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"They were not children,"
she said decisively, and shuddered.
"Well, yes," he said, "they were aliens, true but even as pyramids of green
Jell-O, they were , . .
well, baby pyramids."
"Hm!" said she. There was a moment's silence. He went back to his own book, an
annotated
Poems of Emily Dickinson.
Then she said slowly:
"Love, do you think . . . did it ever occur to you that all children are
aliens?"
He said, "Do you mean the bouncing on adults and the cherry pie between their
toes? Oh yes. No, not really. Anyway I rather liked them. The small pyramids,
I mean."
"I suppose," she said, a bit sharply, "that it's perfectly normal for human
male philoprogenitiveness to be roused by contact with small pyramids of green
goo. Nonetheless "
"No, not by them. By you."
"By me?"
"Absolutely." He added, "Do you want to back out?"
She smiled and shook her head. "No. We'll do it. It'll be human, after all.
Not like them."
Indeedy yes. Will be little yoomin bean. Will be playmate. Will be lonely.
You Know Who go away again soon.
We come back.
-end-
About the author:
Joanna Russ is one the finest stylists of the last forty years in science
fiction. Her stylistic excellences were indeed the foundation of her
reputation in the 1960s and early 1970s, only to be superseded by her
reputation as perhaps the most cutting-edge feminist in SF in the 1970s, the
author of
The Female Man, "When It Changed," and
The Two of
Them.
She also wrote critical essays (for which she has received a Florence Howe
Award from the Modern Language
Association and later the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research
Association) and reviews (mostly in
Fantasy & Science Fiction)
throughout the 1970s; she then fell silent in the mid-1980s.
She has published too little fiction since winning the Hugo award for her
novella, "Souls," in 1983. Not even a story a year. So it is a rare treat to
find a stylistic tour-de-force such as "Invasion." It appeared in
Asimov's in the same month (January) as a letter from Russ in the magazine's
letter column responding to an editorial. She also published a substantial
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collection of her essays, To Write Like a Woman, a Hugo nominee in 1996. We
can only hope for more.
This story is pure fun.
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