A review by eccles
We Who Are About To... by Joanna Russ

dark emotional reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

 Picked this up as a curiosity, following the traces of a few now-forgotten bright lights of 1970s sci-fi.  As someone else has commented, this is basically an extended suicide note in space, the monologue of someone about to die on a planet far far away.   The fact that she’s been wrecked on a distant planet in some distant future in which tesseracts exist and science seems to have overcome all human problems is largely incidental to the central focus of this work, which is preoccupied, I think, with how to die.  The scenario is a survival story trope:  a handful of disparate people thrown together when they’re wrecked on a desert island, not a million miles from Lord of the Flies or a high-tech Gillian’s Island really. But here the hapless crew are cast away, as the result of a glitch in some kind of high-tech space travel, somewhere so far away as to make rescue perfectly unimaginable.   As a consequence, they’re confronted with the choice of starting civilisation all over or just dying sooner rather than later.  Our realistic and nihilistic first person narrator has decided from the beginning that they’re already dead and it’s just a matter of playing out how death happens for all of them.  In fact, and I suppose inevitably, she just kills them all and then spends the last third of the book musing on life the universe and everything as she starves to death.   It’s bleak, and it’s angry.  Angry about the bleakness of life, of the human experience, of how society looks when it’s stripped back to the bone.  There’s no attempt to create a coherent sense of a future world, and amid the passing references to magical technology of this future, 1970’s America is clearly visible.  Because the text is the musings of one person, recorded on her “vodocorder” as she moves through her dance of death, I found the monotone became monotonous.  I’m not sure this exercise shed any new or interesting light on the human condition, but maybe writing doesn’t need to.   But what’s left is pretty emotionally exhausting.