The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews

Front Cover
Liverpool University Press, 2007 - American fiction - 305 pages
In 1959, at the age of 22, Joanna Russ published her first science fiction story, "Nor Custom Stale," in The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. In the forty-five years since, Russ has continued to write some of the most popular, creative, and important novels and stories in science fiction. She was a central figure, along with contemporaries Ursula K. Le Guin and James Tiptree, in revolutionizing science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, and her 1970 novel, The Female Man, is widely regarded as one of the most successful and influential depictions of a feminist utopia in the entire genre.

The Country You Have Never Seen gathers Joanna Russ's most important essays and reviews, revealing the vital part she played over the years in the never-ending conversation among writers and fans about the roles, boundaries, and potential of science fiction. Spanning her entire career, the collection shines a light on Russ's role in the development of new wave science fiction and feminist science fiction, while at the same time providing fascinating insight into her own development as a writer.

From inside the book

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2007)

Joanna Russ was born in New York City on February 22, 1937. She received a degree in English from Cornell University in 1957 and a MFA in playwriting from the Yale Drama School in 1960. She taught at various colleges and universities during her lifetime including a long stint at the University of Washington in Seattle. She was a critic and science fiction writer best known for books of criticism such as The Female Man (1975) and How to Suppress Women's Writing (1984) as well as the novel And Chaos Died (1970). She died on April 29, 2011 at the age of 74.

Bibliographic information