2024 read #58: We Who Are About to… by Joanna Russ.

We Who Are About to… by Joanna Russ

170 pages

Published 1977

Read from May 22 to May 24

Rating: 4 out of 5

CW: thoughts on death and sui 

What sold me on this book was a summary from Samuel R. Delany, quoted in its Wikipedia entry: “‘[We Who Are About to… is] a damningly fine analysis of the mechanics of political and social decay,’ offering the interpretation that ‘Russ suggests that the quality of life is the purpose of living, and reproduction only a reparative process to extend that quality—and not the point of life at all... only feudal societies can really believe wholly that reproduction... is life’s real point.’” Given today’s Christofascist social and political pressures to leverage their breeding kink into public policy, this is horrifically timely.

A subtle miscalculation has thrown an interstellar craft off course. It crashes on an unknown planet, ejecting a handful of survivors. Within a matter of days, the men begin to itemize the women as breeding stock, and employ their physical strength to reinvent the patriarchy, assaulting the women while claiming to protect them. 

Our narrator, who from the start has been pragmatic about the impossibility (and undesirability) of survival, watches with an angry cynicism so restrained it seems like detachment, arming herself with whatever small thing comes to hand. But dissenters, even dissenters who just want to be left alone, cannot be tolerated when people become obsessed with control: "anybody who doesn't agree has to be shut up somehow because it's too terrifying."

One is reminded of how little it took — a couple terrorist attacks, a touch of economic uncertainty, a pandemic — to turn the 21st century into a speed run of the 20th.

I've often thought about the supposed desire for survival that writers like to trot out, even in books as bleak as The Road. Looking at the future ahead of us — uncertain, but trending grimmer by the year — I've been skeptical of the conceit that survival is paramount. Faced with a Christofascist culture that wants to eradicate all human joy, even as capitalism speeds our civilization toward collapse and mass death, I have to wonder: How much of this do I want to live to see?

The narrator’s clear understanding of that choice made this book especially poignant. She doesn't want to die, but there are many things worse than death, and a return to patriarchal control is one of them. We Who is as important to read now as when it was first written. It is the lesbian godmother of our contemporary “burn the world down” queer fiction.