We Who Are About to Die, or Why Elon Musk Should Do It* - The Book

 A while ago on here, I mused about the laughable outdatedness of the vision of the future Elon Musk is trying to sell us. This week I read a novel that constitutes pretty much the definitive refutation of that vision, and it should be no surprise to anyone that said novel is even older than I am. However, where Musk's Noah's Ark in space fantasies have aged like early Grimes records, Joanna Russ' We Who Are About To... has only gotten more relevant to our dumb historical moment. 

I'm going to spoil the plot of Russ' novel here, such as it is, but this is not really a novel you read for the plot anyway. It starts with a ship's travel through hyperspace going badly wrong. Russ gives a very simple, matter of fact explanation of how and why this happens, before moving on to deal with its consequences: the ship's eight passengers, three men and five women, wind up stranded on an alien planet with supplies to last them eight months. So far, so Space Family Robinson. Where things start to diverge from that hoary old trope is the presence on board this ship of Russ' narrator, who is frankly having none of this we-can-repopulate-the-planet stuff, and says as much: 

    ' "All right, so you think you have the chance of a snowball in hell. Maybe you do. But  I  think that           some kinds of survival are damned idiotic. Do you want your children to live in the Old Stone               Age? Do you want them to forget how to read? Do you want to lose your teeth? Do you want your          great-grandchildren to die at thirty? That's obscene." '

The narrator, however, is outvoted by her fellow passengers, who insist that 'just colonizing a little early' is well within their powers. It's worth spending a little time on who exactly these passengers are: we have a rich couple, the Grahams, Valeria and Victor, and their brittle teenage daughter, Lori; a hulking, half-bright rich kid, Alan-Bobby; Nathalie, a woman on her way to army training; John, a bureaucrat of the sort who would rather not explain exactly which bureau he works for (and who spends a significant portion of the novel, until the narrator rumbles him, pretending to be an academic); Cassie, a nightclub dancer with dreams of becoming a mother (dreams which, in the future world Russ sketches lightly in the background, only become possible because of the crash - we'll return to this); and the narrator herself, a former Communist rabble-rouser and religious extremist. 

If you're thinking that none of these folks seem cut out to be pioneers, well, exactly. But crucially, with the exception of the narrator, they're all comfortable and confident enough to think otherwise. This is a work of science fiction to which Dunning-Kruger is much more relevant than Einstein-Rosen or Mitchelson-Morley. And so, despite the narrator's insistence that they're all already dead and might as well go about assuming that condition as quickly and painlessly as possible, they instead start setting up their shelter, digging latrine trenches and making playing cards to pass the time. By Day Four, Alan-Bobby discovers that he's big enough to beat up any other individual member of the group, but not all of them at once; and, four days later, in the proceeding the narrator refers to as 'the great womb robbery', the group start working through the practical implications of 'repopulating the planet'. Or, to put it more starkly, deciding which of the women is going to have to sleep with Victor (who, as the oldest, 'has offered to donate his genetic material first').

You can see why this book has me thinking about Rocket Boer, right? We have unbelievably rich bastards fucking up space travel. We have an impossible dream of planetary colonisation. And we have creepy pro-natalist misogyny and an obsession with 'genetic material'! It's like he's in the room. Except, of course, that Russ, and her narrator, are once again having none of it and - after acting as Victor's death doula (it turns out he really was on a clock as far as donating his genetic material went) - she steals the high-tech scouting module they all call a 'broomstick' and flees the settlement to live in a cave. Yeah, did I mention this was originally published in the UK by The Women's Press, by the way? 

Unfortunately, the would-be colonists follow her. Unfortunately for them, that is, as she has no intention of going back, skills honed from her years as a political agitator, a concealed gas gun, and a conviction that she would rather die than be forced into their nightmare version of reproductive futurism. And so she winds up killing most of the other passengers in a confrontation at her cave, then heading back to the shelter to kill off the rest. 

And yes, that includes Lori, because if you're going to reject reproductive futurism and its investment of meaning in the figure of The Child then you might as well go the whole hog. Besides, it has been established pretty conclusively in the rest of the book that Lori is an extremely hyperallergic child and is likely thereby to have the worst time on the planet of any of the would-be colonists. It's a mercy killing, really. 

Not that Lori's mother sees it that way. In what would be the final dramatic confrontation of the novel were it not for the long, remarkable coda which follows the protagonist as she slowly gets ready to die, Valeria Graham gets the drop on the narrator with a hidden revolver and forces her to listen to a self-justifying spiel which starts with you're not coming anywhere near my child and then rapidly expands, as she realises the gun in her hand is what Russ calls 'a compulsory Ear', to an assertion of her place in 'the top one-tenth of the top one percentile' and its superiority to 'grubby little people' like the narrator, as well as the moral superiority of her decision to buy a child as opposed to Cassie's dreams of extraplanetary motherhood:

   

     ' "That child cost as much money as a small New England state. Believe it. I don't quarrel with Cass,          but to have a baby and call yourself a mother - ! One doesn't say such things, of course. One                    doesn't quarrel. Not here. But having children...I am the real mother here. That's all I'm going to tell you about myself. I don't think you'd understand the rest." '

In the end, it's Val's desire to maintain her self-image as the perfect mother, by getting the narrator out of Lori's earshot, that creates the opening Russ' protagonist needs to kill her with her own revolver, then shoot her daughter in the head. Now that's dramatic irony. 

Val's idea of perfect motherhood, and her belief in the superiority of a child 'bought and paid for' finds a clear echo in a certain contemporary billionaire's own obvious disgust with the messy mechanics of sex, but while the narrator's explicit rejection of the kind of 'natural' motherhood Cassie dreams of (' "Those babies'll love me, not their daddies."') creates the conflict which results in her slaying the others, it's very clear the narrator also despises the Grahams' cosy little domestic set-up. Cassie and Val can argue the toss about which of them counts as 'the real mother here': it's a contest in which the narrator has no interest. 

Russ gives us, as our point of view character, a woman who defiantly rejects motherhood whether its acquired in the marketplace or forced on women in a state of (colonising) nature, under the guise of 'preserving genetic material'. I can think of no better protagonist for a time in which we find ourselves besieged by pro-natalist propaganda from the men who consider shackling space their manifest destiny - nor, indeed, can I think of a better book to write about this Mothers' Day. 

* You know what it is. We all know what it is. He should do it.