THE ADVENTURES OF ALYX [Anglais] [Poche]

The Adventures of Alyx is a collection of four short stories and a novella. The first three short stories follow a small-time tough named Alyx on a series of typical fantasy adventures. Alyx is an engaging character who fights and battles with her wits against sea monsters and pirates. The third story, "The Barbarian," shows a bit of a turn, as Russ has Alyx do battle against a sort of Faustian figure. At this point, Alyx as a character seems to have sparked Russ' creative interest, as the stories now go beyond the standard fantasy fare.

The most ambitious of the items in this collection is the novella "Picnic on Paradise." Russ puts Alyx into a future where a "commercial war" is being fought, and her job is to transport a group to a port on a planet called Paradise. When they arrive at the location of the port, they find it has been destroyed. They then trek for two months across Paradise to find a safe haven. Through that journey, Alyx battles monsters and human attackers, feels love, and experiences loss, as Paradise dishes out as much hell as possible. While the story wanders a bit during this trek, it shows Russ growing in her abilities as a writer.

The final story, "The Second Inquisition," is a bit of a departure. The narrator is not named, and she does not act or seem like Alyx in many ways. However, we are clearly meant to see her as such, not only because of the story's inclusion in this volume, but also because the tag-line that ends all the stories takes on a variation in this story. The story here is an inter-textual sci-fi story that relies as much on H.G. Wells as it does on standard sci-fi conventions. Russ is also at her most feminist in this story--thus pointing toward her future writing--and her prose is crisp and quick moving. While "The Second Inquisition" is an odd end to this collection, it is the strongest entry in this uneven collection.

When I read this book when it first came out, I remember thinking how great it was to finally find something written by a woman who was not hidding her gender under a masculine pseudonym or who had to use just initials for a first name.
In retrospect, after many years, I realize the only thing I remember about it is that it sounded like Lesbian soft core porn with males reduced to mechanical sex slaves for the domineering females. This was considered very avant-garde stuff then before it turned out that real feminism just consisted in having women having access to well paying professional jobs (doctors, lawyers, etc.).
The real future turned out to be a lot more prosaic but more empowered than we could ever have imagined.

Joanna Russ is a big name in feminist science fiction for a reason: she was one of the first big radical noisemakers in a predominantly male world.

First does not always mean best, and even best does not necessarily mean great.

I'm sure that die hard feminists would disagree with me, but, after sharing this and other Russ books with my female feminist friends, I can only say that her work is sometimes good, sometimes passable, sometimes garbage. Rarely great. The Female Man is an IMPORTANT book, but by far not a GREAT book.

This collection is probably the best, and not coincidentally, the least radical she has to offer. It is certainly more enjoyable, although could not be considered important.

It contains several stories collected from other sources (presumably previously published stories from magazines) containing, loosely, a chronological tale of an adventurer named Alyx. The descriptions and chronology are variously inconsistent; this is not necessarily a bad thing, since the stories stand independent, and since they are suppposed to represent an idea more than a single character.

Her writing style is short sentences and sentence fragments, if that is your sort of thing. Also of note, this book contains what is probably her only reference to heterosexual sex (I could be wrong, but there were no other references in the two other books of hers that I read).

Russ has often been vocal about getting people to go out and read the female corpus of literature, naming some great women writers as her inspirations. I agree; there are some great women writers. You should probably read them instead.