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We Who Are About To...
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780819567598
ISBN: 0819567590
Label: Wesleyan
Manufacturer: Wesleyan
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 144
Publication Date: March 15, 2005
Publisher: Wesleyan
Studio: Wesleyan
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Editorial Review:
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 decide to defy the odds and insist on colonizing the planet and creating life, the narrator decides to practice the art of dying. When she is threatened with compulsory reproduction, she defends herself with lethal force. Originally published in 1977, this is one of the most subtle, complex, and exciting science fiction novels ever written about the attempt to survive a hostile alien environment. It is characteristic of Russ's genius that such a readable novel is also one of her most intellectually intricate.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - 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."
Rating:  - the highly capable, depressed woman
This is an old book, in print more than 30 years, but as it has minimal topical references it has not become as dated as some SF of the 70s. It is a gray, gloomy, depressing story that remains a downer right through the last sentence--there's no last-minute discovery of a meaning to life to redeem the book.
The first-person narrator is a highly capable, intelligent woman with loads of forethought and a sardonic attitude. If she mustered any of these qualities in support of anything ... Read More
Rating:  - Dead boring.
This a story of a woman being bored to death. Really, she dies of it. There are some other characters to begin with, but they're a bit boring and she kills them half way through the book. Then we're left with this murderer, and her morbid fascination with, well, death, and her slow, well, death. There's that D word again. The book's actually more interesting then it sounds, but it's still dead boring. The writing is pretty good, but really, the plot is a killer. There's nothing going on, and the ... Read More
Rating: - 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.
Rating: - 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, ... Read More
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