In her afterword to "When It Changed," published in Halan Ellison's Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), Russ states that the story is, at least in part, a response to some questions and problems suggested by Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness (1969) in which an androgynous civilization is depicted.

The story is thus associated with a considerable body of Utopian and dystopian fiction that depicts the impact of encounters between representatives of disparate or mutually exclusive cultures. An early example might be the fourth book of Gulliver's Travels (1726), but in more contemporary terms one of the earliest and best examples is Stapledon's Star Maker (1937). A number of women have written works that transpose familiar male-oriented story types into feminist forms, Suzy McKee Charnas's revision of the post-nuclear holocaust type — Walk to the End of the World (1974) — and Marion Zimmer Bradley's revision of the Arthurian corpus &mdash...