Yet, in her letters to James Tiptree—who was herself no stranger to mother issues—Russ returned often to the subject of her mother, and in a different tone. She described her mother in one letter as being “nutty as a fruitcake,” writing, “There is something particularly awful about having a crazy mother who also tries to possess you utterly. (And a father who shrinks from interfering—who, in fact, colludes.)” In another letter, she writes that, when she was fifteen, she was “absolutely convinced the cold, starving badness I felt inside me all the time was me. . . . Ever since I’ve been sure that the only people who could like me were vampires like my mother, or fellow-defectives.”

Russ’s stories about her childhood—mother-victim, mother-vampire—represent not contradictory accounts but a process, neither linear nor ever really over, of trying to think herself into having some sort of friendship with her mother. In one of her short stories from the seventies, Russ imagines repeatedly encountering and trying to rescue her mother. “Am I,” Russ asks herself, toward the end of the story, “my mother’s mother?” Feminist utopias, as she wrote in one essay, often concerned themselves with “the rescue of the female child.” Bertha had once been a child, too. Even if Russ could save her only through fiction, it was still worth a try.

Though “The Female Man” is Russ’s most famous book, and deservedly so, the exploration of this particular dynamic—of saving children and wishing to save their mothers, too—emerges most provocatively in “The Two of Them,” from 1978, which follows Ernst and Irene, romantically involved agents from an organization called the ﻿Trans-Temporal Authority. The couple are on a mission to ﻿Ka’abah, a subterranean society on a desert planet where gender roles are so intensely enforced that any woman who seeks to live otherwise is functionally lobotomized. (Russ borrowed this setting from the writer Suzette Haden Elgin, to whom the novel is dedicated, but later expressed regret at deploying Islamic stereotypes to comment on American ones.) Zubeydeh, a little girl whom the two encounter during their stay, wishes to be a poet; her Aunt Dunya shared the same ambition, “went mad,” and disappeared.

Irene and Ernst have an ideal partnership—respectful, sexually appreciative, and full of the gentle inside jokes and shared knowledge that come with time. As a teen-ager, Irene ran away with Ernst, in part to escape the suffocating world of her childhood on Earth, a decision that has paid off. Ernst has a confusing relationship to Irene’s difficult mother, presenting himself as her “friend” even though they don’t really seem to know each other. (It’s not impossible that Irene’s mother, too, once travelled with Ernst.) In Ka’abah, Irene discovers an intensified version of what she left behind and decides to rescue Zubeydeh—who displays no great talent for poetry—over the objections of Ernst.

Once the couple have taken Zubeydeh and begun their journey back to headquarters, they start, increasingly, to quarrel. Irene notices little things about how she and Ernst talk to each other: his habit of condescending to her, her habit of appealing to his authority. She apologizes too much. She has, perhaps, not left her childhood at all: she has made “a big loop—even into the stars—and all for nothing.” She plans to flee with the child back to Earth. When Ernst tries to stop her, she shoots and kills him. And, when offered the chance to save another child, a boy, she refuses. “﻿This is Irene’s life-work,” the narrator coolly tells us, “to collect women and little girls from the far corners of the Universe. But not little boys.” That the little boy in question seems as if he might be abused by men, too, is not Irene’s problem.

“The Two of Them” was Russ’s last great sci-fi novel, part of a streak of increasingly bleak books that began with “The Female Man” and continued with “We Who Are About to . . .,” a story of shipwrecked space travellers. Within the novel, killing Ernst and refusing to save the other child are both genuinely shocking acts. They are so shocking that the narrator entertains, for a moment, the possibility that they didn’t happen. But, instead, Russ makes a more interesting decision: she crafts a world in which patriarchy is inescapable, and then she suggests that within that world her heroine is still capable of evil. The “good” man gives to his female partner only the kind of power he knows he can take back. But, within these structures, people also make choices, and they are still responsible for the evil they do, even if they did it to survive, because the imperative of survival is itself dubious. After all, that’s what drives the men in these stories, too.

This is a dynamic that shows up in much of Russ’s fiction. In “We Who Are About to . . .,” a group of stranded colonists on a newly discovered planet try to perpetuate themselves through enforced breeding of the female passengers. When one, Elaine, peacefully opts out, the others pursue her; she kills all of them, including a child. The colonists’ delusional need to feel as if they can rebuild civilization, even if through rape, is inexcusable; yet it is not clear that murdering all of them is excusable, either. Dying alone, Elaine hallucinates the ghosts of those she killed. “﻿﻿I had the muscles of an ox, which always embarrassed me,” one says to her. “I was not beautiful, I was stupid, and I knew nothing. . . . But still, you killed me.”

Rescuing or not rescuing the girl in distress, rebelling or choosing not to, shooting or not shooting the man in your way: these are all choices that must be made in desperate circumstances, but they are not choices that should escape judgment. In “The Two of Them,” Irene also wants to rescue Zubeydeh’s mother and aunt, but the mother doesn’t wish to leave. Though she spends all her time drugged into submission, and though she’s complicit in the destruction of her sister, she would rather sacrifice her child and her sister than resist her husband. She has dreams of being a cat, dreams in which she appears to achieve some kind of happiness. Next to this, a freedom she cannot be sure she’ll even enjoy holds few attractions. That she is undoubtedly a victim does not make her any less of a coward.

Russ’s alternatives, to return to Le Guin’s term, came down not to looking backward or to mulling over grievances but to saying no. Maybe it wasn’t enough to reject the world, but without that rejection nothing else could begin. One had to say no and go on saying it. The title of “The Female Man” refers to the moment when one of its protagonists, Joanna, rejects her own social role; toward the end of the book, she tells us that “I love my body dearly and yet I would copulate with a rhinoceros if I could become not-a-woman”: