Joanna Russ, Trans-Temp Agent

“Joanna Russ: Trans-Temp Agent” describes Joanna’s New York childhood in a close-knit (secular) Ashkenazi Jewish community; the precocious, passionate “sense of wonder” that informed her love of science, and science fiction; and the disillusion with stifling 1950s gender-roles that led young women of her generation to feminism. After Cornell University and a difficult, male-dominated theater course at Yale, she struggled with depression, experimented in the gothic mode, and sold uncanny tales to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. An invitation to the Milford conference marked her entry to the literary sf community. The chapter discusses published fiction from 1959-1970, with emphasis on “The Forever House” (1959) and the life-changing “Alyx” series, including the short novel Picnic on Paradise.