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!