We Who Are About To...

We Who Are About To... first appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction in two instalments in 1976, and Joanna Russ published it as a book the following year. Its narrator is never named. She speaks into a recorder, keeping an account of what the survivors of a wreck find on the planet where they have ended up and of what they decide to do about it.

Russ uses the situation to test something most stories of its kind take for granted. The group has no doctor, no engineer and almost no equipment, and the consensus among the men, that the only sensible response is to populate the planet, is treated by the narrator as a fantasy with a very short future. Her refusal to take part turns a survival story into an argument about who decides what survival means.

The book is short and written in a deliberately flat first person that gets flatter as the narrator's isolation deepens, moving from the practicalities of the first weeks into memory, politics and the history of activism she was part of before the crash. The argument is made through what she notices and what she declines to do rather than through speeches, which is a large part of why the book reads so differently now from the way it read in 1977.