Joanna Russ, And Chaos Died (1970,Berkley Books 2009 )
Joanna Russ died on 29 April. This book has been beside my bed for a while now and I decided to read it as my small personal obsequies. It might have been better to reread The Female Man or read How to Suppress Women’s Writing for the first time, these being the books usually seen as marking her place in the history of Science Fiction, but I don’t have copies of either of them. The New York Times obituary doesn’t mention And Chaos Died, which was first published five and 13 years respectively before those books.
A lot of the time it’s hard to tell what’s going on in this book, though it does become slightly less bewildering after the first 20-page section. The main reason for the bewilderment is that the main character, Jai Vedh, having crash-landed on an alien planet, encounters people there who communicate mentally, reading each other’s feelings and thoughts but also perceiving the world at a molecular level and communing with plants (a wise daisy plays a crucial role) and even inanimate objects. When they communicate with ‘visuals’, their words are oddly elliptical, responding to things the others aren’t quite aware they’ve even thought or felt, let alone expressed, and drawing on the others’ vocabularies (‘I’m not used to talking this at all,’ is one of the first sentences he hears spoken). Nothing is explained; the reader, if anything, understands even less than Jai Vedh.
Jai Vedh identifies as homosexual in the early pages, but he becomes sexually and psychically involved with a woman of the planet and soon is telepathing and teleporting with the best of them. He’s captured and taken back to ‘Old Earth’, a late 60s nightmare of overpopulation, pollution, corrupt authoritarian government, and psychedelic licentiousness, where he escapes death many times, befriends a boy who tries to kill him, and so on. Through all this he uses his mental skills without ever gaining complete control of them, so that he often isn’t at all sure whose thoughts and feelings he’s experiencing and has trouble seeing what’s physically in front of his eyes because other aspects of reality, whether microscopic or purely psychic, are claiming his attention – and the prose takes us along with him. It’s hard to pick a representative passage, because the writing keeps changing with Jai Vedh’s level of competence and the mind/mood-altering agents he encounters. But this might give some idea – he’s collapsed into an exhausted sleep on a California beach, and this is his waking up:
He thought he had been taken inside by someone. They were going to fight over his body. He was on the floor or on the sand, sprawled asleep part of a ritual like a piece of wood, the thought: hold him, hold him, hold him, and somebody holding his head and saying (over and over) ‘Sleep, torn man, sleep. Yang only. Sleep, torn man, sleep. Yin only.’ The lights passed over his closed eyes with exaggerated slowness, vanishing off his chin: purple, green, blue, red, yellow, white, with pictures, too, a very old-fashioned and silly piece of stuff. Last year’s. He was lying in a woman’s lap, in some sort of barn with a lot of smoke around and people shuffling. Jingle-bonk. And could not open his eyes. Jingle-jingle-bonk. Foolishness. It occurred to him that he must have been drugged, for the naked woman whose lap he was in had as much mind or as much sex as a puppet, though he could smell her strongly. That is, she had been drugged. (I’ve been drugged!) Although he did not think that he usually thought that way. … There was a small, irritated, hopping-mad part of her mind, too, somewhere; he noted that with interest. He guessed it was the smoke and began to fend it away from him – big, bumbling molecules, as complicated as antique steamships – to let through the little, keen, live ones.
According to Samuel Delaney, The Female Man was written partly as a critique of this novel. You can download the whole book as a PDF.
Me fail? I fly! 