Although Joanna Russ has stated, "My feminist novel, The Female Man (1975), was a later and very different project" (Zanzibar Cat, p. 9), the connection between the two works is difficult to ignore, since the first narrator in the novel is Janet Evason, who announces, "I was born on a farm on Whileaway." Certainly the novel — which traces the lives of three other women from parallel universes, and which gives a great deal more background about Janet — is a more complex and demanding work, but it is hard to see how it can be a very different project. The adventurous, even swashbuckling characters of Russ's other fictions (e.g., Alyx, of Picnic on Paradise and other stories) also constitute links among her various works.