I've never lost the feeling of transcendental beauty and awe that attached itself to the physical world. Lucretius has a line in De Rerum Naturae tha… - Joanna Russ

I began reading science fiction in the 1950s and got from it a message that didn't exist anywhere else then in my world. Explicit sometimes in the detachable ideas, implicit in the gimmicks, peeking out from behind often intolerably class-bigoted, racist, and sexist characterizations, somehow surviving the usual America-the-empire-is-good plots, most fully expressed in the strange life-forms and strange, strange, wonderfully strange landscapes, was the message:
Things can be really different

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")

most of the women in my generation who were doing groundbreaking work usually felt the need to find a way to distance a lot of personal, controversial issues. And while some awareness on some questions has gone up among the general public, so that it may be possible to say things out loud now that in 1965 or 1970 were certainly very tough to say out loud, in many ways they're getting tough to say again. Back in the early '70s, I shocked myself in writing parts of The Female Man. It scared the dickens out of me. I doubt that women are ever going to feel comfortable being direct, at least not until our society's undergone some changes of its own. When women try to speak totally directly, we lack the social forms or the cultural images or the permission to do so. These things just aren't in our vocabulary yet, so we still have to get at things in a roundabout manner.