2024 read #155: And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ.

And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ

189 pages

Published 1970

Read from December 18 to December 20

Rating: 2-ish out of 5

This book is a strange, often off-putting experiment of a sophomore novel. What opens as a fairly standard space opera gets filtered through the literary affectations of the New Wave. The text revolves from impression to impression with all the logic of an acid trip. An old man eating plums in the moonlight leaps into somersaults at the lightest touch, flames at his heels. Russ’s prose is sweeping and ambitious, but even after I’ve read the whole thing, I’m still not sure whether it was supposed to make sense or not, or if it was meant as a suite of vibes.

I momentarily got excited when Russ revealed that main character Jai Vedh is gay — rarity of rarities in 1970 sci-fi! — but then on page 23 he muses, “I wish I knew what it feels like to be a man who loves a woman,” and by page 51 he’s dream-fucking one of the women from a putative “lost colony.” Later, “homosex” is lumped in with the “exports” of a decadent, sickly dystopia, while Jai ruts through various heterosexual encounters, many of dubious consent. All of which is in keeping with the mores of this era, but it feels like a particular letdown. (You mean to tell me this is the same Russ who would later publish We Who Are About to…?) There are also some deeply uncomfortable passages that I assume (or rather, that I hope) are a feminist critique of the pedophilia at the root of patriarchal heterosexuality.

If you persevere through Chaos’ deliberate opacity and its unfortunately antique construction of sexuality and gender, it turns out to be just another Social Statement sci-fi novel making a contrast between the “natural,” vaguely Taoist society of the colony’s outer space telepaths, and the polluted, listless, technocratic dystopia of future Earth. The book’s main effect was to make me wish I were rereading The Dispossessed instead. Every now and then, though, Russ turned a phrase that made me concede it was worth reading:

Evne, like a woman of salt, fled into the walls in metal crystalhood, where he followed her, turned into a bee (all eyes), a fountain (all mouth), wrapped herself around her own bones inside out, spread herself one molecule thick along all the lines in the ship: the two of them, pulsing miles across, breathing with the lungs of incurious strangers, seeing through other eyes, petrifying in flashes, pursuing each other in the shapes of walls, floors, volumes of contained air. He followed her.