Even at 120 pages, the novel felt long--much of it is the starving narrator's stream-of-conscious ramblings. I appreciate it for its caustic take on the Star Trek, triumph-of-the-human-spirit optimism. But fun to read? No. ( )

Knowing that Joanna Russ is generally considered part of science fiction's New Wave movement, it might seem odd that the setup of this 1977 novel uses only ingredients that could be found in earlier space adventure stories: colonization ships, surprisingly hospitable planets, a super-competent individualist narrator, and a group of castaways that includes a nuclear family and an athlete and a government agent and a professor and a showgirl. The difference is just in the plot, the characterizations, the philosophy, the prose style, and everything else.

The word that follows the title is of course "die", and right away our narrator (I'll call her ON, she never says her name) figures out that their situation is totally hopeless, and tells everyone so. She can't stop them from trying to carry on Robinson Crusoe projects anyway, but there's no chance that they'll be rescued, and their idea of populating the planet with their descendants (another classic SF notion) almost certainly won't work—if it's even desirable. So she just wants to be left in peace. That's basically the entire plot. If you think this sounds like kind of a bummer scenario, you are correct.

You may expect some kind of power struggle to develop, and it does, but not necessarily in the way you'd think. You may also expect, given ON's immediate hostility to everyone and her high level of general crankiness, that eventually she'll soften up and come to see their point of view, since that's a familiar kind of character arc; that doesn't exactly happen (although we do find out some interesting things about the other people), and Russ plays with our sympathies quite a bit, making all of ON's harsh judgments seem right so you can't just say "this person is too angry", but then letting her second-guess herself in ways that also seem possibly right. The flashbacks we eventually get to her past don't exactly explain things, but they're very moving. The point of view is strongly feminist in a way that lets no one off the hook; the first time there's violence between a man and a woman, the way they each deal with it is both disturbing and totally believable for those characters.

At one point something happens that may make you think "Wow, holy shit... well, if that’s where this was going, I guess the book must be almost over"—when in fact you're only a little past the halfway mark; Russ is gambling that if you've made it this far, you'll stick around for what follows, if only to see what more she could possibly do with the premise. The way the last section unfolds sometimes feels a little arbitrary, various things just come and go, but I suspect there's more shape to it than I noticed because I was still really engrossed. The actual end hit me like a brick wall.

There are many difficult things about the book, but the only one that slightly bothered me and felt like it wasn't on purpose was the prose style: it's supposed to be spoken dictation but it doesn't read like that at all, and the dialogue is compressed and choppy in a way that I found a little hard to follow at times (although that may not be specific to Russ; I've noticed it with other writers of that period too). Anyway, it's worth sticking with it even though you will need a hug afterward.

(PS: I'm looking at the 1977 Dell paperback edition and—while I usually don't bother complaining about SF book covers because they're so often terrible, and I sure don't blame publishers for having no idea how to market such a merciless and experimental novel—this has one of the least appropriate covers I've ever seen. There's a little open-top vehicle flying through interplanetary space, piloted by a grey-faced kind of goblin person with glowing red eyes. Needless to say this is not a thing from the book. However, the person who designed the cover so as to make it seem like some other kind of story clearly wasn't talking to the person who designed everything else, because immediately inside the front cover is an excerpt that contains not just a spoiler, but the single most shocking sentence in the book. I'm picturing a bunch of unsuspecting SF fans in 1977 picking this up and going "Oh cool, space! I wonder what it's—[opens cover] AIEEE!") ( )

Difficult to rate... I think if it was any longer I would have found it unbearable. As it is, it's quite difficult. Sort of a more depressing version of Russ' Picnic on Paradise in tone. This all sounds really negative, but I thought it was a genius and well-crafted story. Written in an incredibly distinct voice, it really turns the "spaceship crashed on an alien planet" plot inside out.

I need to keep reading more Joanna Russ! ( )

3.75 stars, maybe. I admit I appreciated the book more after going back and reading the introduction (which I had started but was super spoilery so I ended up skipping). It's cleverly written and mostly entertaining, but also very uncomfortable at times. It started to drag out for me after the murders, where the inner dialogue takes over and becomes more and more rambling until the end - which is probably what happens when you starve to death anyway, but it was such a contrast from the first half of the book that made me pause. ( )

Good deconstruction of the "crash-land and survive & thrive" trope, written with far more literary verve than one usually finds in space-borne SF.

Weird & Wonderful discussion notes: http://positronchicago.blogspot.com/2016/06/weird-wonderful-we-who-are-about-to.... ( )