Read for book club, this is a book of essays collected from a few decades by Joanna Russ about her thoughts of women writing sci-fi. She narrows down her selections for most things to less than a dozen authors and stories in most places. The essays themselves are well thought out and articulated and me trying to summarize them in any fashion would be to do them a great disservice so I won't even try but will instead simply stick to my overall thoughts of the books.
Of the stories that Ms. Russ refers to, I've only read one of them as sci-fi does not tend to be my go to genre of choice and that is Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed. With regards to the essays themselves, I found it to be a mixed bag. Some of the essays were dealing with the rampant misogyny of the time and themes that play into that with many examples of stories and how they show it off. Mostly these were stories that I have never heard of, likely for the reasons she was citing, and even if I had they were generally not something I would choose to read anyway. There was also an essay on the Gothic romances, those that have basically turned into the bodice rippers of today, and which is generally a genre I run far away from. That essay was the most painful as it went in depth on all the reasons I hate that style of book and gave many, many examples. The essay on Mary Shelley was interesting and I enjoyed the one comparing different women's general Utopian sci-fi worlds to each other and how those differ from the general Utopian worlds of men at that time period.
Page count: 200p/33,071p ytd/247,987p lifetime
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