Introduction to
WHEN IT CHANGED

I'm writing this 32,000 feet in the air, on American Airlines flight 194 to Chicago. I'm spending this flight happily broken into segments of writing introductions to stories by people I love, and by reading the advance galleys of Keith Laumer's new Scribner's novel, Dinosaur Beach. And with one of those wicked little coincidences that the Universe tosses at me frequently, I find something in Keith's book that sparks me into the prefatory words for Joanna Russ and her story.

The item that strikes the spark is a passage from page 48, in which two agents of a far-future timesweeping force find themselves stranded back in the Jurassic Period. It goes like this:

"Why haven't they made a pick-up on me?" she said, not really talking to me. Her voice was edging up the scale a little.

"Take it easy, girl," I said, and patted her shoulder; I knew my touching her would chill her down again. Not a nice thing to know, but useful.

"Keep your hands to yourself, Ravel," she snapped, all business again. "If you think this is some little desert island scene, you're very wrong."

"Don't get ahead of yourself," I told her. "When I make a pass at you, that'll be time enough to slap me down. Don't go female on me now. We don't have time for nonsense."

Now Keith is a close friend of mine, and a helluva good writer, and those of you who know he had a debilitating stroke late last year will be delighted to know he's recovering strongly, but if Joanna Russ ever got within smiting distance of Keith, I'm sure she'd belt him one up alongside his pudding-trough for those paragraphs, because they are pure-and-simple male chauvinist pig writing.

I'm not trying to start a fight here, you understand, but like newly-converted Jews or Catholics, like lifetime cigarette smokers who've put down, like alcoholics now on the wagon, those of us who've spent the greater part of our lives as male chauvinists get terribly zealous in pointing out the gentlemen in our midst who are still wrong-thinking offenders.

In case you aren't aware of how insulting those paragraphs can be to a woman, fellas, consider the following:

These agents, male and female alike, are specially trained, ultraefficient, tougher than hell, get bounced here and there through time battling a formidable enemy, as well as time itself, and yet the woman is portrayed as weak, sniveling, semi-hysterical, Puritanical, illogical, inefficient and silly. The man has to take hold and show her the way. The narrator keeps referring to himself and other males as men, but keeps referring to the woman as a girl. If Keith were consistent, he'd call himself (as narrator), and the other males in the novel, boys. And the most glaring evidence of the author's unconscious male chauvinism is his telling her, when she gets sappy and illogical—which I contend is out-of-character for the character—don't go female on me.

Ugh. Kate Millett and Germaine Greer and Mary Reinholz and, I'm sure, Joanna Russ would belt Keith soundly with their picket signs had they but access to him. I urge Keith to stay down there in his Florida sanctuary, while the rest of us, who've been "saved," try to head off the lynch party.

It all ties in so well with Joanna's story, it must be fate. Because Joanna has here written a story that makes some extraordinarily sharp distinctions between the abilities and attitudes of the sexes, while erasing many others we think immutable. It is, in the best and strongest sense of the word, a female liberation story, while never once speaking of, about, or to the subject. And it points out why I think women's lib is one of the three or four most potent and influential movements to spring up in our country during these last decades of social upheaval.

Keith and a few others may pillory me for this, but as far as I'm concerned, the best writers in sf today are the women. Most of them are represented in this volume—Kate Wilhelm, Ursula Le Guin, Josephine Saxton, Lee Hoffman, Joanna—and others were featured in the original Dangerous Visions—Sonya Dorman, Carol Emshwiller, Miriam Allen deFord. Others will make their appearances in The Last Dangerous Visions. Now when I say I think the ladies are the best of us currently, I'm quick to add I don't even care to make the cop-out reservation that held for so many years. It went like this:

"This Leigh Brackett/C. L. Moore/Katherine Maclean/Margaret St. Clair/E. Mayne Hull (fill in the appropriate name for your own past sins, guys) is a helluva writer. She writes so good you think it's a man. You can't tell the difference."

Well, that was nonsense, too. Another glaring example of what we did to our women writers for so many years. We made them feel—and quite rightly—that their sex would lobby against their receiving serious consideration or their work being judged from the git-go on the same plane as a man's. George Sand and George Eliot were not alone in having to assume male pseudonyms in self-defense. God knows what such charades did to the talents and personal lives of not only Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin and Mary Ann Evans but all the potential Shirley Jacksons and Dorothy Parkers against whose sex restrictions were placed. For no one knows how many hundreds of years in literature-in-general, and for almost fifty years in speculative fiction, we have denied ourselves perhaps half the great writers who might have been. By insisting that women could only write well if they wrote as men, by hardboiling themselves, by subscribing to the masculine world-view, we have disenfranchised and even blotted out an infinitude of views of our world as seen through eyes different and wonderful.

Happily, that situation is disappearing. Not nearly fast enough for me, but happening nonetheless. There is still a great deal of what was commonly referred to as "ladies' writing" going on, mostly in the major slicks intended to be read under hair dryers; but that is no more representative of the lofty level of quality attained by serious women writers than is the adolescent Ruark-muscle-flexing of stories in the "men's adventure magazines" typical of the best of serious writing being done by men. Hopefully both idioms will be recognized for what they are: sheer pandering to the lowest possible common denominators of fiction-need by women and men.

The reasons for my joy at the ever-stronger position being assumed by women writers in our genre, and my feelings that women's lib in general is a godsend not only for literature but for the world as a whole, are one and the same.

Men have had it their way for thousands of years. The machismo concept, the dominant male attitude, the picture of women as weak and essentially brainless, the deification of Mars as god of war and male supremacy . . .these have led us to a world of futility, hatred, bigotry, sexual confusion, pollution and despair. Perhaps it is time the women took a turn at bat. They can certainly do no worse. And while I am not unmindful that women can proliferate even these unsavory cultural attitudes (Mothers who send their sons out to battle with the admonition that they return with their shields or on them, and then pay homage to the ruins returned to them in plastic bags from Viet Nam by the display of tacky gold stars in living room windows, strike me as little better than ghouls), still I see more kindness and rationality in the average woman than in the average man.

Surely I am in the truest tradition of the Utopian by conceiving of a world saved by women, and equally surely I'm laying an unfair responsibility on women to clean up what men have sullied. (I'm reminded of the young college student who, when advised sappily by a gray-haired elder that the salvation of the world rested with her and her "more aware generation," responded with the urging that the nice old gentleman go fuck himself: why is it up to me, she demanded? You had all the time in the world and you screwed it, and now it's up to me to clean up your garbage dump. No thanks, dad. Her point was well taken.)

Still, I cannot escape the feeling that if women had but the oneness of purpose of the ladies of Lysistrata, they could end war in half a day.

Don't tell me. I know. I'm expecting a nobility of females that men certainly don't possess, and I'm expecting them all to think the same on major issues. I said I was an Utopian, didn't I?

But I can hope.

I can hope that the world, seen through the minds and eyes of women, will come to be a more pleasing and acceptable view than the one we men have proffered all these centuries. And it is this view, wholly new and different, because it comes from a different systemic orientation, that forms the core of the best new writing in sf and outside the field, by our passionate and dedicated women writers.

Not the least of whom is Joanna Russ.

Terry Carr, editor of the Specials at Ace Books, once told me that Joanna's first novel, the excellent Picnic on Paradise, was rejected by every major hardcover house before he saw it and snapped it up for publication. I may be wrong about the specifics, but I would be willing to bet that at least one of those hardcover editors, males all, unconsciously put the kibosh on the novel because it came from a woman. I have absolutely no evidence to back up that theory, and I don't even know to what houses the book was submitted, but I've been in this business a couple of minutes and I've encountered ingrained prejudices that are imbedded so cellularly they are wholly unknown to the men from whom they leach so much fairness and rationality.

How sad and silly those editors now seem, having passed up a novel of clearly such eminence. Picnic on Paradise was nominated for, and missed winning by a hair, the 1969 Nebula award as best novel of that year. With her first novel, Joanna Russ found herself in the first rank of major sf talents, up against competition like James Blish, Philip K. Dick, Robert Silverberg, R. A. Lafferty, John Brunner and that year's winner, Alexei Panshin.

The promise of Picnic on Paradise was kept with her second novel, And Chaos Died, in 1970. Stronger even than her first book, it too was nominated for a Nebula, and though once again it missed copping the award (making Joanna's work for the second time a bridesmaid rather than a bride), it was clear only a matter of time separates Joanna Russ from the prizes and the greater glory.

Born in the Bronx in 1937, Joanna Russ spent most of her infanthood being wheeled around the Botanical Gardens. Of her schooling she reports, "I got into Science High School but did not go, due to family insanity, and ended my four years somewhere else by becoming one of the top ten Westinghouse Science Talent Search winners in the country, for growing fungi that looked beautiful but made my mother hysterical because I stored them in the refrigerator. I went to Cornell very conventionally as an English major, but when I got out decided to stop being a good girl, and took a Master of Fine Arts degree in Playwriting at Yale Drama School."

Joanna wrote what she calls "bad plays" for three years and then, in 1959, had her first story published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, "Nor Custom Stale." Since that time she has sold several dozen short stories to markets as diverse as Orbit and Manhattan Review. She has done copy-editing, typing and copywriting for house organs, addressed cards for Office Temporaries, worked as a secretary to an irritable psychiatrist, and finally drifted into teaching. Drifting—mostly out of desperation, Joanna puts it—she taught something she knew nothing about, speech, at a community college in New York City, and knew it was the right thing after one day in the classroom. She has been teaching Creative Writing at Cornell University for the last four years.

Joanna Russ has had four one-act plays produced: three, on one bill, Off-Off-Broadway and one at Princeton, as well as a radio play produced by WBAI, Pacifica's New York station, in 1967. Apparently feeling that there is more to the theater than the writing of "bad plays," Joanna has acted in community theater, Off-Off-Broadway productions, typed programs, run lights, sewed costumes and, one summer, she even made seventy-five pairs of Roman sandals for Joseph Papp's cast of Julius Caesar, for the New York Shakespeare Festival.

All of the foregoing, of course, is background to an understanding and appreciation of the woman who wrote the story you are about to read. As such, it is relevant, but hardly important. What Joanna Russ was, or what she set out to be, is not what she is.

What she is, is a fine writer, getting better every year. What she's proving—and "When it Changed" will serve in large measure to further that proof—is that speculative fiction up till now has undisputedly belonged to the men, but squatter's rights to the territory simply aren't good enough any more. Not with talents like Joanna Russ around.

And further, she looks infinitely better in a bikini than any of the editors who rejected her novel.