Joanna Russ - stroke

Word received from Debbie Notkin, Raymond Feist, Samuel R. Delany, others, on a mailing list:

Joanna Russ has suffered several strokes and is in the hospital in Tucson, apparently not doing well -- "slipping away".

This is sad news.

Oh, no. I was thinking about her recently. Sad.

Horrible, horrible news.
Thank you for posting this.

Looks like we're about to lose another great woman writer.

Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.
— Joanna Russ

Locus reports that Joanna Russ has died, 1937-2011.

I am so very sorry to read this. Russ was the reason I first started reading science fiction and she remains my favourite author in the genre. American literature has lost a great writer today.

The Female Man changed the course of my life.
Goodbye, Prof. Russ, and thank you from us all.

Thanks for posting that, dukedom. Very sad to hear. What a great contribution she made.

I don't know Russ' work nearly as well as I should, but I found The Two of Them just amazing when I read it.

The Nielsen Haydens have a memorial thread going. There's a link to a photo of the 16-year old Russ as a finalist in the 1953 Westinghouse (now Intel) Science Talent Search. If you don't know, that's a very impressive achievement.