Picnic on Paradise

Full disclosure: I first read this novel when I was a teenager, fell in love with Alyx, and wanted to be the Machine. This is both a science fiction adventure story and a critique of science fiction adventure stories. It follows a familiar pattern: Alyx is the competent warrior, produced from the past to shepherd the effete civilians to safety. Immediately, however, Russ begins to complicate things. First, Alyx is from an old, refined Hellenic culture, and finds her companions barbarous as well as incompetent. Second, Alyx's competence consists largely of skill at ruthless violence. Among child-like helpless people she must care for, faced continually with the necessity of understanding and dealing with their feelings, she becomes emotionally involved, and proves incompetent at handling her own feelings. Alyx's foil, lover, and double is the Machine. The Machine wears a helmet that screens out most sensory information, leaving him in an austere, simple world. He is capable of complete concentration on physical tasks -- Alyx falls in love with him watching him learn to shoot a crossbow -- but has no more idea than Alyx does how to deal with people. Don't get me wrong, though. At the same time as it is a critique of adventure stories, this is a hell of a fine adventure story. It is full of dangers overcome and fights won. Alyx is a strong, competent, feminist's hero, as well as a critique of strong competent heroes. Russ dearly loved science fiction and fantasy. This is both a love letter to the form as well as the beginning of a farewell.

I'm a feminist who doesn't read a lot of feminist fiction because I find a lot of politically-oriented fiction -- well, really boring. All politics upfront but no heart to the characters or wit in the prose. Joanna Russ's "Picnic on Paradise" is the exception that proves the rule, a joyously written novel that carries it feminist ideals front and center and yet gets at something truly wonderful. (Virginia Woolf has nothing on Joanna Russ!) The plot: Alyx is a woman plucked from a distant era in Earth's history (possibly ancient Greece or Thessalia) by a travel agency in the distant future that caters to bored, rich, jaded humans who pay good money to be taken on an adventure. Tough-as-a-cookie Alyx, gloriously gritty and real, guides her little group of fatted sheep... I mean, tourists, through mishaps and dangers, striving to maintain the perfect balance between the illusion of danger and actual perfect safety, only, of course, things go awry and suddenly the tourists find themselves on a very real, very dangerous adventure. The plot of the novel is fairly straitforward and pure -- what makes the book so interesting is everything else. What I loved the most is the extraordinary vividness of the writing and the emotions. Russ's prose is very beautiful, almost startling and convoluted as poetry. She writes about future alien worlds and wonders with gorgeously visual words and paints pictures of the strange new world Alyx has been dropped into, and all of it glows with the humor and chic toughness of Alyx's POV. I can't say enough about Russ's prose, or her handling of Alyx as a character: it's almost cliche, but Alyx's like an onion: pearly layers, strong-smelling and real, slowly peeled off one by one as the story goes along, until at the end, I felt a sense of intimacy with her that I didn't thought possible when I started "Picnic". You can probably tell I'm more than a little bit in love with Alyx. I think most narrative fiction lives or dies by the strength of the characters, and I truly think Alyx is one of the great and interesting heroines of literary science fiction. The story has it all: feminism, strange new world SF, a great central character, an emotional arc, linguistic playfulness, and even a touching love story that defies almost every convention about love stories. A seriously beautiful book; highly recommended.

One of my favourites. The story of Alyx, a Greek woman from almost 4,000 years ago visiting our future. Her skills in living without technology are used to rescue a group of tourists from a vacation planet. This is a story about how time travel might occur, about culture shock, about mutual incomprehension, about the soft future and the tough-minded past, and even, surprisingly, about love. This is Joanna Russ's first novel. A sequel, of a sort, can be found in "More Women of Wonder," edited by Pamela Sargent.

Picnic on Paradise was Joanna Russ's first novel, and it remains one of my favorites. It concerns Alyx, agent of TransTemp, and her attempt to get a group of civilians safely across a hostile landscape. The dangers faced are sometimes environmental but more often internal. The characters are vivid and fascinating (particularly Machine) and the story is surprisingly realistic and grounded. Definitely my favorite of Ms. Russ's books (and she's one of my favorite authors).