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Holdfast Chronicles #1-2
The Slave and the Free
After thirty years, Suzy McKee Charnas has completed her incomparable epic tale of men and women, slavery and freedom, power and human frailty.
It started with Walk to the End of the World, where Alldera the Messenger is a slave among the Fems, in thrall to men whose own power is waning.
In continued with Motherlines, where Alldera the Runner is a fugitive among the Riding Women, who live a tribal life of horse-thieving and storytelling, killing the few men who approach their boundaries.
The books that finish Alldera's story, The Furies and The Conqueror's Child, are now available. Once you start here, you won't want to stop until you've read the last word of the last book.
It started with Walk to the End of the World, where Alldera the Messenger is a slave among the Fems, in thrall to men whose own power is waning.
In continued with Motherlines, where Alldera the Runner is a fugitive among the Riding Women, who live a tribal life of horse-thieving and storytelling, killing the few men who approach their boundaries.
The books that finish Alldera's story, The Furies and The Conqueror's Child, are now available. Once you start here, you won't want to stop until you've read the last word of the last book.
448 pages, Paperback
First published August 31, 1989
22 people are currently reading
382 people want to read
About the author
Suzy McKee Charnas
77 books109 followersSuzy McKee Charnas, a native New Yorker raised and educated in Manhattan, surfaced as an author with WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD (1974), a no-punches-pulled feminist SF novel and Campbell award finalist. The three further books that sprang from WALK (comprising a futurist, feminist epic about how people make history and create myth) closed in 1999 with THE CONQUEROR’S CHILD, a Tiptree winner (as is the series in its entirety).
Meanwhile, she taught for two years in Nigeria with the Peace Corps, married, and moved to New Mexico, where she has lived, taught, and written fiction and non-fiction for forty five years. She teaches SF from time to time, and travels every year to genre conventions around the country and (occasionally) around the world.
Her varied SF and fantasy works have also won the Hugo award, the Nebula award, the Gigamesh Award (Spain), and the Mythopoeic award for Young-Adult fantasy. A play based on her novel THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY has been staged on both coasts. STAGESTRUCK VAMPIRES (Tachyon Books) collects her best short fiction, plus essays on writing feminist SF and on seeing her play script first become a professionally staged drama in San Francisco. Currently, she’s working at getting all of her work out in e-book, audio, and other formats, and moving several decades’ worth of manuscripts, correspondence, etc. out of a slightly leaky garage and sent off to be archived at the University of Oregon Special Collections. She has two cats and a gentleman boarder (also a cat), good friends and colleagues, ideas for new work, and travel plans for the future.
Meanwhile, she taught for two years in Nigeria with the Peace Corps, married, and moved to New Mexico, where she has lived, taught, and written fiction and non-fiction for forty five years. She teaches SF from time to time, and travels every year to genre conventions around the country and (occasionally) around the world.
Her varied SF and fantasy works have also won the Hugo award, the Nebula award, the Gigamesh Award (Spain), and the Mythopoeic award for Young-Adult fantasy. A play based on her novel THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY has been staged on both coasts. STAGESTRUCK VAMPIRES (Tachyon Books) collects her best short fiction, plus essays on writing feminist SF and on seeing her play script first become a professionally staged drama in San Francisco. Currently, she’s working at getting all of her work out in e-book, audio, and other formats, and moving several decades’ worth of manuscripts, correspondence, etc. out of a slightly leaky garage and sent off to be archived at the University of Oregon Special Collections. She has two cats and a gentleman boarder (also a cat), good friends and colleagues, ideas for new work, and travel plans for the future.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
November 2, 2025
I do keep enjoying these second wave feminist novels despite my increasing desire to spend less time on patriarchal dystopias and stories with such an emphasis on a biological sex=gender binary. Charnas is maybe the most intentional author I’ve read on this premise, beginning this two-book volume with a (mostly) traditional, action-focused, man-on-a-quest fashion in the kind of extreme, myopic dystopias where such stories thrive. Her goal is to create a background to and a contrast with book 2, which instead tells the story of women as parts of communities changing over a period of seventeen years. That second book impressed and enticed me, especially the anthropological focus on cultures that are each deeply flawed and largely incompatible with each other, but face the challenge of living together and perhaps changing the world. You won’t find a utopia here or a simple message to translate into modern political concerns, but Charnas provides so much to discuss by covering such a breadth of character perspectives so richly. And I’m very fond of some of these characters.
December 5, 2007
amazing. hard to explain it without making the book sound totally weird. but i read this and HAD to read the others in the series... i was totally sucked in. and just to give the book some credit, the way i learned about it was while working at CU textbook's... it was being taught in a class b/c it deals with so many interesting themes: feminisim, queer theory, end of the world, science, ect.
July 14, 2019
Brilliantly realized but a tough-minded vision of a feminist dystopia, followed by a qualified feminist utopia in which two communities of women forge worlds of their own. Charnas' prose flows, and her eye for detail and social custom immerse the reader in the worlds of Holdfast and the Riding Women. Charnas' sympathies are clear, but the main male protagonists in Walk are complicated and fallible in believable ways. They are products of their world and convincing as such, though each of three men is also unconventional in his own way. But, of course, they only think they know what's going on. Walk is slightly let down by a rushed ending, but this edition moves the reader right on to Motherlines.
The second book is slower and deliberate, taking its time to establish a complex community that has long-standing rituals despite its relatively short existence. It's the sort of book that might have been easy to get bogged down in, but again Charnas' prose keeps the reader moving along. It helps that the cast of characters expands dramatically with several memorable women who struggle to reconcile their varying goals with a shared understanding that their future depends on their ability to live and thrive together. Eventually it becomes clear that this is a story about social change and about opposing communities coming together despite themselves, and that the long introduction to the Rider Women was necessary to make the importance of that change apparent.
A very solid work that holds up extremely well.
The second book is slower and deliberate, taking its time to establish a complex community that has long-standing rituals despite its relatively short existence. It's the sort of book that might have been easy to get bogged down in, but again Charnas' prose keeps the reader moving along. It helps that the cast of characters expands dramatically with several memorable women who struggle to reconcile their varying goals with a shared understanding that their future depends on their ability to live and thrive together. Eventually it becomes clear that this is a story about social change and about opposing communities coming together despite themselves, and that the long introduction to the Rider Women was necessary to make the importance of that change apparent.
A very solid work that holds up extremely well.
February 1, 2008
A post-apocalyptic dystopia in which women are enslaved to men, and life is bleak. But don't assume it'll be that way forever. Yes, this is classic 2nd wave feminist Sci-fi, but it's also really dang good.
But I'm going to tell it to you straight. I think that they put these two books into one single volume, because the first one is rather dull and/or hard to get into. Don't get me wrong, it's a fascinating dystopia - but NOTHING beats the complete change of pace, character development, and engrossing tale that follows in the 3 books that follow (only 1 attached). Seriously, Suzy McKee Charnas is one of my heroines, and these books are so smart and compelling...I LOVED them. You just have to slope your way through the first one to get there... think of it as setting up the background.
But I'm going to tell it to you straight. I think that they put these two books into one single volume, because the first one is rather dull and/or hard to get into. Don't get me wrong, it's a fascinating dystopia - but NOTHING beats the complete change of pace, character development, and engrossing tale that follows in the 3 books that follow (only 1 attached). Seriously, Suzy McKee Charnas is one of my heroines, and these books are so smart and compelling...I LOVED them. You just have to slope your way through the first one to get there... think of it as setting up the background.
March 9, 2011
Made me sick. The world Charnas portrays is too grim, too extreme and depressing. Women are viewed as non-human beasts of burden. What finally turned me off and turned me stomach is how the "free women" procreate.
October 24, 2011
Old school feminist future dystopia? Sign me up!
January 24, 2025
It's a very good post-apocalyptic dystopia. It's also a profoundly bleak post-apocalyptic dystopia. In Holdfast, there are no more animals and what plant life there is is thinning on the ground. Men have built their society around warped memories of masculine virtues and utter hatred of the un-men (anyone who wasn't white) and fems (women). Fems are slave labor and breeding stock, not even considered human, and when we finally get out of male heads and into a chapter from Alldera's point of view, the stark horror of a life where you have to hide even a hint of intelligence lest you be killed as a threat to masculine society is painted clear. When she makes it out of Holdfast and into the wilderness with the Marish and the free fems, that doesn't fix anything. Freedom doesn't take away her trauma, she doesn't have the security and knowledge of a motherline among the Marish, and refuses to take part in the aping of Holdfast society that the free fems have built. There's a hint of Furiosa and Fury Road to it--out here, everything hurts, somehow.
Trigger warnings for rape (have I mentioned how bleak Holdfast is?), and for...well, for bestiality, because the Marish have been genetically altered for survival and reproductive purposes and have made it work, but oh god.
Trigger warnings for rape (have I mentioned how bleak Holdfast is?), and for...well, for bestiality, because the Marish have been genetically altered for survival and reproductive purposes and have made it work, but oh god.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 6, 2019
Walk to the End of the World was good, buy a lot of times I feel that the development of the story was very slow (very few action) I don´t understand why the first book is often put in utopian list, Is told from the perspectives of males and didn't show anything of the all-women comunnities far from the Holdfast.
The second book (Motherlines) is definitely my favorite, yes is a "utopia" (at least at the end) but all the women are protrayed with all their strongs and fails, they are not perfect, they are not simply living "in armony" with one another, there are fights, conflicts, gounds, even hates, but at the end they live the best they can, as an all-female society is sexual violence-free, and of course, that is makes that society utopian at the end
The second book (Motherlines) is definitely my favorite, yes is a "utopia" (at least at the end) but all the women are protrayed with all their strongs and fails, they are not perfect, they are not simply living "in armony" with one another, there are fights, conflicts, gounds, even hates, but at the end they live the best they can, as an all-female society is sexual violence-free, and of course, that is makes that society utopian at the end
June 28, 2020
See my reviews for the individual stories in this omnibus edition:
https://itstartedwiththehugos.blogspo...
https://itstartedwiththehugos.blogspo...
https://itstartedwiththehugos.blogspo...
https://itstartedwiththehugos.blogspo...
August 25, 2024
Women are slaves of men. One woman escapes. Her owner and is pregnant. She goes and lives with women that have escaped and created their own world. Was not really that crazy about this story. It reminded me of the handmaids
May 18, 2020
Both Tiptree Retro winners
July 25, 2020
As a whole this series really influenced how I think of my autonomy, and my concept of freedom. It was a slow read, but I really enjoyed the journey of the characters.
August 3, 2024
I really enjoyed these two novels. Classic feminist science fiction.
February 2, 2012
The Slave and the Free... where do I begin? So much intensity going on in this collection of the first two novels of Charnas' Holdfast Chronicles: Walk to the End of the World (1974) and Motherlines (1978).
This is feminist dystopian science fiction at it's best. Inducted into the Gaylactic Spectrum Hall of Fame* in 2003 and winner of the James Tiptree Jr. Award, the Slave and the Free addresses both LGBTQ and gender topics in a fabulous way.
The world has been almost eradicated by an apocalypse referred to as the Wasting, with the exception of a group of white middle class men and their wives who survived by secluding themselves into a shelter called the Holdfast. Following the Wasting women are blamed for all of the damage and enslaved. What develops is a world of extreme sexism where women, called Fems, are treated worse than cattle (all animals, or 'un-men' as both animals and fems are referred to, are dead - and so are all individuals of colour) and ordered to perform all work duties for their male masters. Men are so repulsed by fems that they limit their contact with them to the best of their ability and instead form relationships with men. Fems are left to form relationships with other fems, and it is widely understood that partnering with your own sex is the proper way to do it. Men who enjoy sex with women are considered perverted and deranged. To continue the species, women in heat are sent to 'breeding rooms' where they are inseminated by men via rape, then when their 'cub' is born it is sent to a 'kit-pit' until it is old enough to work. All in all to say it's a dismal misogynistic world is a gross understatement. The suffering of the women is extreme, and parts of the book are hard to read (but thankfully Charnas does not describe acts of rape or violence in intricate detail, only enough so that you know what is taking place).
Where is all this going? Well, the captive fems hear rumours of 'free fems' that have escaped the Holdfast and are building numbers on the outskirts so they can then return to the Holdfast and wage war on the men. Walk to the End of the World establishes all this story while we follow 3 men on their own journey, on the way picking up Alldera; a fit fem who has been trained to run. The first 3/4s of this book is about the world-building and the story of the men, which I found pretty boring. We move through the POV of each of the three men before finally arriving at Alldera's, and from there the book improves as we begin to understand her role and about the 'free fems'.
Moving into Motherlines the book is all about Alldera and her experience after escaping the Holdfast. Before she can reach the free fems she is captured by the Mares, who are women on horseback who patrol the edge of the Holdfast and kill any men who travel out and may expose the existence of the free fems. Scenes of violence between men and fems have disappeared as there are no men in this book, but Charnas has added a new element of disturbing content, which I won't spoil for anyone despite the fact that it is revealed fairly early on. The character development is pretty strong, and things wrap up as well as they can before leading you into the third installment, The Furies.
Overall, I thought Walk to the End of the World was a pretty dull book, but I appreciated all the work Charnas put into her world building (disturbing as it may be). Motherlines is exponentially better than the first. I'm looking forward to continuing the series!
*Other inductees include Joanna Russ' The Female Man, Nicola Griffiths' Slow River and Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness. Also, in 2001 Joss Whedon won a Gaylactic Spectrum Award for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series. In conclusion, Gaylactic Spectrum = rad.
This is feminist dystopian science fiction at it's best. Inducted into the Gaylactic Spectrum Hall of Fame* in 2003 and winner of the James Tiptree Jr. Award, the Slave and the Free addresses both LGBTQ and gender topics in a fabulous way.
The world has been almost eradicated by an apocalypse referred to as the Wasting, with the exception of a group of white middle class men and their wives who survived by secluding themselves into a shelter called the Holdfast. Following the Wasting women are blamed for all of the damage and enslaved. What develops is a world of extreme sexism where women, called Fems, are treated worse than cattle (all animals, or 'un-men' as both animals and fems are referred to, are dead - and so are all individuals of colour) and ordered to perform all work duties for their male masters. Men are so repulsed by fems that they limit their contact with them to the best of their ability and instead form relationships with men. Fems are left to form relationships with other fems, and it is widely understood that partnering with your own sex is the proper way to do it. Men who enjoy sex with women are considered perverted and deranged. To continue the species, women in heat are sent to 'breeding rooms' where they are inseminated by men via rape, then when their 'cub' is born it is sent to a 'kit-pit' until it is old enough to work. All in all to say it's a dismal misogynistic world is a gross understatement. The suffering of the women is extreme, and parts of the book are hard to read (but thankfully Charnas does not describe acts of rape or violence in intricate detail, only enough so that you know what is taking place).
Where is all this going? Well, the captive fems hear rumours of 'free fems' that have escaped the Holdfast and are building numbers on the outskirts so they can then return to the Holdfast and wage war on the men. Walk to the End of the World establishes all this story while we follow 3 men on their own journey, on the way picking up Alldera; a fit fem who has been trained to run. The first 3/4s of this book is about the world-building and the story of the men, which I found pretty boring. We move through the POV of each of the three men before finally arriving at Alldera's, and from there the book improves as we begin to understand her role and about the 'free fems'.
Moving into Motherlines the book is all about Alldera and her experience after escaping the Holdfast. Before she can reach the free fems she is captured by the Mares, who are women on horseback who patrol the edge of the Holdfast and kill any men who travel out and may expose the existence of the free fems. Scenes of violence between men and fems have disappeared as there are no men in this book, but Charnas has added a new element of disturbing content, which I won't spoil for anyone despite the fact that it is revealed fairly early on. The character development is pretty strong, and things wrap up as well as they can before leading you into the third installment, The Furies.
Overall, I thought Walk to the End of the World was a pretty dull book, but I appreciated all the work Charnas put into her world building (disturbing as it may be). Motherlines is exponentially better than the first. I'm looking forward to continuing the series!
*Other inductees include Joanna Russ' The Female Man, Nicola Griffiths' Slow River and Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness. Also, in 2001 Joss Whedon won a Gaylactic Spectrum Award for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series. In conclusion, Gaylactic Spectrum = rad.
June 5, 2008
this book ended up getting pretty badass, as it went on. the first half was hard for me to get through as most of it is told from the point of view of the male characters... who are enslaving the 'unmen' or the 'fems' and there is lots of drearydreary post apocalyptic background to this one, animals have pretty much disappeared, female bodied people are seen as less than human and are enslaved, there are two main food crops, sea weed and hemp. .. almost too easy to imagine as a pathetic future of our dumb species... but once it started to be told from Alldera's pov, it really started to pick up. in the second half she is taken in by 'the riding women' who are living tribally on the other side of the desert, where men dont even know they exist... oh yes, and their entire culture revolves around their horses that they depend upon so much for their independence from the 'civilized' nitemare. Alldera finds her strength and teaches other 'free fems' about horses and fighting skills and suppossedly in the next book, they are riding off to battle to go and save the fems that were left behind to toil under the abuses of the men. Queer sex/love is the norm in these socities, het sex is used only for breeding or as a display of power and dominance over the fems. oh yes, and the riding women, they procreate via the usage of stallion semen...
i will be keeping my eye out for the other two books in this series, because i simply must know what happens!
i will be keeping my eye out for the other two books in this series, because i simply must know what happens!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 5, 2014
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2237380.html[return][return]Walk to the End of the World, the first half (I got the combined edition, The Slave and the Free) is a horribly well-drawn future dystopia where women are enslaved and brainwashed, and doped up men fight for their own continued supremacy. It's gruesomely well depicted, though not at all subtle and a bit relentless.[return][return]But Motherlines takes a lot of Walk to the End of the World and inverts it - we switch from a male to a female central character, and discover that a lot of what had been presented as unchallengeable fact in the first volume is in fact very different looked at from the other side of the gender divide. In addition, the actual plot has some very impressive twists and turns in what is still a very short book.[return][return]Motherlines is really excellent, and though Walk to the End of the World is not quite as good you enjoy the second much more for having read the first. And neither is very long.
June 4, 2009
This technically two books packaged together. I originally picked it up because it was highlighted in the library's Sci-Fi section, and I checked it out because it had a Dorothy Allison blurb on the back. These books are one of my favorite genres: post apocalyptic dystopia. I mostly enjoyed it but felt I would have like some story lines explored more, and you can definitely tell this came out of 70s feminism, but isn't as rhectoric heavy as most dystopia that came out at that time. Overall I would recommend it with the caution that it has quite a bit of violence and weird sex stuff.
October 28, 2009
I realize that this book has many positive reviews from people who appear to know what they're talking about. I read the book and tried to see it from a positive view but I couldn't find too much that I admired or even felt a connection to. I'm all for women finding power and a better existance in the face of oppression but this book was just too much for me. I couldn't feel close to the characters and I almost gave up during the first 130 pages but thought that it would get better when the main character escaped(which I knew would happen sometime soon).
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 26, 2011
Read this a long time ago and felt it spoke deeply to me as a woman. It is feminist science fiction and was published in the 1970s by The Women's Press in their characteristic black and white striped paperbacks.
These two books look at the role of women in a future society. The first is a dystopia, the second a kind of utopia.
There is loads of info available online via Google (study guides etc).
These two books look at the role of women in a future society. The first is a dystopia, the second a kind of utopia.
There is loads of info available online via Google (study guides etc).
February 3, 2011
I came across this book at CPL on a browsing shelf called "non best-sellers" compiled by library staff. Considering my gender studies major, I'm surprised I never heard of this book before. I enjoyed the characters and the story. Also, after reading Motherlines I realized that I need to spend a lot more time outside.
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August 20, 2008I'm obsessed with feminist utopian/dystopian fiction. Yeah, crazy, I know. This one's a bit dated, but it's certainly an adventurous read. Beware of the rape, though; the description of the brutality of this world can get really rough. I don't know if I'll read the rest of the series.
September 7, 2015
It took me nearly a week to read the first quarter of this book and four days to read the rest of it. These books tell the story of the slowly-fading remnants of humanity in a post-nuclear world that is not all darkness and death (though there is a lot of both).
September 7, 2015
I got 70 pages in and just couldn't stomach it. I need something to keep pulling me through the horror. Some amazing strength in a character, some love interest, some emotion or feeling. This was just too harsh and bleak. There was just no respite from it.
February 19, 2008
another future has been fucked up book-really liked it
January 5, 2010
holy bestiality batman!
June 16, 2010
Best damn book I've read. This series is a must read in my opinion.
November 4, 2018
I finished the first book, Walk to the End of the World. there was far less from the woman and about the woman than I thought.
December 29, 2011
Loved it. I blew through these books. A bit violent though.
April 1, 2017
The Turl Street Oxfam bookshop has had a lot of SF and fantasy by women lately, including several novels by Suzy McKee Charnas published in the Women's Press SF imprint; given that SF and fantasy by women, especially feminist SF and fantasy, is what I'm reading most at the moment, I obviously bought them (they all originally belonged to the same woman, as she wrote her name in them. I do wonder why so much of her collection has been donated).
Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines, published in one volume by the Women's Press, are two separate novels, though they're set in the same post-apocalyptic world and share a central character. (The Internet tells me there are two more in the series, The Furies, which I also bought, and The Conqueror's Child, which wasn't there. Walk to the End of the World is a classic of feminist dystopian fiction, set in a society made up of the descendants of powerful white men who retreated into underground bunkers as civilisation collapsed. Emerging from the bunkers to scratch out an existence in a world stripped of other animals and natural resources (with the exception of edible seaweeds that flourish in the polluted ocean), they blame those who were different from them for the collapse of the world of the Ancients - women, hippies, other races - and have created the Holdfast, a rigidly hierarchical society where age brings power and where women are retained as a slave class for breeding and heavy labour, considered to be bestial and subhuman. The social setup, where the only acceptable romantic relationships are between men and heterosexual intercouse is limited to breeding, seemed to me to be partly inspired by Ancient Greek society, although the experience of women as slaves probably owes a lot more to the experience of black slaves in the US. The novel focuses sequentially on three men who are, for various reasons, outsiders in their society to some extent, and then finally on Alldera, the woman who is sent to travel with them to the city of 'Troi, at the farthest western extent of the Holdfast. It's an interesting if rather grim read; fortunately, it's short enough to push through the grimness, and some of the characters are surprisingly sympathetic.
Motherlines picks up Alldera's story after she has escaped from the Holdfast and travelled to the Grassland, which are occupied by two different all-female societies: the Riding Women, who have been genetically engineered to breed without men and who live a semi-nomadic existence alongside their horses; they have a complex structure of kinship and a strong adherence to their traditions. Set against them are the free fems, women who have escaped from the Holdfast, who have no children of their own but who cannot be integrated in the women's society. Alldera finds herself both participating in and excluded from both societies, and the changes her arrival bring drive the plot of the novel, such as it is; mostly, it's an exploration of cultural differences and how people react to change. While much less grim than Walk to the End of the World, I wouldn't describe Motherlines as utopian: the Riding Women's society might see utopian at first glance, but it has its own tensions and darkness; the women's solution to the problem of breeding without men is fairly unsettling and their attitude to the free fems is far from admirable, while the fems are escaped slaves struggling to break free of their slave mindset. I liked this a lot; it's thoughtful and complex with interesting characters.
Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines, published in one volume by the Women's Press, are two separate novels, though they're set in the same post-apocalyptic world and share a central character. (The Internet tells me there are two more in the series, The Furies, which I also bought, and The Conqueror's Child, which wasn't there. Walk to the End of the World is a classic of feminist dystopian fiction, set in a society made up of the descendants of powerful white men who retreated into underground bunkers as civilisation collapsed. Emerging from the bunkers to scratch out an existence in a world stripped of other animals and natural resources (with the exception of edible seaweeds that flourish in the polluted ocean), they blame those who were different from them for the collapse of the world of the Ancients - women, hippies, other races - and have created the Holdfast, a rigidly hierarchical society where age brings power and where women are retained as a slave class for breeding and heavy labour, considered to be bestial and subhuman. The social setup, where the only acceptable romantic relationships are between men and heterosexual intercouse is limited to breeding, seemed to me to be partly inspired by Ancient Greek society, although the experience of women as slaves probably owes a lot more to the experience of black slaves in the US. The novel focuses sequentially on three men who are, for various reasons, outsiders in their society to some extent, and then finally on Alldera, the woman who is sent to travel with them to the city of 'Troi, at the farthest western extent of the Holdfast. It's an interesting if rather grim read; fortunately, it's short enough to push through the grimness, and some of the characters are surprisingly sympathetic.
Motherlines picks up Alldera's story after she has escaped from the Holdfast and travelled to the Grassland, which are occupied by two different all-female societies: the Riding Women, who have been genetically engineered to breed without men and who live a semi-nomadic existence alongside their horses; they have a complex structure of kinship and a strong adherence to their traditions. Set against them are the free fems, women who have escaped from the Holdfast, who have no children of their own but who cannot be integrated in the women's society. Alldera finds herself both participating in and excluded from both societies, and the changes her arrival bring drive the plot of the novel, such as it is; mostly, it's an exploration of cultural differences and how people react to change. While much less grim than Walk to the End of the World, I wouldn't describe Motherlines as utopian: the Riding Women's society might see utopian at first glance, but it has its own tensions and darkness; the women's solution to the problem of breeding without men is fairly unsettling and their attitude to the free fems is far from admirable, while the fems are escaped slaves struggling to break free of their slave mindset. I liked this a lot; it's thoughtful and complex with interesting characters.
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October 5, 2018Fiction C483s 1999
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