One advantage of working in a genre is that things have to happen, you must create a moving plot, and that discipline keeps Russ' springy intelligence at least somewhat anchored. If she is like any other writer, she makes me think sometimes of Swift. She is as angry, as disgusted, as playful, as often didactic, as airy at times and as crude, as intellectual. The quality of outraged, clear-sighted, pained intelligence, at once incandescent and exacerbated, is one of the major experiences for me in reading her work. Her critical essays tend to be witty and savage. Boredom is a torture to which the world obviously condemns her a lot.

Her first novel and still her easiest to approach is Picnic on Paradise….

Her protagonist Alyx is a Greek thief who was in the process of being executed in Tyre some centuries B.C. when she was accidentally...