We Who Are About To...

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Wesleyan University Press, Mar 15, 2005 - Fiction - 118 pages

One woman's quest to die with dignity may doom them all.

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.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
16
Section 3
48
Section 4
52
Section 5
71
Section 6
76
Section 7
83
Section 8
84
Section 9
88
Section 10
90
Section 11
93
Section 12
94
Section 13
98
Section 14
118
Section 15
Copyright

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About the author (2005)

Joanna Russ was born in New York City on February 22, 1937. She received a degree in English from Cornell University in 1957 and a MFA in playwriting from the Yale Drama School in 1960. She taught at various colleges and universities during her lifetime including a long stint at the University of Washington in Seattle. She was a critic and science fiction writer best known for books of criticism such as The Female Man (1975) and How to Suppress Women's Writing (1984) as well as the novel And Chaos Died (1970). She died on April 29, 2011 at the age of 74.

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