Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ

Pointless story about idiots on a camping trip

Picnic on Paradise, a science fiction novel by American writer Joanna Russ, was published in 1968. It features a recurring character named Alyx who appears in a handful of Russ’s stories. Alyx is a thief and warrior woman of ancient Tyre (in present-day Lebanon) who was plucked from the past and brought forward by time machine to what would be our future. In this novel, Alyx is assigned by a lieutenant (a lieutenant of what is unclear) to guide several people on a backpacking exercise through the mountainous country of the planet Paradise. None of these people seem to be in the military (two are nuns, for example), so why are they taking orders from a lieutenant? Who knows? The planet Paradise is a nature preserve of sorts, but it is hardly paradisiacal. The mountains are snowy and cold, and the hikers have to face such hazards as freezing to death, falling in crevasses, and attacks by wildlife.

Alyx is the only member of the party who has any experience in this sort of wilderness adventure, and she’s the only one who acts remotely like an adult human being. The rest of the gang behave like children, speak in nonsensical non-sequiturs, and constantly break out crying for no apparent reason. Hardly a page goes by when one of these idiots isn’t weeping. It’s not just the characters that are dumb but the way they are written. Russ’s prose is merely a string of sentences that often make no sense and don’t really belong together in sequence. In the 1960s this might have been seen as creative, but to the intelligent reader of the 21st century it’s just annoying. It’s like listening to a bunch of children in a kindergarten shouting out whatever pops into their heads. The plot doesn’t really go anywhere, and the whole journey seems pointless. If there’s a larger philosophical meaning to this narrative, it escapes me. I question if this can even be considered science fiction because, with the exception of the occasional mention of a raygun or flying machine, it’s really just a camping story, and not a very good one.

I discovered this novel in the Library of America’s collection American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1968–1969. This is the second novel I’ve read from that book, after R. A. Lafferty’s Past Master, and both were just terribly written and utterly pointless. Picnic on Paradise was nominated for a Nebula Award, which makes you wonder about the tastes of such award committees, science fiction critics, and the editors who put together “classic” anthologies. Were the sci-fi literati of that time so hard up for good books that anything remotely “different,” however foolish, is hailed as groundbreaking? I find that hard to believe. Alyx may be a feminist heroine, but doesn’t a feminist heroine deserve a better book than this? Russ may have some decent works in her oeuvre, but this isn’t one of them.
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