The week before Eastercon 2026 I sat down to write a conclusion to the talk on Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) that I was planning to give, and I wrote this line:

Joanna is being visited by three ghosts and may be one herself.

The act of writing the line, which I had not thought through in any other way than as a summary of what I had written about Russ and existentialism, stopped me in my tracks.

Russ liked ghost stories, she liked them a lot.