The premise of this one is that a new species of moth has emerged and spread throughout the world. This moth releases a toxin that only affects biological males, sometimes killing them, sometimes driving them into a permanent state of violet psychosis. The story takes place a few decades after this happened, in a mostly female world where a small number of men have been able to be kept safe in carefully maintained clean facilities.
Now, I was a little bit leery to pick this up, because it sounds like the kind of thing that misogynist anti-feminist podcasters would imagine feminists write. “Ha ha ha, those awful men get what they deserve, and now women rule all! Yes! YES!” kind of thing. But that is not at all what this is; this is a very well done thought experiment, in classic science fiction tradition.
The protagonist of this book is an old woman working as a carer in one of these clean facilities. She’s one of the shrinking minority who remember clearly what the world was like before the change, and as such views the men under her care rather differently than her younger colleagues do. We also get flashback sequences to when the change happened, when she was a woman with a husband and teenage son.
The flashbacks are very reminiscent of a zombie apocalypse story. The mysterious illness appears and spreads rapidly, the survivors huddle together to survive, and society struggles to rebuild in the aftermath. The effects of this affecting half of the population are very well thought out. Many of the men die outright; many others are killed as they descend into violence. Those who go mad also tend to die quickly, because they’re uninterested in caring for themselves. Only some small number, who are able to be kept sedated by the use of rapidly diminishing stockpiles of drugs, are able to be kept alive. And many, many women died as well, often at the hands of their loved ones, in very horrific ways. And global society collapsed, so even more died, and then there is the problem of the continuation of the species when there aren’t any stable males around. It’s extremely, extremely dark, and utterly heart rending.
The present day is better, in many ways. Society has stabilized, a female-only world has been built, and true artificial insemination has been perfected. When a male child is born (which only really happens because of government incentives, because the artificial insemination process means the parents can reliably choose the sex of their child) they are immediately whisked off to a clean facility to be raised there. No parental bond is formed.
Resources were incredibly strained in those early years after the change, and keeping males safe was both extraordinarily difficult and with no margin of error. Very little time or energy could be spent actually educating these males, so much was going into keeping them alive. So the few men that exist are childlike, and regarded as such by the majority of the population who haven’t ever seen or interacted with a man.
Except, of course, there are other uses for men. Most women in this new world are, naturally, involved with other women, but there are still of course those who are still heterosexual, or those that are curious. They can (after going through decontamination procedures, and paying the necessary fees) enjoy the company of a man for a few hours.
As I said, this is an excellent and thoughtful exploration of a very tragic question. Very highly recommended. It works well as a standalone, but there is a sequel coming out in a few months that I’m now very much looking forward to.
Trigger warnings on this book: Sexual assault (both violent and coerced); grooming; graphic violence; suicide.