Let's be for us. For goodness' sakes, let's not be against us. (p107) - Joanna Russ

Writing isn't talking. God damn it. Look, James, this isn't going to be an easy letter. I'm going to finish it, put it in the Net, turn my signal off, and go to bed. I'll be asleep by the time you get up, so don't call if you decide to answer your red light or just go looking for something intelligible to read or know about (little enough here for either of us). I keep thinking of the impulses in the Net as sparks flying underground or undersea or bouncing off satellites; of course it's faster than that. It's already morning in Hawaii and this will get to you almost instantaneously when I depress the Transmit key. Which is a little daunting, the irreversibility. (beginning of "Bodies")

If any theme runs through all my work, it is what Adrienne Rich once called "re-vision," i.e., the re-perceiving of experience, not because our experience is complex or subtle or hard to understand (though it is sometimes all three) but because so much of what's presented to us as "the real world" or "the way it is" is so obviously untrue that a great deal of social energy must be mobilized to hide that gross and ghastly fact. As a theatre critic (whose name I'm afraid I've forgotten) once put it, "There's less there than meets the eye." Hence, my love for science fiction, which analyzes reality by changing it. Mundane, realistic fiction often carries its meaning behind the action, underneath the action, underneath the ostensible action. Science fiction cancels this process by making what is usually a literary metaphor into a literal identity. (Introduction)

In the field of science fiction or fantasy, morality—when it enters a book at all—is almost always either thoughtlessly liberal (you can’t judge other cultures) or thoughtlessly illiberal (strong men must rule) or just plain thoughtless (killing people is bad).