Sex

A parable about a terrifying future without mothers, without birth, and without writing—and a brilliant vision of how we might survive it

Only through this loop can we break the spell.

2080. On a climate-degraded, corporate-controlled Earth, sterilization is the norm and most human births occur in artificial wombs inside labs. Unsupervised pregnancy is a capital offense; the few people who still practice physiological birth must submit to a highly regulated process in which every aspect of gestation is surveilled, and labor is a ritualized and often deadly public spectacle.

Rachel is a “meet baeb,” freakish for having been born from the body of her mother. Even more unusual is her intelligence, which earns her a place at a university otherwise populated by the genetically edited offspring of powerful elites. There she is seduced and abandoned by a classmate and must survive homelessness, enslavement, and addiction until she finds refuge among a renegade order of Neo-Catholic nuns.

Under a new name, Sister Simone, and with the guidance of elderly Sister Anne, she begins to see the possibility of a different kind of society—and to accept her role in its formation. Her mission first takes her and her sisters through a blasted landscape of unbreathable air, unanticipated checkpoints, and treacherous illusions before launching them into outer space. Yet the most astonishing part of her journey is a return.