We Who Are About To... Book

The unacceptability of outsiders. The inability of society to accept, discuss, or process perspectives that run sharply against its primary thrust. Not even so much against as just completely oblique to, even.

Essential sci-fi premise: survivors of a crash-landing on an unknown and unexplored planet.

Essential sci-fi elaboration (particularly golden era): civilization goes on! plucky survivors maintain hope, persevere against all odds!

Essential reality: if no one knows where to look for you, in the vastness of space, you will never be found. If you don't know where you are, almost anything will probably kill you. If you can eat the flora or fauna, surely some of it can eat you too. Mineral or biological water impurities that no human body has ever encountered. Unexpected atmospheric effects. (Even granted breathable air -- the ship computer ran some calculations, found that at least.) If you crash land on an unknown planet with no way to contact anyone and no information, it is sheer delusion to imagine you are any better than dead. Dead on a delay of hours, days, maybe weeks, but don't fool yourself. (We're all already dead on a delay of years, of course, this just brings that a little closer).

Or so might explain the narrator of We Who Are About To. (Like Xorandor this is sci-fi by dictation). While her fellow survivors immediately go about enacting every golden age sci-fi trope of maintaining civilization in the face of impossible odds, she quietly and without despair acknowledges the odds as impossible. The power and horror of a simple, calm contradiction of the fundamental drive of civilization. ("civilization must go on!" they say. "civilization is fine. we're just not part of it anymore" she says.) What she's objecting too is both the kind of menacing self-assurance of the new plans, but also the conventions of the genre she's fallen into. The drive to maintain this irrelevant veneer of civilized order, and organized plot-movement, is a kind of mania. Maybe not just in space.

On the other hand, how do people act without societal prescriptions gathered about them? Also not so great.

Just leave me alone.