Dennis Biba

An astronaut is stranded alone on an alien planet and fights for his survival. With technical know-how, inventiveness and a good portion of colonial power, he finally succeeds in doing what Robinson Crusoe did in Daniel Dafoe’s novel from 1719: the triumph of Homo faber over the uncivilized remaining matter. The End.

This is what Joanna Russ‘ novel We who are about to… could have looked like if Andy Weir had written it, but the (at that time) 39-year-old writer from New York City was firstly a literature professor and secondly a feminist, which is why the audience is spared a story like The Martian, which was published thirty-five years later. Russ‘ space robinsonade is what outside of Science Fiction would be called a novella: a short novel reduced to the essentials about an – as Goethe put it – „unheard of event“.

A group of space travelers are unexpectedly stranded on an Earth-like planet and must fight for their survival. Do they have to? What other robinsonades assume as the premise of the story is renegotiated in Russ’s. The unplanned emergency landing is not the outrageous event, but the behavior of a single woman who tries to defy the logic of her story. The group of stranded people is mixed gender, there is also a child with poor chances of survival and the nameless first-person narrator, whose story we read as a written audio diary. The food supplies are enough for half a year, the alien planet seems indifferent and uninhabited and the prospect of rescue is zero. They quickly agree that the survival of human civilization must be ensured at all costs. The solution lies in compulsory sexual intercourse, regardless of the limited resources, since no one knows whether food can be obtained on the alien planet. But Joanna Russ is clearly not interested in logic, but in deconstructing the dominant ideology (in a feminist twist on Marxist terminology): the supposedly natural logic of patriarchal societies. So why survive at all if the situation is hopeless? While the rest of the group does not seem to ask this question, the protagonist comes to terms with her fatal fate and refuses a happy ending (and rape) by heading out into the wilderness alone. Not to survive, but to die. She thus leaves no doubt about the incomplete title of the SF novella: We who are about to… die.

Instead of letting a strong, hyper-masculine hero face the dangers of the wilderness alone, the text subverts all conventional narratives by not simply contrasting the male superhero with a female counterpart, but by consistently refusing everything that the sensation-seeking audience expects. However, this radical attempt to escape patriarchal logic also leads to a text that is more character-based than plot-based, which is not exactly easy to read despite all the narrator’s humor. The lack of a conventional plot ultimately results in almost no plot at all. Despite all the critical questions of survival, none of the characters show the slightest interest in exploring an as yet unknown planet. The protagonist’s experienced drug use is also of little help, raising some doubts about the reliability of the narrator. Is the supposed threat posed by her male fellow travelers ultimately only in her head? The fact that the protagonist rides through the air on a broomstick while fleeing from anticipated or hallucinated dangers – future technology makes it possible – is certainly evidence of the author’s black humor, who aesthetically appropriates the witch hunt as an actually patriarchal strategy of oppression (according to the Italian philosopher Silvia Federici). Narratively, We who are about to… remains a mixed pleasure. Despite all the effort to subvert conventions, the short novel does not invent any new narrative patterns. Perhaps that is precisely the point Russ is making: where society blocks them, no alternative narratives are possible.