Book Review: Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ

 

Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ

172 pages, Paperback

Ace, 1968

Reprinted and collected in 2019 in the library of America's  American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1968-69 edited by Gary K. Wolfe

As someone who fancies himself a non-professional scholar of 20th century Science Fiction, I had one major gap in my reading. I got called out for my bullshit on this one, I promise you that. This all started when I declared Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner the greatest Science Fiction novel of the 20th century and several people disagreed that was the best of 1968. So I started to put together a list of 1968 (novels I admit I mostly started with the Hugo nominated novels, the plan have a debate about what was the best of 68 debate panel on the podcast. I posted a list of novels that we were discussing.

Professor Lisa Yaszek, the Georgia Tech scholar of Science Fiction has been regularly one of my favorite guests on Dickheads rightly called bullshit. My list was all male writers, and 68 was the debut of Joanna Russ who was nominated for the best novel nebula that year.
 
 Joanna Russ is important, goddamn important I know that but she is my biggest gap in reading. I knew she was good and important, I had books on the shelf and in my mind, I was saving her for my post-PKD (podcast) period of reading. Lisa was right to call BS as Picnic on Paradise is a GREAT science fiction novel and should be in this discussion.  As with the other 1968 books I am going to judge this one alone in this review. If you want to hear how it fits into the 68 debate…You’ll have to wait for the podcast, I will post here when I have it.

From a 21st-century point of view if you ask your average fan of Science Fiction who were the most important women writing Science Fiction the common answers will be Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Leguin. They are two important writers for sure, and it is not competition but for people who go deeper, there are names that are just as important maybe more so. For the golden age, CL Moore and Leigh Brackett come to mind, Judith Merril is an important bridge to the New Wave and Certainly, Joanna Russ might be the most important voice of the New Wave era.

While I have not read her fiction, because I have several of her essays and I know about her impact. I promise I am now to determined to fix my error and read more Russ. Her first SF sale came in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the magazine founded by Boucher and McCommas that discovered many giants in the field. Later she penned 15 years of columns for the magazine.

As a science fiction writer or an essayist she was more directly a feminist thinker and commentator that any of the other major women writers in the genre.  Something addressed more directly in her classic novel The Female Man, and essays. I say all this to give you background on the author but we are going to focus on this novel.

Picnic on Paradise is a science fiction novel of the late 60s that embraces the experimentational feel the era is known for. By that I mean it is not a pulp novel trying to do a 30th-generation carbon copy of Flash Gordan or John Carter of Mars. There is a reading of this novel that is focused on the adventure, but a deeper look at the narrative comments on gender, technology, and the tropes of the genre it doesn’t all with the coming-of-age story that oozes world-building.

I can suspect just from this novel, that Russ was not at the height of her powers but this novel seems like a good exercise. I had an image in my head of a swordswoman sharpening her blade.     

Alyx is a hero, I am told was introduced in a series of stories that appeared in Damon Knight’s  Orbit books. Alyx is a fish out of water character, a trans-temporal agent pulled through time from Ancient Greece to this future colony world.  She escaped abuse and a dangerous ancient child and is introduced by saving a big tough guy from a bear. I saw one review that thought this was pretty progressive for 1968, come on now. CL Moore’s Jirel was saving fools for three decades. None the less Alyx is a great character.

“She was a soft-spoken, dark-haired, small-boned woman, not even coming up to their shoulders, like a kind of dwarf or miniature—but that was normal enough for a Mediterranean Greek of nearly four millennia ago, before super-diets and hybridization from seventy colonized planets had turned all humanity (so she had been told) into Scandinavian giants.”

The story is simple in set our time-traveling hero has to enter a warzone on a colony world and take a group of tourists (and nuns) stranded on a colony to safety.  The planet lost in these future wars is forced into the process of getting terraformed at a brutally intense speed by the victors. Paradise however has rules against any technology or construction even. A pristine planet.

“Paradise,” he said is impossible to colonize, but still too valuable to mess up. It’s too beautiful.” He took a deep breath. “It happens,” he said, “to be a tourist resort."

It will probably just be me, but I loved this world-building stuff, that seemed front-loaded. Russ clearly didn’t care about it much once she got into the themes. The story of crossing nature reminded me of the Leguin classic The Left Hand of Darkness, but this novel predates it. Alyx having survived in a much harsher era is more equipped to survive than the members of this coddled future. Something Russ portrays well.  The character of Machine was the most interesting to me, being a trans-human technology augmented teenager.

The character interactions and the relationships that drive many of the ideas start coming to life when they make camp and get to know each other. Alyx is physically a fish out of water not just culturally in this time. This is a concept I have not seen explored in SF  before and I really dug that.
Picnic on Paradise is sneaky good, it is a novel that rewards deep dives, study and re-reads but it doesn’t have the classic/masterwork status of some of her other work. Too bad. I thought this novel was pretty good when I read it. When I sat down to write this review I ended up re-reading big chunks and getting a stronger feeling for it.