One of the most exciting things about working in SF for me, a woman, is that SF is so open-ended-it's perfectly possible to imagine a world where sex… - Joanna Russ

The idea that artists should be willing to push something as far as it will go, until they watch it crack, has always appealed to me.

I'll never understand the kind of writer who genuinely advances the proposition that life is a dream or a fiction. To me that's the voice of privilege, whether it's money, class, sex, color, or what have you. Most of us can't find refuge in anything so false.

the whole Robinson-Crusoe-and-the-desert-island business is, at bottom, an imperialist myth: you find a place "out there" and you make it yours, whether the people who already live there want you to or not. This goes on in SF all the time--you can see it in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series, for instance. I'm not interested in that notion. It's been obvious for at least twenty or thirty years now-certainly since the '60s to us white folks-that it's simply not a good attitude for people to take. And, of course, if you were really put in that situation, I'd think you'd do amazingly well just to stay alive.