Author:	Joanna Russ
Copyright:	1984
Date Reviewed:	9/24/85
Rating:	4.5

Review/Synopsis: "Extra(ordinary) People" is an anthology of five short stories which all seemed to have pretty much the same theme. However, its somewhat hard to tell since most were incomprehensible. Perhaps I wasn't working hard enough to understand them. In Netnews, some would call this great art but at least in this case I would disagree. The main theme is sex role reversals. Women pretend to be men (or perhaps they are men pretending to be women pretending to be men). In some cases they are really sexless anyway.

The first story "Souls" was the best. It told of a very capable Abbess in a 12th century Abbey who tries to protect the church and town from invading Vikings. The story is told in a sort of old English (but not that old since I could read it). Somewhere towards the middle it gets very preachy and by the end we find that the Abbess is really an alien being whose soul was placed in the infant's body long ago.

The next three stories "The Mystery of the Young Gentleman", "Bodies" and "What Did You Do During the Revolution, Grandma" are virtually identical as a narrator writes to another about her(his) experience passing off as the opposite sex.

The fourth story introduced alternative world lines much like the "Imperium" series by Keith Laumer and that's about the only thing I understood there.

The fifth story I enjoyed. Here a woman(?) develops a plot for a Gothic novel about a romance between two lesbians.

All in all, not a good read.