The Female Man is a more interesting and consistent story about sex and gender than Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness. Russ is a poet and it shows. Russ hits the reader with evocative words and images that still hold up today (mostly). The Complete Alyx Stories haven’t, but they were influential to writers that came later, like Mary Gentle (as seen in the foreword to her White Crow collection)… So I’m glad Russ wrote them.
Although, the Female Man text would probably collapse when faced with a basic trans reading of it…
I’ve yet to read the rest of the stories in this book but I will do so, eventually and report back.
The Female Man: ⭐⭐⭐⭐_
Interesting so far. Maybe this story has aged better?
Somewhat Wolfe-ian. I’m intrigued…
Freud would have a field day with Russ’s constant references to dump truck asses. It’s interesting to see Russ explicitly say that one of her subsequent novels is her “coming out” novel when this one is so explicitly gay for women physically and mentally in every way that I find it hard to believe that someone could read this and not at least make an educated guess that Russ is a lesbian.
Overall, this might be the horniest book I’ve read, where the intent of the sex scenes and sex- adjacent scenes seems to be to titilate and is possibly writing-as-therapy for Russ as she’s coming to terms with her own sexuality at the time.
The hornyness of it explains part of why it would have had a harder time finding a publisher.
Russ would have had a much easier time getting published today and having her work be more widely read.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Female Man is her one hit and the rest of her work is where she falled to achieve the popular and critical success of the Female Man…
After finishing this novel, I’m going to take a Russ break but I might come back to her work eventually.
The Complete Alyx stories: ⭐⭐___
Nothing too special here. Really not what I was expecting. This seems like it could have been somewhat revolutionary at the time but in 2024, having a woman protagonist isn’t enough to make a text interesting.
These stories aren’t continuous and don’t fall into the same genre and don’t even feature the same Alyx character. It’s hard to evaluate these as a collection of cohesive stories. When and where these stories take place is all over the place. The writing style shifts drastically between the stories for no discernible reason, other than the passage of time and Russ disinterest in tying these stories together more.
The last one is the only one I really enjoyed reading. It’s very high concept, the writing is evocative and it’s short. That’s the only story I can recommend without caveats.
Overall, I wouldn’t recommend these stories.