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language: English
country: USA
year: 1977
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 25.6.23-27.6.23
Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To… is the third of her books I’ve read — first The Female Man, which I loved in spite of its big ideological problems (transphobia), and then Adventures of Alyx, which was reasonably enjoyable but which I don’t think I loved as such — and while it’s definitely not my favorite book of the year I love her style. from the incredible opening —
About to die. And so on.
We’re all going to die.
— to the dialogue structures, some of which are extremely tasty although difficult to pull out of context as examples.
We Who Are About To… is a biting critique of one of the oldest tale-types of adventure fiction and of the science fiction that grew out of it (from the robinsonade onward) — and also of the philosophical novel (Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān) and of the science fiction that grew out of that, namely, you crash on a desert island or an uncharted planet and you rebuild “civilization” from first principles.
the first half of the novel is devoted to untangling the assumptions that underly this colonial narrative: the narrator (a musicologist who studies early modern music and may be named Elaine) and her fellow travelers are ejected onto an empty world when their transport ship encounters mechanical difficulties and, ultimately, explodes. her fellow travelers immediately set about making plans to rebuild society — in defiance of the fact that they only have supplies to last a few months (at the most) and no way to get more food afterwards. the narrator objects, first — and perhaps foremost — to their denial: they are, she insists, dead already. she also objects — perhaps less philosophically but much more immediately — to the imperative to reproduce, both in terms of social reproduction (shortly after landing the men attempt to reinstitute patriarchal governance-by-force-of-arms, for example) and in that almost immediately everyone (except the narrator) commits themselves to a project of planned breeding in order to populate the planet — their “colony” — a project they intend to integrate her into, by force if necessary.
by the midpoint of the novel, all of the would-be colonists, from the hyperrich couple (high-powered businesswoman and her trophy husband) to the brawny football player who (re)discovered physical coercion to the twelve-year-old who spent the last five years of her life with her consciousness displaced into others’ bodies in order to receive intensive (and expensive) medical procedures, are dead. the narrator spends the remainder of the novel waiting with increasing impatience for starvation to claim her, recording her experience (for whom? she wonders) on a voice recorder as she hallucinates people she knew (the “colonists”; friends from her checkered past) and walks the reader back through a dizzying portrait of a life in a future society, full of perfectly opaque cultural and political references. there’s a fascinating push and pull here between comprehensible meditations on death and recognizable scenes from ordinary life and at times incomprehensible incidents relating to her political and religious background that suggest (in the form of vague outlines looming out of fog) the contours of the future society she inhabited.
it’s a dark and dizzying book. the prose is exhilarating. I still think The Female Man is better but this is definitely worth a read if any of this sounds interesting to you.
moods: dark, reflective