I don’t think I ever doubted that Russ was an extremely clever writer, although it was more evident in some stories than others – some of her short fiction, in fact, was so much of its time, it was hard to see see past how emblematic of their period of writing they were. But it wasn’t until I read The Hidden Side of the Moon that I realised how consistently clever a writer was Russ. This is not a specially curated collection, but it’s so much more intelligent a collection than her The Zanzibar Cat. Perhaps it’s because not every story in it is genre, and it was not put together to showcase her genre credentials. Perhaps it’s because every story in it is fiercely feminist. I don’t know. I do know a collected works of Russ is long past overdue – not just the short fiction, but also the non-fiction, like the essays in Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts, or her criticism. She is, like Samuel R Delany, one of the most important writers American science fiction has produced. And yet who is it who remains in print and has countless stories and novels adapted by Hollywood? Philip K Dick. A drug-addled hack. We are, I suppose, fortunate that Asimov, one of the most graceless prose stylists of his generation, has not been so enthusiastically adopted by Hollywood. And while I still have a soft spot for some of Heinlein’s works, he’s pretty much science fiction’s embarrassingly outspoken old uncle with all the offensive opinions at the family barbecue, who’s pretty harmless until he starts touching up his young nieces. It’s long past time science fiction stopped venerating skeevy old hacks like Asimov and Heinlein and Dick, and started lauding the real grand masters, like Delany, Russ, Tiptree and Le Guin. ( )

My favorite story in this collection is "The Little Dirty Girl." The rest range from exciting ("The Experimenter") to chilling ("Nor Custom Stale," about discovering immortality, and "Come Closer") to cheering ("Mr. Wilde's Second Chance," about Oscar Wilde's time in the afterlife). All are very odd, not least "The Throaways," in which permanence is disgusting. Some are almost classic scifi--"Elf Hill" for instance, a domestic story about reality and overpopulation. Others take a scifi trope and run wild with it, such as time travel ("Old Thoughts, Old Presences"), but do not merely evade cliche--they confound it. OTOP, for instance, uses time travel as a means of exploring a mother/daughter relationship.
There were few stories in this collection that I actually felt I understood, but they were wonderful. Russ has always seemed like someone I'd be a little afraid but very glad to know--dry, sarcastic, and very very sharp.
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Russ is probably best known for her novel The Female Man, but I prefer her short stories (of which, this book contains twenty-eight). She gives one plenty to mull over in a few pages and in some ways the stories are more accessible than the novel. This volume also contains the funny (and not quite fictictious "The Cliches From Outer Space"). ( )