group of wealthy tourists is trapped in a peculiar war zone in the 1968 SF novel Picnic on Paradise, Joanna Russ' quirky account of their struggle to make it to safety on a resort world turned hunting ground.
Raised in high-tech comfort with every imaginable luxury at their disposal, the refugees are incapable of caring for themselves. Their lone chance for survival lies with Alyx, a Greek thief scooped, against her will, from Earth's ancient past. Alyx is everything her charges are not: resourceful, ruthless and well acquainted with human savagery. It falls to her to shepherd the hapless civilians—whose number includes pacifist nuns, socialites, an outdoor adventure guide, an artist and a politician—to a pre-chosen evacuation point. The only promising member of the party is Machine, a taciturn technophile who impresses Alyx from the outset when he takes time (unlike the others) to learn to use the crossbows that are the party's only defense against attack.
After hurried preparations are complete, everyone sets out cheerfully enough; the idea of violent death is so alien to the tourists' experience that they are incapable of taking it seriously. Alyx is therefore forced to play the villain, goading them to hike at a reasonable pace, rationing the food and violently thwarting attempts to undermine her authority over the party.
Her precautions are warranted. When they finally arrive at the evacuation point, the war has outpaced them. The base is taken, and they are forced to raid it for supplies. Afterward, Alyx leads her charges out into the wilds of Paradise again ... and this time there is no safe harbor waiting to take them in.
Lessons about learning and loss
Picnic on Paradise is one of those novels that takes place within a very limited sphere, a war story whose war intrudes but rarely on the action. Russ explains nothing she doesn't have to. The intricacies of interstellar politics, the warring entities, even the matter of how this particular group of people ended up trapped on the resort when others were, presumably, evacuated, are all left for the reader to fill in. The planet itself is an obvious and improbable construct. A world useless for agriculture and industrial purposes, it is deliberately being spared the ravages of a more high-tech war because of its appealing climate and geography. The refugees are essentially shipwreck survivors in a very big and snowy life raft, cut off from everyone else and entirely wrapped up in each other.
The point of enclosing the characters in this bubble, of course, is to explore Alyx's evolving relationships with the strange future-born people she has been charged with protecting. These links, particularly her growing fondness for the emotionally remote Machine, form the core
of the book. Each tiny success and moment of growth feels like a tremendous victory, and as attrition whittles the group down, its members must deal with shock, fear and grief. These feelings are unfamiliar to everyone but Alyx, but she is no less affected by them.
All of Russ' writing is characterized by a unique blend of playfulness and grace, musically repeated poetic refrains and moments of razor-sharp wit, but in Picnic on Paradise, her first novel, these qualities are restrained, less fully developed than they will be in her best-known work, 1975's The Female Man. Her feminist politics, clearly visible in the novel's subtext, have a more subtle presence in this book. Packed with love, tragedy and adventure, Picnic on Paradise is intriguing, almost hypnotic. As its culture clash between the far future and the equally distant past plays out, readers see what has not changed since humanity's earliest days: joy, love and grief are part of the Homo sapiens package
and—like betrayal and the folly of war—and always will be.
