We Who Are about To...

by Joanna Russ

Book Overview

A multi-dimensional explosion hurls the starship's few passengers across the galaxies and onto an uncharted barren tundra. With no technical skills and scant supplies, the survivors face a bleak end in an alien world. One brave woman holds the daring answer, but it is the most desperate one possible. Elegant and electric, We Who Are About To... brings us face to face with our basic assumptions about our will to live. While most of the stranded tourists...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0819567590
• ISBN13: 9780819567598
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

One of the best SF novels I have ever read.

John W. Campbell's formula for great science fiction was, famously, "ask the next question." That's exactly what this bracing, challenging, bleak, funny, deeply subversive novel does, elegantly undercutting decades of unexamined science-fiction adventure cliches. Recommended for anyone who ever wanted to lay into Compulsory Optimism with a meat ax. "The human race is fine. We're just not there."

wonderfully subversive

If I had read this book when I was fifteen, I do believe my life would have been entirely different. This is wonderfully subversive stuff, addressing all the problems any science fiction fan has with the "starship separated from civilization" plot, with a protagonist you will love to be appalled by.

For those who believe in survival of none

I was young when I first read "We who are about to..." Too young, really, to grasp the full concept of life and death, the two main currents that lie within the book. A cruise vessel of the future manages to miss the point in space that it was attempting to fold to, spinning amazingly far off course and crashing into a planet that is in no way guaranteed not to kill the survivors. A politician, an upper class family, a "jock", a young sex object, a washed up waitress, a supposed tactical expert, and a musician (our heroine) all help make an ensemble from Hell. Nothing goes according to protocol, and chaos ensues as the musician experiments liberally with her psychoactive drugs. While in a science-fiction setting, Ms. Russ manages to maintain a surprising lack of the technological; the underlying concept of the story being Gilligan's Island on Acid. As Social Darwinism takes its course, the value of life itself is called into question. This is not a book for those who are set in their ideas of God and living; this is for those who remain unsure as to what lies in store for them, and what may be the meaning of life.