An incandescent stylist who emerged from the experimental ferment of science fiction’s New Wave and against the backdrop of the women’s liberation and LGBTQ+ rights movements, Joanna Russ upended every genre she worked in. The essential novels and stories gathered in this Library of America edition reveal not only a beguiling, darkly comic writer of speculative fiction, but, in the words of Samuel R. Delany, “one of the finest—and most necessary—writers of American fiction.”

The Female Man (1975)––a multivoiced, multidimensional voyage that challenges readers’ sense of gender and reality—introduces four remarkable women: Jeannine, a librarian from an alternate-reality New York in which the Great Depression never ended; Joanna, a 1970s activist who in some ways resembles the author; Janet, from the utopian, all-female future planet Whileaway; and Jael, a black-clad, steel-fanged warrior from embattled Womanland, who has brought the other three together to enlist them in a liberatory war against patriarchy in every dimension.

In We Who Are About To . . . (1977), a party of misfit space tourists struggles to adapt and survive after crash landing on an unforgiving alien world. Some in the group even hope to build civilization anew. Recording the castaways’ daily progress on her pocket vocoder, Russ’s incisive but perhaps unreliable narrator begins to see each of them in a new light, and to wonder if any is worth saving at all.

On Strike Against God (1980), Russ’s fierce and witty final novel, boldly explores a world neither speculative nor utopian but no less uncharted. Esther, a small-town college English professor, lonely and long hemmed in by patronizing colleagues and other parochial minds, realizes she has fallen in love—and to her surprise with another woman. In Russ’s telling, coming out becomes an ongoing fantastic journey, humbling, awkward, arousing, and ultimately joyous.

This edition also presents all six of Russ’s “Alyx” stories (1967–71) in one volume for the first time, including her short Alyx novel, Picnic on Paradise (1968), and the late story “A Game of Vlet,” not included in previous collections. A “wild hill girl” from ancient Ourdh, ex-evangelical, sometime assassin, bodyguard, and agent for the far-future Trans-Temporal Military Authority, Alyx is an all-around badass and perhaps Russ’s most memorable character, whose exploits reinvent “sword and sorcery” for a postmodern, feminist era.

Rounding out the collection are the Nebula, Locus, and Hugo Award–winning stories “When It Changed” and “Souls,” the former offering Russ’s first vision of the all-female world of Whileaway, and the latter, in the words of Stephanie Burt, a “perfectly wrought medieval tale.”

Nicole Rudick is the author of What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle. Her essays on art, literature, and comics have been published in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, and elsewhere.