Tag: Joanna Russ

‘The Second Inquisition’ by Joanna Russ

The final story in a sequence of stories and a short novel about the adventures of Alyx, a fierce female mercenary from Ancient Greece who ends up in the future (hers and ours) as a Trans-Temporal Agent. In the drowsy claustrophobia of suburban Chicago in 1925, the narrator, a girl of sixteen and an only child, is caught up in a futuristic conflict after the strange woman staying with her family confides that she’s a time traveller, a rebel (who might be Alyx’s granddaughter) hiding from her enemies in what she calls a dead area. It’s the stuff of pulp SF, featuring enigmatic technology and sudden violence, that’s invigorated by Russ’s spikily sharp prose and critique of what we’ve come to call the patriarchy. And there are hints that, like the future selves Paul encounters when he runs away from home, the visitor and the agents who finally drag her back to the future might be figures in an escapist fantasy. A deftly sustained confusion between the true and the real. “It was almost a pity that she wasn’t there,” the girl muses, after a conversation that acknowledges her importance in the visitor’s plans, and in the end she realises that she has to find her own way of escaping the conventions of her parents and the mundane world: “No more stories.”

First published in Orbit 6, Putnam, 1970. Collected in Joanna Russ: Novels & Stories, Library of America, 2023

‘The Second Inquisition’ by Joanna Russ

Joanna Russ was a tall woman with strong opinions and a voice trained to dominate an auditorium. Novels provided room enough for sharp elbows, close-quarters combat, and dialectic layering. Most of her shorter stories taste comparatively watered-down.

‘The Second Inquisition’ is an exception, a uranium-dense fruitcake of 1920s Americana, 1950s science fiction, and 1970s disgust, a coming-of-age and a protest against the age come into, with an exchange I’ve always found inspiring:

“We despise you,” she said. “That’s what we do. We think you’re slobs. The scum of the earth! The world’s fertilizer, Joe, that’s what you are.”
“Baby, you’re blue,” he said, “you’re blue tonight.”

The story ends — is this a spoiler? — “No more stories”, which works best in its place at the end of The Adventures of Alyx omnibus. Russ’s later novels The Female Man and The Two of Them both, in very different ways, restart and retell the tale and they could easily join Alyx in a Library of America volume.

First published in Orbit 6, edited by Damon Knight, 1970. Reprinted as the conclusion of Russ’s Alyx series in 1976 and several times since