A group of people, with no technical skills and scant supplies, are stranded on a planet and debate how to survive.

The men in the group are dedicated to colonizing and populating the planet, but the unnamed female protagonist, who does not believe that long-term survival is possible, resists being made pregnant by them.

Left alone, she becomes increasingly philosophical, recounting her personal history in political agitation and attempting to chart the days and seasons even as she begins to hallucinate from hunger and loneliness.

We Who Are About To... received poor reviews at the time of publication, and was panned by Spider Robinson writing in Analog,[1] and by Algis Budrys in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

[2] Later reviews have been more positive, however; David Pringle referred to it as "a grim tale which inverts the usual sf myth of human indomitability" in The Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction,[3] and Sarah LeFanu said in In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction that "for all its brevity [it] can withstand a multiplicity of readings.