The Female Man
Four women (Joanna, Janet, Jeannine, Jael) from four parallel Earths at different stages of feminist revolution confront each other. Russ's 1975 novel explodes the realist contract of SF with formal radicalism. It remains the most important feminist SF novel ever written.
Basic disorientation is the complaint repeated across every source: four narrators whose names all start with J, voice and person shifting with almost no signposting, “frustrating not to know who the first-person narrator was,” and two readers abandoned it unfinished for exactly that reason. Readers who wanted a novel got something closer to polemic, “The other 90% is unnecessary polemic” at the hostile end, thin at scene level with long stretches of direct argument. The parallel-world premise goes unexplained. Some find the anger indiscriminate, landing hard on women who do not share the politics. To a hostile minority “the author comes through as a sad, lonely, bitter, nasty person.” And one passage reads as transphobic now.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
