In the summer of 192- there occurred to me the most extraordinary event of my life. (beginning of "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amélie Bertrand") - Joanna Russ

Nothing but machines left between people. Telephones, taxis, letters, the discarded automata of the modern love affair. (p63)

I was constantly reading these stories about fucking in bars and fistfights and war, and my reaction, quite naturally, was that I didn't know anything about those things so I couldn't possibly write about them. And the stuff I could write about was considered trivial-writing about a fishing trip was considered "deep" and "raw," while a description of a high school dance was unimportant. There really was a profound bias about what was proper material for "Great Writing." So I decided to write about something nobody knew anything about-to transform the realism of my life into SF and fantasy. I was also drawn to the way SF writers' minds seemed to work. Current fiction bored me stiff, but not SF, where the conceivable was far larger than the personally observable. It's interesting to note that so-called mainstream fiction seems finally to be catching up to SF in this regard; it's becoming increasingly unrealistic, surrealistic, fantastic, “postrealistic.” I feel justified.

What I think of the mystification I was exposed to, it was just hard. I’m seventy, but this must have started when I was eleven or twelve, being squashed. Somebody was saying that for gay women to come out, they usually do it a good bit later than gay men, because you can’t get a picture of yourself at all, one way or the other.