We Who Are About to… – Joanna Russ

First published in 1977, We Who Are About to… is Joanna Russ’ follow up to her Feminist science fiction classic, the Female Man.  A cynical take on science fiction’s obsession with castaway myths, We Who Are About to… is a planetary anti-romance that presents an atheist, scientifically realistic vision of the universe, and tears down how gender roles are asserted in society.  It is also Russ’ own howl of anger, a refusal to play nice with the boys’ club of the science fiction community and their dismissal of the Female Man as a mere propaganda piece.

Perhaps more than that of any other ’70s SF author, Russ’s work has suffered an onslaught of completely unbefitting cover art.

Told through the comm logs of one of the survivors of an ejected passenger compartment following systems failure on a superluminal voyage, the novella begins with a short set up of the situation, a paean to the lost technology that our narrator has relied on that lets the reader intuit her feelings about being marooned on the nearest ‘tagged’ planet.  Of course theoretically, the planet is habitable, but it is dull, ugly, and the eight castaways are not skilled terraformers, but a selection of gormless innocents and crashing idiots.  The equations of survival are being worked out by a bureaucrat unknowable lightyears from his office, and a wannabe law enforcer on her way to basic training when she was thrown into the situation.  And yet, against all logic, the majority of Russ’ castaways hand them the power.

It would be a mistake, however, to read the book as merely angry, and miss its acerbic humour.  The narrator’s nihilistic attitude, that the survivors should merely wait for death when their modern technology runs out, may seem grim, but it underscores the inanity of science fiction’s unscientific belief in the human spirit, the naiveity of which sees the would be colonists cut down wood for a fire, the smoke of which causes a teenage survivor to break out in hives.  They are thwarted at every move, if not by the mundanely inhospitable planet itself, then by their own lack of knowledge, a hodge-podge of assumptions and half-remembered concepts.  Even the very dullness of the planet breaks down science fiction’s tropes – there is nothing exciting, nothing to explore.  The planet is not devoid of life, but neither is it a primal jungle of adventure, or possessed of some willful genius loci to be tamed; it simply exists, unapologetically, and not for humans.

Aside from the struggle with the uncaring planet, however, the group is faced with the internal struggle, as it becomes clear that to have a colony, there must be people.  Russ shows how quickly the people devolve, and women become simple conduits for proliferation.  The narrator’s objections are dismissed, though she wonders what kind of world a child would even be getting brought into.  To the narrator, however, the colonists seem foolish, their dreams and demands of life, at any cost, being counter to the very society whose bureaucrats they still recognise.  The novella’s short discussion of the issue of sex and child rearing does much to highlight that women, as much as the castaway myth, are often merely a trope themselves in the hands of science fiction authors, a useful narrative device, a baby-making MacGuffin.

Perhaps the weakest element of the story comes towards the end, as the narrator escapes with the intention of dying in solitude, only to be pursued by the other colonists.  Suddenly the narrator kills them off, one by one, and returns to the original encampment where she finishes the job.  It seems odd and out of place, an attempt to parody the violence in usual planetary romances that falls flat despite capturing the seeming inanity of the narrator’s actions.  While the violence certainly achieves its function in not being traditionally exciting, it ruptures the narrative, and feels like a lazy accelerant towards the wonderfully realised starvation-addled last entries in our narrator’s log.  Here, the implications of the violence come to fruition, and the odd autobiographical detail about the narrator slip through, giving the logs a pervasive melancholy, punctuated by surreal visions and Russ’ harsh prose-poetry.  In fact, it’s only in the final few pages of the book that the narrator steps outside her fairy tale witch role and grows into a somewhat more complex character, ending We Who Are About to… on a fittingly frustrated note, drab inevitability taking its last victim.