But I’ll refrain from elaborating further, and urge you to read the entirety of Duchamp’s take – if you’ve read the book already that is, as the first experience of this book suffers badly if you’ve had too many spoilers. Not that its feminist stance is not important, on the contrary, and well-done at that. Framing the novel only as such – an easy mistake as Russ is the author of the better known The Female Man, and maybe even more importantly as identity politics is important in today’s discourse on culture – does the novel a tremendous disservice. The main gist of what I want to say is that We Who Are About To… is a lot more than a feminist novel.
As part of a burgeoning movement of dissent, she learned the painful lesson of who may speak in a polis controlled by vast political and financial machinery (which these days we generally name “global capitalism”). At the time of the crash, the narrator was in full flight from a life of political activism and idealism that had smashed on the rocks of discursive politics. Through the soliloquy we discover that the narrator’s despair is not so much existential as political in the most fundamental sense of the word. Not that I had totally missed one of the political messages of the book, but I hadn’t perceived its full importance:Īs I read it, the soliloquy not only allows the narrator to put herself – once a “Neochristian” – on trial for murder, but also explores enough of her history to make it possible for the reader to understand her series of responses to the situation following the crash. It also opened up my understanding of the novel. Timmel Duchamp – an SF author herself – published in the February 2006 issue of the New York Review of Science Fiction, it quickly dawned on me it was no use of even starting the review I had in mind, as her text said about everything I wanted to say – references to Robinson Crusoe included – but better. There’s no use in repeating what others already have written.
After finishing a book, I usually read up on other reviews and stuff before starting my own.
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