Joanna Russ, R.I.P.

"Joanna Russ died yesterday. She wasn’t important, she was essential!" -- Paul Kincaid from Big Other

Succinct and perfect -- and sad because after hearing about Joanna Russ's death, I went sleuthing for online tributes, mentions, something and found very little.

Joanna Russ was an American writer and feminist, known mostly in feminist circles for her sarcastic How To Suppress Women's Writing. She was also a prominent science-fiction author who challenged science-fiction writing as mostly a man's domain. Her 1972 story, "When it Changed" won a Nebula Award, and a decade later won a Hugo award for her novella, "Souls." From Publisher's Weekly:

I don’t even know how to talk about her: her influence on writing, on writers, on the direction of the genre, on generations of readers, and especially on other women in all areas of the field. She was tremendous. I read The Female Man when I was in college, and was awed. I read “When It Changed” some time later, I think when it was first reprinted on SciFi.com (for which I am very grateful to Ellen Datlow, the site’s fiction editor, who ran a phenomenal series of reprints there), and I read it again today when Graham Sleight posted a link to it. It is just as powerful as I remember.

Joanna Russ was 74.