What We Once Felt by Anne Marie Healy is being produced at the LTC3 theater, part of the Lincoln Center campus. As near as I can glean from reading all the reviews, it takes place in a woman-only future, where you get pregnant by swallowing a special pill — which can be downloaded off the internet. But this otherwise idyllic future world has a caste system: Women are divided into Keepers, who are beautiful and perfect, and Tradepacks, who have some "preexisting condition" that may make them unhealthy. The ugly, unwanted Tradepacks do all the crappy jobs, except for a few who are able to pass as Keepers. There's a movement afoot to get rid of all the Tradepacks, by convincing them that they can go to Paradise if they all die.

Talking to New York Magazine, Healy explains the reasoning behind the Keeper/Tradepack split:

It started with the health-care debate, and people with preexisting conditions being denied health care. In this world, the information about what diseases people had and their preexisting conditions became part of a database, so that the society began to divide into two parts. There's the world of the Keepers, who are supposedly perfectly healthy, and they're allowed to procreate and they're allowed to live the life of the Haves, and there's the part of the society that has been genetically sequenced, and there's no indication that they will be sick, they've just been systematically marginalized.

And meanwhile, book publishing is all but obsolete — and an ambitious young writer, Macy O. Blonsky, wants to have her novel be the last print book ever published. (I'm wondering if anybody would be reading the last print book ever published — presumably it's the last book because people have already stopped reading them?) In any case, Macy makes a faustian bargain with a book publisher, Claire Monsoon — Claire is secretly a Tradepack who's passing as a Keeper, and she wants to borrow Macy's "scancard" so she can trick the social apparatus into letting her download a baby and get pregnant.

It all sounds very silly, and more than a little contrived — but also potentially fun. NewYorkTheatreGuide.com gives it one star out of five, but other reviews are a fair bit more upbeat. In any case, it's always nice to see a new take on dystopia.

Petticoat Planet is directed by "Disco" Dave De Coteau, the director who brought you Frankenstein & The Werewolf Reborn!, The Brotherhood IV: The Complex, Grizzly Rage, The Brotherhood V: Alumni, Witches Of The Caribbean, Retro Puppet Master, Ancient Evil: Scream Of The Mummy and The Brotherhood VI: Initiation. And it's just as great as you'd expect it to be.

The mining town of PuckerBush Gulch (yes, really) sits on an otherwise deserted planet, and there have been no men there since the mine collapsed years ago. Until one day, interstellar garbage-hauler Steve Rogers crashes on the planet. At first, they think he's just another woman, albeit one with five-oclock shadow. But once they realize the truth, mayhem ensues, as the heretofore lesbian townsfolk all try to get with him. Yards and yards of cheap lingerie are unleashed onto the screen. But probably the trashiest scene is the one where the aforementioned Sarah Parker, who puts the "she" in "sheriff," has Steve handcuffed in her cell. I utterly adore this scene, from the part where the Sheriff has never seen a man-part before, to the part where Steve inexplicably gets a pair of sunglasses.

This second clip is arguably NSFW, although no actual naughty bits are seen:

In The Carhullan Army, England's economy and government have collapsed, and the country spends most of its resources on wars to secure overseas oil pipelines. England has become a reverse-colony of America, and people subsist on American canned food. (Insert your own joke about how this would be superior to actual British cooking here.) The main character, known only as Sister, works in a factory making water-power turbines that will never be used. To prevent overpopulation, she and other women have a brutal IUD-type device, known as the Coil, inserted, and the authorities randomly inspect women to make sure their Coils are still in place. The only way you get your Coil out is by winning a lottery to become a mother.

Sister flees, even though travel is forbidden without a special permit, and makes her way to Carhullan, a self-sufficient women's commune that lives off the land. Once there, she falls under the spell of charismatic leader (and ex-soldier) Jackie, and learns to fight and think for herself. Until Jackie decides that it's only a matter of time before the Authority which governs Britain comes to take Carhullan away from them — unless the women of Carhullan preemptively attack first.

The Carhullan Army is beautifully written and often manages to juxtapose nature and technology in jarring ways. Just look at this passage, set in the forest right after Sister has had sex with another woman for the first time:

"Look," she whispered. I directed my gaze where she pointed. An owl was flying over the grassland, sweeping down towards the ground and then up. Its white, clock-like face hovered gracefully, while its wings worked hard and silently in the air. For a second I caught a reflection in its eye, a weird flash of yellow-green, like a battery light flaring on then off again.

A lot of the time, Hall's prose adheres to the "short, choppy sentences" thing that's in vogue these days, but when she breaks out a bit, it's really lovely.

In fact, almost all of the stuff that takes place at Carhullan is beautifully depicted and inspiring. Like all utopian communities, it's nowhere near as perfect as it appears at first. There are petty politics, and the cult of personality around Jackie, the leader, becomes a bit scary at times. The debate over whether to mount a rebellion before the government can come and crush the women is fascinating. And we discover there's another side to Carhullan: the community has five "kept men," who live off in the woods in their own separate area. (The men trade with the women of Carhullan, but more importantly they're the husbands — or in one case gigolo — of the straight women who live there.) How to treat these men (and the two little boys who live with them) becomes the source of the biggest rift within the community.

The other thing Carhullan Army does really really well is to show how the ordinary people of Sister's original home town, Rith, start out opposing the rise of totalitarianism in England, but slowly become more and more complicit and cowed.

That said, the book had a couple of near-fatal problems, for me. The book takes the form of a deposition by Sister, after she's been captured by the authorities. And parts of the deposition have "[Data Lost]" written in them abruptly, as though the file is corrupted. This lets Hall get away with skipping over some of the slow parts of her story — but then she also uses it to avoid having to write some of the crucial parts as well. It feels a bit like a cheat.

Most importantly, though, I felt as though Hall failed to make the authoritarian dystopia which Sister rebels against believable. We never really got even a glimpse of the Authority, or even its propaganda, except for the doctor who installs Sister's Coil. It felt like an absence rather than a presence. We learn a lot about how bad things have gotten, and hear people saying how evil the Authority is, but the Authority itself isn't really in evidence. This makes it a lot harder to feel connected to the characters and their situation, for me.

Bottom line: The Carhullan Army/Daughters of the North is worth reading for its gorgeous prose and layered depictions of the relationships among the women in a commune. But as a future dystopian narrative, it presents a few really terrifying ideas — the Coil chief among them — and then falls a bit flat.

Many, many thanks to Liz Henry with the Feminist SF blog for helping me put together this exhaustive list of lesbian-dominated cultures in science fiction. Smug Sappho! There are way more than I'd expected.

Ammonite by Nicola Griffith. A weird virus on the planet Jeep kills all the men, and most of the women, and the women who survive are changed, gaining access to a sort of Jungian collective unconscious. Deprived of access to men's precious bodily fluids, the women start mating using a weird ritual called "deep trance." One reviewer was annoyed that all these women, who presumably aren't naturally lesbians, seem way too comfortable turning to lesbianism and don't seem to miss the men at all. Ammonite won the Tiptree Award for science fiction that considers gender themes, prompting also-ran David Brin to complain that he'd been robbed.

Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree Jr. A trio of astronauts blast off into a mission around the sun, but a solar flare knocks them forward in time a few hundred years, to an era when a plague (again!) has wiped out all the men and most of the women. The surviving women reproduce via cloning, and a few of their girl-babies are dosed with androgens early on to make them grow up bigger and stronger. The three male astronauts are thrilled at the chance to be the only men on Earth — either to become patriarchs, or just to have lots of sex — but then it turns out the women rulers have no intention of letting the men live. They're happy without men around, and don't want to upset their groovy, stable society with annoying menfolk.

Walk To The End of the World and Motherlines, by Suzy McKee Charnas. A horrendous gay male-dominated society that locks up women in breeding farms. But then a free lesbian society, the Motherlines, springs up and shelters the refugees from the ebil male society. And the nomadic, horse-riding lesbian culture has an... interesting way of reproducing. In a nutshell, they, ummm... collect semen from their male horses and then use it as a catalyst to reproduce themselves. Or as Liz puts it, "horsefucking lesbians."

The Marq'ssan Cycle by L. Timmel Duchamp. In the dystopian future of 2076, everything's run by lesbians, and somehow the world is still totally fucked. The novel pits the lesbian Anarchist Collectives in the Women's Free Zone against the evil Executive Class, which runs the rest of the world and is equally lesbiotic. Ideomancer explains:

Executive men are 'fixed', which means they are capable of reproduction but entirely uninterested in the act except as a mean to an end. They derive no physical pleasure from the act, which frees them to pursue their vocations and hobbies without internal conflict. Executive women are almost entirely homosexual, except when it is necessary to bear their executive men children-and it is a distasteful act: in Renegade, one executive woman speaks of the obvious perversion of heterosexuality-but there is a very strong prohibition against executive-with-executive sex: executive women are only to have sex with service-tech women, who are sometimes available during parties much as champagne and caviar are provided. Executive women are also taught self-defense against un-fixed men.

The Door into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski. The planet Valedon is materialistic and has a rigid class system, but its moon, Shora, is covered by a shallow ocean full of water-breathing lesbians who live in harmony (but don't have any goats.) The Sharers of Shora are pacifists and super-advanced biologists, who communicate across long distances by talking to the insects, and reproduce by parthenogenesis. They live in peace... until an army from Valedon comes to "develop" Shora. Here's sample dialogue after the army has taken a few Sharers prisoner:

"We seek our sister Sharers," Merwen said.
"Who might they be?"
"Lerion Nonthinker, Ronesha the Coldhearted, and Oo the Jealous, who were last seen with Valans on Nri-el raft."

The Wanderground by Sally Gearhart. A linked collection of stories about a future lesbian utopia, where women can communicate telepathically, not just with each other but also with plants and animals. They can talk to the flowers! And everyone lives in harmony with nature. The women raise children collectively and die when they decide to. Gearhart coined some fancy terms for the lesbians' non-verbal communication, including "learntogether" and "listenspread." In the book's final story, an old woman and her goat prepare to pass on together.

Virgin Planet by Poul Anderson. This is more like the traditional "spaceman visits a planet of all women" story, except that for once the women-only planet is explicitly lesbified. As Liz puts it, "The lesbian society is like OMG SPACEMENZ please fuck us." Similarly, World Without Men by Charles Maine from 1958 features a lesbian-dominated dystopia, which is saved by a man. Here's how the Feminist SF web page describes it:

In World Without Men, all the men are dead and the women perverted lesbians. The story explains that this was caused by feminism and sexual liberation. One man is created from frozen sperm and saves the society.

Solution Three by Naomi Mitchison. Everyone in the ruling class is gay, except for a few "deviant" professional class hets. Cloning has replaced sexual reproduction as a means of carrying on the species, but a few women rebel and bear their own children. Heterosexuality is seen as "rather an unpleasant word," because heterosexuality leads to violence and aggression. And sports. By the end of the book, however, there's the suggestion that eventually society may stop conditioning everyone into mandatory homosexuality.

Shore Of Women by Pamela Sargent. In a post-nuclear dystopia, the sexes have been segregated: Lesbians live in the cities, while savage men lurk out in the wastelands. Every now and then, men come to "shrines" in the wilderness and "consort with the lady," meaning they have virtual-reality sex with a fake goddess. During these cyber hook-ups, the savage men are milked of semen, which is used for artificial insemination by the city women. A woman who murders another woman is exiled from the city, to a horrible fate in the wilderness of men. But there's a shocking twist: the men are so conditioned to worship women that when they meet one in person, they're enraptured instead of violent. So you see, cybersex can change the world after all.

Want more worlds ruled by lesbians? (And who doesn't?) Here's an exhaustive list of gay female worlds in lesbian science fiction.