"The Men" by Sandra Newman

An audio book.

Men, boys and male foetuses suddenly all disappear. We get a list of episodes describing the moment - Jane Pearson, a 6 ft ex-ballerina, camping with her family, lists the male behaviours she misses; a woman is being operated on by a man; Ji-Won, who works in a shop, wants to be an artist, etc. There are mass suicides, a cult that claims that the men are still alive, arty videos online featuring men - a series called "The Men". Women think they're AI-generated until faces are recognised. Human-sized creatures are in the videos too.

Jane is infamous - in her mid-teens she seduced (and had sex with) teenage boys so that her dancing teacher could watch. She was then hit upon by men (including police) who thought she was loose. She tracks down Evangelyne Moreau. She'd been Evangelyne's muse when Evangelyne (black) shot police who killed her family. Evangelyne had helped her forget her past. They sleep together for the first time on the day they meet up again. Jane orgasms, to her surprise. Evangelyne wants to become president. Having a white colleague is advantageous. She wrote "The White Girl", an essay that was published in The New Yorker. The white girl in question wasn't her, but the girl who triggered events that led to the death of Evangelyne's family. Jane and Ji-Won meet at a meeting where woman watch the next episode of "The Men" looking for men they know. Jane sees her son being massacred by various men she knew, her husband not helping. Artificial insemination has progressed so that no semen is needed.

We learn about Poppy, Evangelyne's ex-girlfriend. Evangelyne's house was thought to shelter a cult - human sacrifice? Evangelyne was on her way to Princeton. Her mother's an academic. Poppy became a manic-depressive, famous among Seattle lesbians as a muse and relationship-breaker. She imagined beakless bird-like creatures (as in the videos). She set herself alight and died. Evangelyne pleads to Jane for help.

The men return. Not everyone can change the world. We let it change around us. That's enough for Jane in the end,

So it was all a dream, or at least an alternative reality. But before that revelation I think there are many sections that could be shortened - even removed.

"She took a selfie of herself" doesn't sound right.

Other reviews

• Alex Clark (It is also a novel about the lengths to which we might all go to assuage individual loss and grief; if the world turned out to be a better place without your loved one, would you sacrifice the greater good to turn the clock back? ... Evangelyne’s name is clearly meant to suggest HG Wells’s novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, but despite her evident desire for influence, she is not the book’s mad scientist, desperate to create beings half-animal, half-human. That strand of the story unfolds in the shape of mysterious video footage that appears online, featuring the missing men in a terrifying apocalyptic and savage setting. ... The novel caused trouble ahead of publication. There were vehement charges of gender essentialism and transphobia)
• Zachary Houle (It also starts out very slowly, and it will take many readers a long time to settle into the plot. It wasn’t until I was halfway through the book that I really started to warm up to this one. Also, potential readers should know that Newman spends an awful lot of real estate detailing women’s sweat ... Put that [video] experimentation on the printed page, and you wind up having to settle in for a massive snooze-fest ... It’s a bit confusing trying to keep character names straight for people we barely get to hear from. And, as it turns out, their stories really have absolutely no barring on the narrative at all! ... What’s more — because I’m on a roll here — the ending feels like one big cop-out.)
• motherbooker (They’ll publish anything if it’s a feminist dystopia these days. I’m absolutely sick of it. ... I expected the book to go into the consequences of this change. To analyse life without men and how differently women acted. It did to some extent but a lot of the book is preoccupied with reliving the past. ... There’s no easy way to say it but Jane isn’t an interesting enough character to be the main protagonist here. She’s so passive. ... Honestly, I think there were too many perspectives here.)

"Julia" by Sandra Newman

An audio book, set in the world of "1984".

Julia, 26, works in the Fiction section of the Ministry of Truth, mending the machines that create plots. She wears an "anti-sex league" sash. Artificial insemination (ArtSem) is encouraged. She chats up Winston Smith. The Ministry of Love is white with no windows.

She finds an aborted foetus in the toilet of her hostel and reports it. It was Vicky's but someone else is blamed and is never seen again. Vicky fancies Julia. Lesbians are biologically unable to have sex, so it's not a sex crime. Julia fantasised about pilots. She's had sex with about 20 party members. She likes sex in the countryside. O'Brien has a private meeting with her. He's impressed that she denounced her mother. O'Brien says that Julia doesn't hate, that she (like him) is one of the new breed of humans. He knows that she's had sex with Smith and wants her to continue using him as her training subject. Winston thinks that O'Brien's in their side.

There's a long flashback to her youth.

She uses a grubby room in a junkstore to have sex with Winston and others. She knows that it's bugged and has cameras. She's fantasised about having sex with Big Brother in his crystal palace (he has nothing to hide - everybody else is under constant surveillance). When she thinks she's pregnant she gets inseminated as part of the "Big Future" project - it's Big Brother's semen.

Vicky is on the Central Committee. Julia tells her that she wonders if the "Brotherhood" (rebels) are really much of a threat, and whether there really is a war against Eurasia. She and Winston are arrested. They're tortured in the Ministry of Love by O'Brien, ultimately betraying each other. She's released though she's disfigured by rats eating her face, and expecting to be killed once she's given birth. She meets Winston, who feels guilty.

She escapes the city by merging with evacuees. She by chance approaches crystal palace. The rebels have taken it over. They welcome her. She's surprised that Big Brother exists. She's allowed to visit him. He's old and demented. She (like many other of his visitors) feels sorry for him and her own lost hopes. At the end, while she's processed to join the rebels she's asked the same questions as O'Brien asked Winston.

I can recall few details from "1984", so I looked it up on Wikipedia. It entered the public domain on 1 January 2021 in most of the world. I didn't realise that the statement "2 + 2 = 5" was a communist party slogan which encouraged fulfilment of the five-year plan in four years. I presume the conversation between Julia and Winston in "1984" closely matches that in "Julia", though here we get Julia's PoV, and there's more about sex. I'd forgotten that the anti-sex idea was in 1984.

Other reviews

• Natasha Walter (by about halfway through, I began to feel more convinced by Julia’s responses to this totalitarian state than I had ever been by Smith’s. Yet after that halfway point, the novel starts to weaken. The entry into darkness, into the Ministry of Love, does not have the power of Orwell’s journey. ... The book reaches what feels like an effective and sharply delineated denouement just over 50 pages before the end.)
• Anthony C Green ( There is a tendency today in fiction, in books, in films and television, to make all women into strong women, and portray all men as being weak and/or stupid. I didn’t find this the case in Newman’s work, where the male characters, principally Winston but others too, are not only recognisable from Orwell’s novel, but are also given an extra dimension through being seen through feminine eyes)
• litgaz ( the almost complete isolation in time and place of Orwell’s world was very effective in creating the disorientation that engages the reader. [] I found it hard to avoid the feeling that the story was losing some of its power from all the wealth of new detail and the descriptive meandering which Newman engages in.)