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 us… - Joanna Russ

What fascinated me about the theater then was that you could project a private reality onto actual material things: people, sets, voices, scenes. It gradually dawned on me that I could do this in words, too.

The point is to show how small the greatest of disasters can appear when seen from a distance of several billion miles or years.

Whether tentative or conclusively pessimistic, the invented, all-female worlds, with their consequent lesbianism, have another function: that of expressing the joys of female bonding, which-like freedom and access to the public world-are in short supply for many women in the real world. Sexually, this amounts to the insistence that women are erotic integers and not fractions waiting for completion. Female sexuality is seen as native and initiatory, not (as in our traditionally sexist view) reactive, passive, or potential. ("Recent Feminist Utopias")