We Who Are About to

Rating:
Summary: For those who believe in survival of none
Review: I was young when I first read "We who are about to..." Too young, really, to grasp the full concept of life and death, the two main currents that lie within the book.

A cruise vessel of the future manages to miss the point in space that it was attempting to fold to, spinning amazingly far off course and crashing into a planet that is in no way guaranteed not to kill the survivors. A politician, an upper class family, a "jock", a young sex object, a washed up waitress, a supposed tactical expert, and a musician (our heroine) all help make an ensemble from Hell. Nothing goes according to protocol, and chaos ensues as the musician experiments liberally with her psychoactive drugs.

While in a science-fiction setting, Ms. Russ manages to maintain a surprising lack of the technological; the underlying concept of the story being Gilligan's Island on Acid. As Social Darwinism takes its course, the value of life itself is called into question.

This is not a book for those who are set in their ideas of God and living; this is for those who remain unsure as to what lies in store for them, and what may be the meaning of life.

Rating:
Summary: wonderfully subversive
Review: If I had read this book when I was fifteen, I do believe my life would have been entirely different. This is wonderfully subversive stuff, addressing all the problems any science fiction fan has with the "starship separated from civilization" plot, with a protagonist you will love to be appalled by.

Rating:
Summary: wonderfully subversive
Review: If I had read this book when I was fifteen, I do believe my life would have been entirely different. This is wonderfully subversive stuff, addressing all the problems any science fiction fan has with the "starship separated from civilization" plot, with a protagonist you will love to be appalled by.

Rating:
Summary: Dead boring.
Review: This a story of a woman being bored to death. Really, she dies of it. There are some other characters to begin with, but they're a bit boring and she kills them half way through the book. Then we're left with this murderer, and her morbid fascination with, well, death, and her slow, well, death. There's that D word again. The book's actually more interesting then it sounds, but it's still dead boring. The writing is pretty good, but really, the plot is a killer. There's nothing going on, and the murderer's morbid thoughts and recollections are not that interesting, especially as the sane reader will probably not sympathize with the one and only character offered in the second half of the book.
Other reviewers seemed awed by the fact this book deals with, you guessed it, death. This book should have been killed in its infancy.