98/2020. I'd remembered how clever Joanna Russ' writing is but I'd forgotten how funny it can be too, in the usual way that people in desperate situations often reach for humour. The five stories in this collection are also framed within an amusing metafictional device, doubly amusing if one remembers Russ was a professional teacher, which allows a sucker-punch of a punchline, and each story is headed by an epigraph from well-known women authors including Alice Sheldon, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, Anna Tsetsaeyva, Harriet Tubman, and Carol Emshwiller, which provide commentary on the stories to which they're attached. The Alice "James Tiptree Jr" Sheldon quote at the beginning should clue readers into the fact that all these stories are about who is and isn't included in any particular definition of "people", and whose ideas define normal behaviour in any specific social group, hence the title: Extra People, Ordinary People, Extra(Ordinary) People. If you like the literary end of speculative fiction and if you think utopia must be feminist, because oppression by gender is automatically dystopian, then these sophisticated and witty stories are for you.

Three of the stories were previously published but Bodies and Everyday Depressions were written especially for this collection. I've hidden additional spoilers for any reader who can't quite figure out what's going on in each story.

In Souls, winner of a Hugo Award, an English abbess in the early middle ages attempts to protect her people from vikings, and the vikings from herself because she isn't quite what she at first appears. The abbess is a telepath from another human(oid) society distant in space (or time).

The Mystery of the Young Gentleman, a mystery which is thoroughly cleared up by the end of the story if you read carefully, is about a young "gentleman" escorting a teenage girl on a steamship journey across the Atlantic. The gent is a telepathic woman escorting a recently discovered teenage telepath to a hidden community of telepaths in the American west. (Oddly, this is the second book I've read in a row with a Spanish street teen in a pygmalion story despite that not being my usual type of reading material.)

Bodies is about two people whose personalities have been lifted from 1930 and 1970 and placed into vat-grown versions of their previous bodies in a gender-free communist utopia in around the year 4000. The story implies that the personalities of the English homosexual from 1930 and the USian woman from 1970 have been damaged, by the norms of the societies they originally lived in, to the point where even living in a utopia can't heal them. Or you could reimagine this as a missive from Russ to Alice "James Tiptree Jr" Sheldon discussing Ursula K. Le Guin's novel Left Hand of Darkness.

What Did You Do During the Revolution? Set in around the year 2200 this story is about colonial, class, and gender exploitation. It's also wryly funny, with an ongoing sfnal joke about people who think they're the centre of the universe. However, warning for a 58 year old woman having sex with a 13 year old girl and using the usual colonialist excuse that supposedly less technologically advanced people supposedly mature younger (why?). This reads like Russ fictionalising an encounter with the Society for Creative Anachronism at a college where she was teaching, lol: Countess Debbi and Lord Bob. These days they sound more like gamers.

Ouch: "Did you ever hear the old joke about the optimist and the pessimist who both believed that this was the best of all possible worlds?"

Everyday Depressions has an epigraph by Carol Emshwiller, is written as a letter addressed to Susanillamilla, and includes a character named Alice Tiptree who was a Sheldon (of Deepdene). It also manages to reference the poems of Sappho, Marvin Harris' then new but now classic work Cultural Materialism, and Vincent Virga's groundbreaking gay gothic romance novel Gaywyck within the first two paragraphs in a way that makes sense and sets up the story. The letter describes the intended plot and characters of a potential lesbian gothic romance, whose heroine is both an English lady and an Italian poetess, and who falls in love with Fanny Goodwood who later finds blackmailable letters in a copy of Corinne (about an Italian poetess). Etc etc. The subtext here, which is mostly text, is that the protagonist writing the letter is an author who wants to write a historical lesbian romance novel but her status as a woman (an Extra Person - Adam's spare rib) and a lesbian (an Extraordinary Person) not a man or a heterosexual (an Ordinary author or Ordinary dramatis Personae) means her work is seen as extraordinarily political and extraordinarily gendered and extraordinarily sexual, like the classic authors referenced in the story: Sappho, Delarivier Manley, and Germaine de Staël - who all wrote about gender, sex, social politics, and all wrote out of economic necessity so needed to create work which would please a sufficient number of men and wealthy women. The metatext here is Russ catechising the names of minority authors mostly excluded from the ordinary canon of literature. She's also enjoying the opportunity to publish "fanny" jokes, obviously. Ironic that this is the most straightforward of the stories and yet requires the most contextual explanation because contemporary settings age more noticeably than fantasy worlds.

Inverts: "Is there an East Wessex? (West Sussex?) Must find out."

Fanny Goodwood is an unforgivable pun but it does lead to: "[...] it is FANNY who courageously dispatches the villain." Reader, I laughed. ( )

The title story, 'Souls', is excellent as an example of beguiling and atmospheric writing, and is set in an Abbey possibly a thousand years ago (my history is shaky here!) with wonderful characters. As someone commented previously, though, the 'SF' element of the story did seem a little fake, but not enough to really mar the story. The second story has a strong idea and is similarly atmospheric - now we have moved on from the time of the Norsemen and into what seems to be Victorian England, and the thread of reality is beginning to wane. What follows is a mix of enigmatic and downright confusing storytelling, in what might now be termed a 'post-human' style. It didn't move me in the way the first tale did, mainly because I didn't really care what was happening after a certain point; it just seemed to be a series of disconnected statements suffused with bizarre alien logic somehow tied into issues of gender stereotypes and reclassification of gender roles. Interesting but not desperately enjoyable. ( )

Collection of five stories by leading feminist sf writer.

The lead story, 'Souls', won the 1983 Hugo for best novella. As the blurb states "a mediaeval abbess defends her community defends her community against a Viking invasion". Being an sf story, the abbess is gradually revealed to be more than human, and that's when my problem with this story started. I enjoyed the realistic aspects of the story - the conversations between the abbess and the vikings, the attempts to counter swords with words, etc. When the true identity of the abbess is revealed, rather than a sense of wander, I was filled with a sense of disappointment. Still worth reading, shame about the ending.

In 'The Mystery of the Young Gentleman' a young gentleman is gradually revealed to more than a man. Shares the same problem as 'Souls' - the sf element seems a little tacked on. Still, enjoyable lesbian wish fulfillment fluff (makes a change for teenage boy wish fulfillment fluff) but not much of a 'mystery'.

'Bodies' is a disappointing story about humans being resurrected by aliens in the distant future, whereupon the man acts like a disgruntled teenager, the woman as a surrogate mother. In some ways, could just as easily be 1970's California than the far future.

'What Did You Do During the Revolution, Grandma? is the strangest tale in the collection, yet another variation on the theme of a character not being what they seem. In this case, a woman is genetically altered to resemble a demon-god in order to be sent to another version of Earth, of which there are thousands. The revolution is two-fold, on the alternate Earth, one of ruling houses; on the orginal Earth dealing with the fact this version of Earth is not the one at the centre - i.e., prime Earth. Would-be gods replaced by other would-be gods.

Everyday Depressions is a epistolary story where a woman outlines a gothic romance that eventually has lesbian overtones. Reading if felt like reading the outline to Sarah Walters and I couldn't help thinking if Russ had written the novel she too could have been reaping the rewards of greater success.

Russ writes in an oblique style that hints at revelations to come but too often the revelations were less interesting than what has gone before - the style beguiles, the truth disappoints. This is an sf collection where I wish the author has written less sf - only What Did You Do...' benefitted from the sf element because it was a pure sf story. Still, Russ is a good writer and worth reading. ( ( )

Worth the purchase price for "Souls" alone (winner of the 1983 Hugo award for Best Novella). ( )

Contents:
Souls
The Mystery of the Young Gentleman
Bodies
What did you do during the revolution, Grandma?
Everyday Depressions ( )