We Who Are About To…
★★★★★
In the depths of space, a catastrophic malfunction maroons eight dysfunctional castaways on a barren planet with only six months’ supplies, no indigenous life, and no hope of rescue.
Our female narrator accepts their inevitable demise, but the others choose delusion. They start homesteading, insisting that our protagonist donate her precious genes and womb to the cause, when all she wants to do is die with dignity.
We follow events through the first-person audio diary of our nihilist protagonist — challenging prose that perfectly captures her conversational stream of consciousness. We occasionally glimpse the colonists’ right-stuff narrative as latrines are dug and water found, but it’s occluded by the diary’s torrent of existential despair rooted in the cold equations of survival.
The thin veneer of civilisation is baked away under the unrelenting glare of the bleak desert and its starless nights — patriarchal dominance rapidly emerges, enforced with violence. Tensions come to a murderous crescendo when the narrator escapes to die alone on her terms and avoid rape. It’s a shocking midpoint to the book that brutally inverts the romanticised colonisation trope.
The last half of the book is an extended soliloquy as our protagonist starves herself to death, seeking her redemption. Russ captures the descent into madness in chaotic, fevered prose, interspersed with moments of lucidity as we’re fed tidbits of backstory through her visions and hallucinations. It’s a challenging and disorienting extended monologue, completely at odds with the first half, offering fragmented hints of the authoritarian political despair that shaped her.
This is not the easy heroic story you might expect. It’s a powerful, but punishing read; a disordered diaristic monologue that explicitly refuses the linear narratives of colonisation and conquest. Russ expertly deconstructs the crashed spaceship trope, challenging the romanticisation of primitive patriarchy, and exploring how to die well when faced with death’s inevitability.
