Gollancz SF Masterworks, 2010, 209 p, plus 5p epigraph and Introduction. Originally published in 1975.

One day a woman called Janet Evason appears on a street in the US. She is from the future, from a planet named Whileaway where a cataclysm wiped out all men hundreds of years before Janet’s birth. Her appearance makes her a celebrity and occasions disbelief at the mere possibility of a manless society. This US is in a parallel timeline to ours where the Great Depression is still ongoing and the Second World War never happened. She is, of course, Janet Evasdaughter but as the book tells us, Evason “is your translation.” Her path crosses that of Jeannine Dadier, who is in an unsatisfactory relationship with a man called Cal but feels pressurised to marry – especially by her mother. “Someone is collecting J’s” as we also meet Joanna, a woman from something very like our own 1970s who may indeed be a representation of the author, and Jael Reasoner from a world where men and women are at war.

This set-up gives Russ opportunity to elaborate on the many iniquities which men pile upon women. In the intervening forty or so years since the novel was first published many things have changed but others have not. Russ’s strictures still have power. Of motherhood Joanna says, “This is the most important job in the world. That’s why they don’t pay you for it.”

The book’s structure is disjointed and bitty, though, the many asides a distraction from the unfolding of story but these asides are one of the means by which Russ is pointing up her concerns.

Science Fiction is the perfect medium for thought experiments; SF is never really about the future. In its particular highlighting of how things might (still) be different in terms of sexual equality The Female Man was – and remains – an important book in the history of SF and in its evolution.

Curiosity corner. We had “waked” for “woke.” Is this a US usage? Also gay appeared in the sense of homosexual – as long ago as 1975!

Another of Science Fiction’s prominent authors, Frederick Pohl, has died.

His contribution to the genre started early in its history, mostly pseudonymously at first but later notably in collaboration with C M Kornbluth. His writing career also developed under his own name and he won four Hugo and three Nebula awards overall.

It was not just as a writer that Pohl was important to the field. He was an influential editor of the magazines Galaxy and If in the 1960s and for Bantam Books in the 1970s where he took a punt on Samuel R Delany’s Dhalgren and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man.

Pohl also wrote an autobiographical account of his early years in the SF field and his meetings with the group of SF fans (many of whom were writers) known as “The Futurians” in The Way The Future Was.

In later years he adapted this title to take up blogging, at The Way The Future Blogs, an unfailingly entertaining and informative blog which I shall miss.

Frederik George Pohl, Jr. 26/11/1919-2/9/2013. So it goes.

I’ve just caught up with the news that Joanna Russ has died.

She was one of the first women to break into the male dominated world of 1960s Science Fiction and used feminism as her main theme, explicitly critiquing sexism and women’s perceived role in society. In this respect SF was, of course, a perfect vehicle with its ability to take a fresh look at how things are and how perhaps they ought to be.

I do not recall reading The Female Man, perhaps her most famous novel, but may have done so in my teens when most of my reading came from the local Library. I do have Picnic On Paradise (1968) on my shelves and certainly read that but must admit I don’t remember much of it from this distance in time.

What is undeniable is the impact Russ had in promoting women and feminism in SF.

Russ also took a great interest in slash fiction and seems to have been a force in it beginning to be taken more seriously than when it first appeared.

Joanna Russ 22/2/1937-29/4/2011. So it goes.