Fantasy is reality...Surely the mode of fantasy (which includes many genres and effects) is the only way in which some realities can be treated.I gre… - Joanna Russ

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Fantasy is reality...Surely the mode of fantasy (which includes many genres and effects) is the only way in which some realities can be treated.I grew up in United States in the 1950s, in a world in which fantasy was supposed to be the opposite of reality. 'Rational,' 'mature' people were concerned only with a narrowly defined 'reality' and only the 'immature' or the 'neurotic' (all-purpose put-downs) had any truck with fantasy, which was then considered to be wishful thinking, escapism, and other bad things, attractive only to the weak and damaged. Only Communists, feminists, homosexuals and other deviants were unsatisfied with Things As They Were at the time and Heaven help you if you were one of those. I took to fantasy like a duckling to water. Unfortunately for me, there was nobody around then to tell me that fantasy was the most realistic of arts, expressing as it does the contents of the human soul directly.”

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About Joanna Russ

Joanna Russ (February 22, 1937 – April 29, 2011) was an American writer, academic and feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism and is best known for The Female Man, a novel combining utopian fiction and satire.

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Science fiction is a natural, in a way, for any kind of radical thought. Because it is about things that have not happened and do not happen. It's usually placed in the future, but not always. It's very fruitful if you want to present the concerns of any marginal group, because you are doing it in a world where things are different.

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there is no God in any of my stories or in my beliefs. In fact, if there's one thread running throughout my fiction it's precisely the lack of that kind of authority. My books, I would say, are designed to undermine that notion, to force readers to question the authorities governing their lives, be they literary, sexual, political, religious, whatever. Cosmic awe isn't religion. I'm an atheist, and I loathe having religion imported into my work. If you believe in religion, do it, but don't assume or insist that I do.

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