Joanna Russ published her first science fiction story ‘Nor Custom Stale’ in the popular Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fictionin 1959, when she was 22 and in her second year at the Yale School of Drama. ‘It is Miss Russ's first story—’ wrote the editors in their introductory note to this text, ‘first, we are confident, of many’ (75). Joanna Russ has since not only written many stories, she has also accomplished a few things that the editors might not have expected from this young woman. Together with writers such as the French author Monique Wittig, James Tiptree, Jr., Marge Piercy, Ursula Le Guin and others, this promising young ‘Miss’ Russ would become one of the forces which revolutionized the genre in the 1960s and ’70s. This revolution transformed science fiction from a bastion of masculinism to one of the richest spaces for feminist utopian thinking and cultural criticism.

Although Russ published two poems when she was 15 and went on to study play writing, she chose narrative rather than poetry or drama for most of her work. In an interview which Donna Perry conducted with her in the early 1990s, Russ said that she had abandoned the ‘bare art’ of drama for narrative because ‘Too much of what I write is internal’ (293). However, most of what Russ writes also reverberates with a consistently radical political voice and is as much concerned with its external effects as it is with exploring ‘internal’ spaces. The title of this book, Demand My Writing,echoes this political urgency of Russ's fiction. Her writing always intensely engages with its audience and specifically with the individual reader. One could call this approach didacticism, but I prefer to call it political responsibility. Russ's concern with the reader correlates with her interest in writing, particularly women's writing. I stole the phrase I use in my title from Rachel Blau DuPlessis's essay ‘The Pink Guitar’, from which I once heard her read at a lecture.