https://bookandfilmglobe.com/fiction/afterland-a-world-without-men-amen/

‘Afterland’: A World Without Men, Amen
Lauren Beukes’ new novel imagines what happens after a virus kills nearly every male

July 28, 2020 Christopher Farnsworth
It can’t be easy to have a pandemic novel hit the market in an actual pandemic. You do all the research and plotting and hard work of creating a plausible apocalypse, and then when it publishes, people can experience the real thing by doomscrolling Twitter.

Lauren Beukes, to her credit, has created a different dystopian vision than the one we’re all currently enduring. In her new novel Afterland, Beukes — the author of The Shining Girls, recently ordered to series by Apple TV — imagines a world where 99 percent of men have died from HCV. It’s a virus that triggers massive, fatal cancers, starting with their prostates.

The manopocalypse, as it’s called, has been done before in Brian K. Vaughan’s comic-book series Y: The Last Man, although Vaughan killed every male on Earth but one (and his pet monkey). Beukes’ pandemic is slower and more grounded in science, but the result is still Biblical in scale: 3.2 billion men and boys dead.



Bleak new reality
Three years later, Cole and her son Miles, one of the last 12-year-old boys on the planet, have escaped from the custody of the federal government. They’re trying to get home to South Africa. This is complicated by Cole’s sister, Billie, who’s promised Miles to human traffickers. There are people who will pay almost anything for a live male.

After cracking Billie across the head with a tire iron, Cole and Miles, disguised as Mila, take off on a road trip across a transformed United States. Along the way, they encounter abandoned senior living developments being reclaimed by the desert, an anarchist commune in Salt Lake City, and finally, the Church of All Sorrows, a cult dedicated to apologizing profusely for the plague in the belief that it will eventually bring the men back.

A human hero
Cole, unlike most of the characters of apocalypse fiction, is not an omnicompetent action hero. She’s human, trapped in an impossible situation. She makes mistakes, like allowing Miles to post their location on Instagram, and she’s wracked with guilt and sorrow and loss. At one point, overwhelmed, she forces Miles to beg the Church for a ride. All Cole wants is to protect her son, but in the process, she reveals a conscience that will not stop hectoring her about the steps she takes to do that.

Miles is 12 years old, so of course he appreciates this not at all. On the edge of puberty, he’s often annoying or a jerk to his mom, because there are some things that not even the end of the world can change.

To be fair, neither of them are aware that Billie, still alive despite a brain injury, is hard on their trail, assisted by a couple of armed thugs. Billie is instantly recognizable to anyone who’s had a perennial fuck-up in the family. She has no idea why the collection agency is calling, she didn’t think you’d be so uptight about borrowing your credit card, she barely even touched that cop, that judge was being so unfair. She is the particularly ugly variety of selfish that cannot imagine anything more important than her own needs, even if that means selling her nephew.

Wishing for more

Lauren Beukes (Photo by Tabitha Guy)
But outside of the chase, there are moments when the world that contains Cole and Miles and Billie feels strangely incomplete. Beukes’ Beautiful Monsters shows she can make her settings come alive with almost surrealistic attention to the key details. There is an interlude that describes how the world deals with the Thanos-like reduction in population, and it only feels like the beginning of the story.

Half the humans on Earth have died, and it seems like the survivors would still be knee-deep in bodies rather than posting on social media and making Starbucks runs. Globally, we are currently at less than .02 percent of that death toll, and we are not handling it well at all. It’s unfair that we can test fiction against reality here in 2020, but there are times in the narrative when maybe there should be more endless screaming.

A world without men
Still, that might be male ego talking. Rebecca Solnit has argued that disasters unite people, rather than separating them, so it’s possible that women are simply better at getting their shit together in the face of a global pandemic. There’s strong evidence that this is the case in the real world. See Germany and New Zealand, or the way my wife makes masks and friendship bread while I binge-read comic books.

And getting rid of all the men would definitely solve the problem of the guys in the zombie movies who hoard supplies, shoot others at random, and hide their infection until it’s too late. (It’s worth noting here that men commit the vast majority of all violent crime in the U.S.)

That’s not to say the women-only world is a utopia. As Beukes said in an interview, women can be bad guys, too. It’s nice to hope for a villain-free society once the men are mostly gone. But Billie and her collaborators show that sociopathic assholes aren’t just one gender. That’s sadly true outside of fiction, too. Witness every YouTube video featuring a Karen Gone Wild or the CPS files of mothers who abuse their kids.

Afterland challenges the assumptions that we’ve swallowed in our constant diet of apocalypse porn, especially the belief that we will all inevitably descend into cannibalism and chaos. It is not a zombie movie, or the world according to Mad Max. It’s our world, cut in half, and Beukes shows us how the survivors try to live with the wound.

(Tor, July 28, 2020)

The Human Culgoa Virus starts off as a highly contagious flu, but soon causes aggressive prostate cancer and kills off 99% of people with prostate glands around the world. The remaining seem to be genetically immune, though no one knows how or why. But generally, it’s game over for the majority of the people with a Y chromosome in Lauren’s Beukes’ latest novel, Afterland.


Women may be in charge, but their bodies are still governed by the state: they aren’t allowed to get pregnant, or have babies (if by some illegal way they can find viable sperm). A worldwide treaty has been put in place against all pregnancies, until HCV can be cured, or managed in some way.

Cole is far from home in California, after what was meant to be a family vacation ends with her husband dead, and her son one of the very rare male survivors of the pandemic. She and Miles are taken away to a military facility for their own safety, except safety in the new post-HCV world looks a lot like a fancy prison.

I love the dystopian apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic genres so reading the description of Afterland as a Children of Men meets The Handmaid’s Tale, I was all-in!

In Afterland, we meet Cole, her 12 year old son Miles, and her psychopath sister Billie. 3 years before the book takes place, a plague hits which ends up killing 99% of the men. Parts of this story was very prescient with hand sanitizer and other supplies running out.

Told in current day and flashbacks, Cole and Miles were taken by the government and placed in quarantine for a couple of years as Miles is one of only a very few males left in the world.

Cole and Miles end up escaping as Billie is trying to kidnap Miles to sell him into sex trafficking for his rare sperm. Yes, VERY disturbing!

The story follows the three from each of their POVs as they travel cross country in a world of women. They’re trying to reach Florida to take a boat back to their homeland, Africa as they were trapped in the U.S. when the plague started. Miles is traveling as a girl, Mila, to disguise and protect him from being found and retaken by the government.

This was definitely an eye opener to see how the women in this world cope without men. A religious cult emerges in this world which Cole and Miles pretend to join to help get them cross country.

This premise was really interesting and I thought the world building was exceptional. I was really happy with the ending.

*Thank you to NetGalley and Mulholland Books for the advance copy!*

This is the first pandemic book I’ve allowed myself to read during this pandemic, and fortunately the premise was far enough away from reality that it didn’t make me anxious. That premise, that a virus that causes virulent and metastatic testicular cancer hits the world and kills most of the male population, is clever and serves as a set-up to a thriller set in an all-female world. There are some boys and men who have not died, and they have been rounded up and imprisoned “for their own welfare” along with their immediate families. Testing to find the source of their immunity and their future use as breeders are the true reasons for their confinement. Miles, age 13, is one of these boys. Cole, his mom, breaks him out of captivity to take him home to Johannesburg (the author is South African, as are Cole and Miles), and then the chase is on.

Cole provides an outsider’s view of the US that she crosses, causing some laugh out loud moments in the midst of the suspense. Evangelical religion’s rise to fill the needs for an explanation and for hope is addressed at the same time that it provides a number of plot foils. Cole and Miles are fully realized characters, ones that the reader can root for. And many of the other characters are well fleshed-out as well. The tension is palpable even as it’s hard to imagine that they might actually make it across the country and off to Africa. Beukes does a terrific job with the ending. Her writing throughout is clever and engaging, in the end providing a pandemic book that is somewhat less than apocalyptic.

In 2023, a mysterious virus swept the planet called HCV causing almost all men to contract prostate cancer and die. Cole and her teenage son, Miles, are on the run after Miles’ identity becomes known to the government. After escaping from one of their testing facilities where Miles has essentially been a guinea pig and being betrayed by her sister, Cole trusts no one. Miles is wanted by so many groups for a variety of reasons and Cole is scared to let anyone help them. Will Cole be able to get Miles to safety somewhere? If you are a fan of dystopian fiction, I would recommend checking this one out as it was just published last week. Thanks to @mulhollandbooks and @netgalley for the review copy.

I really liked Cole’s character as she was so determined but also flawed which made her extremely human and likeable to me. Miles was frustrating at times like a true teenage boy and Billie was a great villain. I found the concept fascinating as Beukes builds a new world devoid of men. It was very cool to see how she visualized women forming new cultural norms without them and what roles they had to take up to keep society going. The plot was slow for me in the middle but I really enjoyed the beginning and ending. The middle has an interlude where you get to read texts like articles and radio broadcasts that explain how society crumbled and it kind of gave me World War Z vibes. This would have been a five star for me if it was shorter!

The Human Culgoa Virus has ravaged the globe, turning into an aggressive and deadly prostate cancer in most men. Now, only a small percentage of men are left, including twelve-year-old Miles. The government wants to keep him and his mother, Cole, in Ataraxia, a secure facility for testing to learn why he is immune. On the black market, though, women will pay astronomical sums for semen or surrogate sons, since reproduction has been outlawed until the virus is understood.

Cole wants to keep Miles safe from both groups—and to do that, she decides to escape Ataraxia and head to her home, South Africa. Not only does she have to avoid federal agents, her biggest threat is her sister Billie who views Miles as a payday that will make her secure for life.

Once Cole and Miles break out, Miles must become Mila as they travel from the West coast to Miami in search of a way to leave the country. On the way, they take refuge with an anarchist cult devoted to dismantling borders and property rights. They hide among a traveling cult, the Church of All Sorrows, that is sure with enough repentance God will forgive them their sins and return men to earth. Along the way, Cole and Miles/Mila deflect natural disasters, federal agents, and women with too many questions as they try to stay ahead of Billie and her mercenaries and Cole wonders if there’s anything she wouldn’t do to protect her son.

The perspective alternates between Cole, Miles, and Billie, a sound narrative choice since the three characters have such different priorities and ways of seeing the world. Comparing how Cole and Miles see the same interactions differently is particularly interesting and probably will be very familiar to parents of teenagers!

While the primary focus is on the chase and the relationships among the characters, the post-virus worldbuilding is exquisite—it’s well-developed yet very subtle. To varying degrees, everyone in the book is reckoning with the absence of men and what it means for the future and to power dynamics.

The book is full of puns and word play with Billie being particularly sardonic so that I was frequently amused. At the same time, some observations were so cutting and resonant that I found lots of meaning in the book. And, of course, I loved the pit stop in Oklahoma.

Those who liked The Handmaid’s Tale, The Power, and The Red Clock will likely enjoy this, though I do think Afterland has a lighter tone and the genre mash-up gives it a fresh interpretation.

Ah, another book that hits wayyyy too close to home, I personally kind of love it. Plague? Check. United States being awful to immigrants and kids? Double check. Literally taking people captive for arbitrary crap? Oh all the checks. Ironically, that last point hadn't been front page news when I read the book, so it's just a fresh, horrific tie in to add to the mix.

Afterland hit me right in the motherly feels, guys. Cole will do anything, absolutely anything, to save her son Miles from being taken captive. As one of an incredibly small number of genetically male humans left in the world, Miles is a terrifyingly hot commodity. So, Cole and Miles (as "Mila") go on the run from those who would do... well, Cole doesn't know what they'll do to Miles but she doesn't intend to find out. She just wants to get them back to their home in South America, near friends and hopefully safety. Meanwhile, Cole's sister Billy is one hundred percent awful and is basically willing to also do anything... to capture Miles and the reward she'll get for bringing him in.

I loved that they were basically running across the country, trying to get out of it, and that was a great adventure. We see Cole's and Miles' perspectives as they traverse and dodge, and as they encounter others along the way. Miles feels pretty much like you'd expect a terrified thirteen year old on the cusp of hitting puberty and having to dress up as a girl, all while being chased. My one gripe is that for all the excitement of the chase, the ending felt a bit easy. I guess I wanted a bit more from it, though it did end on a satisfying note.

I found the pandemic interesting in itself, and I liked that the author addressed the issue of other genders and such, which I find can always be a worry with this sort of book. I also liked that there were bits of world status updates interspersed, especially because they contained a bit of dark humor and levity in an otherwise downright depressing world. Overall, definitely a win!

Bottom Line: A great look at the lengths a mother will go to in order to keep her child safe... and the depravity some people will inventively choose at the end of the world. Realistic and quite close to home, I definitely recommend!

Hmm, sounds promising. I LOVE The Handmaid’s Tale, and this book said it would focus on a different type of dystopia, one where men were the rarity. Unfortunately, this book failed to live up to its promise.

The relationships between the characters is affected by a very cavalier way of describing their communications. Their deepest emotions are constantly trivialized with an odd, impersonal attempt at humor through unending pop culture references. In one passage, a woman comes to a realization about death and her own weariness,

“Tired and numb, the grief woven through with anger. Worst friendship bracelet ever.”

She just undermined her own … jeez I just … never mind. Hashtags, inside jokes and references to Ed Sheeran, abound in this book and I don’t think it has the effect the author was striving for. For one thing, it will really date this book, imagine reading Afterland again in 20 years time and actually understanding any of this nonsense? It really takes the reader away from the moment. I found it hard to connect to any of the characters and I partially blame the glibness with which they are treated.

The one thing that made me literally toss my kindle away and officially DNF was one moment in particular. An 11 year old boy is asked by his aunt whether he is masturbating yet, because she would like some of the sperm to sell on the black market. His response is horror (obviously) and titillation. Now we are subjected to an entire paragraph about how he is fighting an erection. The author goes on to trivialize his reaction by sprinkling in word jokes about how thinking the word “penis” makes it react, and say “pat me”. WTF. It goes on from there. Sexual abuse is not freaking funny. You know, I didn’t put up with this kind of shit when Murakami was writing it, why would I do it now?

On top of all that, I found the world building to be a little superficial. There was no real explanation for how and why culture, government and society changed. The world was just full of women now, and those women were distilled down to very predictable roles. I’m sorry, a world with an army now made up of all women women does not equal an army of only masculine women .. and I honestly dislike the inference that only a certain kind of woman will be in the military. It’s distasteful that non-binary people should be stereotyped into being just one type of person, or that they will all act in the same way. I feel like I don’t have the language to describe how annoying this is and I would hate to say something to offend, so I asked a couple of friends to help me arrange my thoughts… here’s what they came up with:

“The army is comprised of hyper-masculine women that play upon, both in behavior and appearance, harmful tropes regarding women who choose to present as masculine, lesbians and non-binary persons. Non-binary, rather than being removed from the binary as the word suggests and instead of providing a wide breadth of identity and expression, is used to pigeonhole characters into one type of person. In addition, the choice to make this army strictly beholden to a strict set of gender norms that forces the more masculine women or androgynous person into a role fit for ‘men’ is also a strange one to make in terms of what it says about femininity. The aesthetic appearance of a person, their hair, their swagger or style is not an inherent indicator of their skill as a soldier or how well they perform roles of manual labor often set aside as ‘male roles.’ The author has created a world without men which is still under the spell of patriarchal powers.” (thank you Cat & Eri for helping me with this!)

I feel the book showed a lack of real understanding of women and non-binary persons and how they should be portrayed.

This book made me actively angry, I’m annoyed thinking about it now. I know that sometimes a bad review might make some people more interested in reading it … more power to you. I hope you like it better than I did. Wholehearted DNF.

Ahoy there me mateys!  I received this dystopian thriller eARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.  So here be me honest musings . . .

This be me fourth book by the author.  I adored her shining girls and thought it was one of the best time travel books I have read.  I also very much enjoyed zoo city cause who doesn't want a giant sloth? 

This is a dystopian thriller where a plague has wiped out most of the men.  The remaining men are locked up for their own protection.  A mom, Cole, and her teenage son, Miles, have escaped and are on the run.  They make their way across the US with Miles dressed as a girl.  I should have loved this one but I wasn't thrilled by it at all.

While I liked the concepts, everything was dealt with on a surface level. Instead of getting the interesting point of view of Miles as one of the last men on earth, ye primarily get an anxious mom's looping thoughts.  The government chasing the fugitives doesn't come into play.  The bad guy is a relative who only is able to track the duo because a) the son's bad use of social media or b) because mom actually gives directions!  The pandemic could have been removed and replaced with any other big issue and not much would have changed in the story.  Also minor points that are personal dislikes include the use of the religious cult and mention of current politics and people.

I was expected a fast-paced action thriller that delves into the social structure of a post-apocalyptic world run by women.  Instead it is an uninteresting take on family dynamics where not much really happens.  A miss for me but I will still be reading future work by the author.

So lastly . . .

Thank ye Mulholland Books!

I cannot lie: I love Lauren Beukes's writing. It's fresh and different and raw and honest and makes me pay attention. Her creations--places, people, beliefs, ideas--are always relevant. This novel is no different. When men all over the world die from a specific cancer targeting them, the few men and boys who survive are hunted, tested, claimed by governments and corporations. Cole's got a 12-year-old son, she's stuck in the US and needs to get to her home country of South Africa; and she's got a sister wants to sell her son for millions. Cole does what any mother would do: she puts her son in a dress and goes on the run, traveling across America and trying to escape the government, her sister, and other trouble along the way. It's a fast-paced, exhilarating ride that includes truly thoughtful discussions of death, gender and identity, personal choice and bodily autonomy, the nature of belief and religion, and coping with family. It's smart and fun and I loved it.

I just loved the idea of this book. A new virus has taken over which causes men B's boys to develop a fast acting prostate cancer. It then invaded the bones. A small percent of males are left over in this world. The book is told from 3 POVs. Cole (the mother), Miles (the son), and Billie (his aunt).
The book started out great, a page turner, and then it just lost a lot of steam for me around the halfway point. I didn't really enjoy any of the characters. I kept waiting for Cole to be vulnerable and it didn't seem to happen....maybe because of self-preservation. I kept wanted more emotionally. I think that's what the book lacked.

“You can’t imagine how much the world can change in six months. You just can’t.”

A couple months ago I read The Mother Code and I’ve got The Gunslinger and Severance on my current TBR. I’ve loved pandemic and post-apocalyptic fiction for years and I am not shying away from it despite current events. I was especially excited to read Afterland because I loved Lauren Beukes' 2013 release, The Shining Girls. I was not let down with Afterland! I loved the characters in this novel. Not just the main characters but all the secondary characters. They were so well written, even the ones that are just a tiny blip on the radar of this story. Beukes also does a wonderful job of keeping the tension palpable while interspersing smaller subplots and flashbacks.

Human Culgoa Virus (HCV), a highly contagious flu which turns into an aggressive prostate cancer in men and boys has lead to a less than 1% survival rate among males. Some countries thrive without the all-male militias, alternative economies emerge, and anarchist groups attempt to bring down banking and eliminate debt and immigration records. In the United States, Quarantined Males (QMs) and their Direct Surviving Relatives (DSRs) are rounded up and sent to government facilities to be studied. During an attempt to leave the country, Cole and her son Miles are discovered and sent to one of these centers. Determined to get her son to safety in Johannesburg, Cole and her sister Billie plan an escape, but Billie has plans of her own.

Thank you Netgalley for the opportunity to preview Afterland by Lauren Beukes. This is a relevant book for today's world of COVID 19. Beukes takes the reader on a journey to a world that faced a pandemic that wiped out the male species (mostly).
But a young woman, Cole, has a son, Miles. But Cole is on the run and she must protect Miles at all costs. The journey is relevant and keeps you engaged and really thinking all the time. good book - what's wrong with a world full of women anyway???
3.5 stars.

First of all, Afterland has one of the most beautiful covers I've seen this year!

Afterland was a fascinating read! Basically an illness has caused the majority of mean nd boys to die from prostate cancer and women are left to rule the world. Rad--right? Welll, not exactly because the US government wants to put all remaining men and boys in camps and keep an eye on them and do sketchy stuff like possibly harvest their sperm. Afterland tells the story of a mother and son stuck in the US and trying to get home to South Africa while fleeing a government camp and then a group of women who want that precious boy sperm.
There are lots of skeevy and uncomfortable moments that make the story seem very real.

The chapters each switched narrators which took a little getting used to at first and were confusing for parts of the story, but I enjoyed learning about how the patriarchy was taking over from different points of view.
I enjoyed the pop culture references and the Mad Max vibes. I did want a little more information about everything, but that's just how I am. The ending also seemed to be tacked on and didn't fully fit the feel of the rest of the story, but I can't think of how else it could have ended.


4 out 5 stars for this thrilling read.

Interesting dystopian story. A virus has just about wiped out all males and only a few have survived and the government is keeping them in quarantine for their”own good”. But Cole wants to take her son Miles back to South Africa. A hair raising crops country chase with Cole’s sister Billie in hot pursuit to sell Miles to the highest bidder. Another well done book from the author who is always comes up with a great story.

My Shelf Awareness Pro review is here: https://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=3771#m48990

The review was also cross-posted to my Smithsonian BookDragon blog here: http://smithsonianapa.org/bookdragon/afterland-by-lauren-beukes-in-shelf-awareness/

Ive been a fan of Lauren Beukes since reading Zoo Story. I thought that I’d reached my limit on reading dystpian novels, but Afterland was a pleasure to read. Strong characters and very different take on the after disaster made the difference. An America. that almost looks familiar, with some things that work and others that didn’t really worked for me.

While I liked and even admired parts of Afterland, as a whole it was largely unsatisfying. That may say more about me than the book, so take my reservations with a grain of salt, but let me explain.

First off, this was a book that largely ignored the half of the story I’d hoped would be its focus. This is largely Cole’s story, the story of a mother on the run with her child, desperate to get home and just as desperate to avoid dealing with her violence against her sister. All of that is fine, and Lauren Beukes does a solid job of exploring a mother’s love, but it was Miles’ story that I was interested in. He’s one of the last males in the world, forced to disguise himself as a girl during their flight, with his struggle compounded by the advent of puberty. There was so much potential there, so many issues of gender and sexuality that could have been explored, but aside from a few passages on shaving and erections, he’s really just a package to be delivered.

Second, there’s a fascinating new world here, one where the men are gone, leaving women to rebuild society without them, but we don’t get to see a lot of what that entails. I wanted to know more about the new family dynamics, the new relationships, and the new society of women helping, loving, supporting women. We get glimpses of that new world, but most of them are either dark and sordid, as seen through the eyes of Billie, an opportunistic, greedy, unbalanced woman with a concussion. I suspect (hope?) that was deliberate on Beukes’s part, stuck between either suggesting women are hopeless without men or undermining Cole’s story by exploring how strong and resilient women can be, but I feel like an entire novel existed beneath this.

Finally, this was a book that felt light to me in many ways, superficial and safe where it could have been, could have said, so much more. In skimming over the gender issues and the women’s issues, restricting the narrative to the journey of a mother – one that wouldn’t be much different if it had zombies or vampires or abusive husbands behind it – it misses so many opportunities. At the same time, that lightness leaves us with a soft ending that comes far too quickly, far too easily, without the kind of significance it could have had. It almost feels unfinished, like the first chapter of a longer story.

With all that said, there were aspects of this that I enjoyed. The concept of a viral cancer is an interesting one, and there’s a great deal of fascinating detail on how it progresses, how it kills, and how the world disposes of more bodies than it can handle. The post-apocalyptic roadtrip aspect is exceptionally well done, with Cole and Miles struggling with gas shortages, smartly exploring abandoned communities, and dealing with a religious cult that I found more comical than chilling – although there is an attempt towards the end to find some meaning in their mission.

As a story of a mother’s journey, Afterland was an okay read, and as a post-apocalyptic roadtrip it had its moments, but as a book about sex and gender and the consequences of the manpocalypse, I found it lacking, just not the book I’d hoped it would be.

Cole flees across the U.S. with her son Miles in Beukes's apocalypse, which features a highly contagious flu that mutates into prostate cancer and has killed off an estimated 3.2 billion carriers of the XY chromosome. They're on the run from Cole's sister Billie, who's been offered a lot of money for anything and everything one of the few remaining young men in the country can provide to the highest bidder (even those things to which a twelve-year-old cannot consent, ahem). This is a nailbiter right up until the last few pages; during the last third I'd read a chapter, get up and pace around for a few minute to wring my hands, then read another chapter, rinse, repeat. Herein lies a fine case for gender diversification in every industry, and though of course the mass death is terrible, the true horror at the center of this is the mundane process by which children grow up, how they pull away and stop needing their parents, how necessary and good and heart-breaking that is.

I'm a fan of Lauren Beukes. I really enjoyed her previous works, but this one fell flat for me. In post-apocalyptic literature, the story has to slow down and let us live in the world a bit. I'm thinking of books like Station Eleven, he Fireman, or The Road. Beukes has woven a fast-paced narrative here, which would work in a real-world setting just fine, but here, it makes it so we're skimming along through this world without ever really understanding it. If Miles had the cure for some other disease in his genetic code or something, the plot would still have worked as-is.

The world also feels too bleak for what should be a feminist piece. In Y: The Last Man, for instance, all the men suddenly dying is horrible and breaks society, but women rebuild and pick up the pieces as the story unfolds. There is hope in Y: The Last Man that isn't found here. It rubbed me the wrong way that without men, the world would fall apart. I know it wouldn't be sunshine and rainbows, at least not at first, but I need that glimmer of hope that I didn't get here.