Resetting the clockocracy: time and memory in Joanna Russ’s The Adventures of Alyx

Abstract

This article offers a literary analysis of the short stories The Adventures of Alyx, by feminist speculative fiction author Joanna Russ. I argue that Russ uses the literary devices of time travel and different kinds of memory in these stories to destabilise a linear time that is complicit with patriarchal ideologies that seek to dismiss her female protagonist, Alyx, from the male-dominated space of the agora. In destabilising linear time, Alyx is able to gain agency and refuse the harmful masculinist ideologies of her world. It is argued that these stories which were written during feminism’s second wave (c1960-1980) explore a particularly second wave perspective regarding patrilinear time. In order to contextualise these tales, a brief exploration of this perspective is thus undertaken. This article is also an attempt to redress the lack of critical attention that these stories have received to date because, as is contended in the article, they are essential to any consideration of Russ’s early work as they foreshadow the experimentation and sophistication of her later works.