There are vases with less filler than NBC's prime time Olympic coverage, so I've managed to read three novels this week during the 50 minutes per hour the network isn't showing sports, one of which was Joanna Russ's 1968 debut sci-fi novella Picnic on Paradise.
Paradise is fine as far as it goes. A time travelling female "agent" from ancient Greece is tasked to lead stranded tourists to safety across the nether regions of a resort planet during a war, so there's lots of walking and talking between occasional affrays. No surprises, per se, but Russ keeps it short and minimizes the explanatory, Slavic surname-influenced jargon that afflicts so many sci-fi novels of the 1950s and 60s; e.g., "if we just attach the zlurb to the garotski then, by golly, we might have a fighting chance against the Xlorgons!"
Its audience today is completists and historians, but it could do in a pinch.
What's striking is the jacket copy, which describes Russ as a "radical feminist" trailblazer. The description isn't a 60 year old anachronism. The copy was written for the book's 2018 reprint. Given the female lead's principal attributes - riot grrl with intermittent bursts of distaff empathy - it's tough to see what's particularly radical, then and now, about any of this feminism, unless Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, the Brontes, et. al., were just bullshitting. There may be a dozen people outside the Middle East and Central Asia who'd have a problem with Russ's radical feminism.
"Radical feminism" has long become another phrase that means anything anyone wants it to mean. It's a compliment. It's a pejorative. It's a marketing angle. It's many, many things. What it isn't is a descriptor.
P.S. The jacket copy also has an author blurb describing the novella as "screamingly funny." There's very little that would elicit more than a smirk about the book in particular, sci-fi in general, and fiction writ large. I think I know why this is, but that's for another time.
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