A few weeks ago, I read Joanna Russ’s 1975 review of the movie A Boy and His Dog, which had originally been published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies. I hadn’t intended to, and wasn’t deliberately seeking it out. I just came upon it the way one often does online, clicking through from link to link, and eventually ending up somewhere unexpected but necessary.

It’s a wonderful piece, and deserves your attention, as all of her work does, but the passage that intrigued me the most was a paraphrase of something Chip Delany once wrote:

According to Samuel Delany, a literary characterization proceeds by means of three kinds of actions: gratuitous, purposeful, and habitual, and well-written characters perform all three. (This classification certainly applies to realistic fiction, and I suspect it applies to all fiction, however stylized.) Sexist literature produces two kinds of female characters, both imperfect: the Heroine, whose actions are all gratuitious, and the Villainess, whose actions are all purposeful. Neither performs habitual actions.

This stood out for me because, being a writer, I immediately wanted to understand more fully exactly what Delany meant by these three classifications. I could tell the concept would be helpful to my own writing. And as I thought, hmmm, how will I ever track down the source, I suddenly remembered that due to this connected world in which we live, I could simply ask the source directly, since Chip and I are friends on Facebook. So I reached out to query where I could find his full essay explicating this idea.

It turns out the essay “Letter to the Symposium on Women In Science Fiction” originally appeared in an issue of Khatru, and was then reprinted in his non-fiction collection The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. But not, unfortunately, my copy of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, as it’s a first edition. It can be found in the current expanded edition, though. I decided I’d pick up a copy at this year’s Readercon, where I could get him to autograph it, and then thought nothing more. (more…)