Virginia Woolf said a woman required a room of her own. The heroine of Joanna Russ’s startling 1976 novel, We Who Are About To. . . needs a whole planet.
Russ was a writer, academic and feminist who died in 2011, aged 74. Her science fiction is not easy to categorise, but it’s enough to tear through the 120 pages of We Who Are About To. . . (it really has to be imbibed in one sitting) to know that rage inspired her. Russ once addressed a young feminist critic with the rejoinder: “Where is her anger?” adding “I think from now on, I will not trust anyone who isn’t angry.”
The unnamed narrator is angry. She’s not just angry because she has been ejected
