When It Changed

Here I am, mentioning the ED SF Project yet again in less than 24 hours. But I feel I have to, because Kameron Hurley has just published her appreciation of Joanna Russ’ story: When It Changed.

 

I remember reading the story back in 1977, in the paperback of Harlan Ellison’s collection: Again Dangerous Visions. It had a powerful effect on me then, and on re-reading it, I find that the effect is only slightly diminished. It speaks of a very different society from what we experience, and yet one that I (and I think, Kameron) can empathise with. And at the core of the story is the recognition by the narrator that the known world is on a cusp – and from that moment on, because of a meeting, the world is irrevocably changed.

 

Imagine the meeting between Cortes and the Aztecs as a some sort of two-dimensional object – say a square. Now turn that 2D object into three dimensions – a cube. That extra dimension is what Russ paces out in the nature of the meeting that occurs in this story. You’ll have to read it to understand what I mean. If you’ve read Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, you’ll have an inkling of what Russ is going to do, except in her story there are no aliens in the sense of being non-human. There are aliens of another form, though, and equally as deadly as invaders from Mars.