It's a little dry at times but still an interesting look at eugenics and what might happen when the long-absent other sex is reintroduced into a monosexual society. ( )

In Alph, Charles Eric Maine has produced a crisply written book that portrays a dystopic future society peopled entirely by women due to an unexpected side-effect of a commonly-used birth control pill. In the opening chapter, the last man is intentionally left to die in the frozen wastes of Antarctica, only to have his 500-year old corpse used to recreate the first human male infant in over half a millenium, an infant whose birth heralds huge sociological and political upheavals in this Lesbian society.

While as a work of science fiction and authorship it is certainly very readable, my problem with this work is that - like the Greek myth of the Amazons and the early modern Europeans myths of societies of women warriors in South America from the Age of European Exploration, Maine has created a morality play that portrays lesbians as perverted, of female-led societies as inherently corrupt and decadent. He uses pseudo-science to rationalize homophobic, sexist view-points. While some of the sociological outcomes of an accidentally single-sex world ring true, his narrative as a whole loses credibility when it grandstands against female same sex desire.

Where his works rings the most true is in its description of political dynamics and how power elites - of any gender or class - will fight to stay in control.