The story here has it that all the males in the world (defined as bearers of a Y chromosome) instantly disappear one day. The list could have been extended quite a bit, though, to the “Herland” of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Begum Rokeya’s “Ladyland,” or even to medieval or classical models. In her acknowledgments at the end of “The Men,” Sandra Newman gives thanks to feminist SF writers who had previously imagined all-female societies, mentioning Joanna Russ, Alice Sheldon and Sherri Tepper. The result offers something fresh and engaging for fans of many genres. The locked-room mystery is well handled while social media in the form of up-to-the-minute tweets and news feeds (ranked for their “truthiness”) are deftly interwoven with a classic conspiracy-thriller plot. There’s a lot going on in “Drunk on All Your Strange New Words” and most of it is really good. But when Fitz ends up murdered Lydia finds herself in the middle of an intergalactic murder mystery in which she’ll need some assistance from the dead ambassador, whose voice is still kicking around in her head. Lydia Southwell is one such specially trained translator, assigned to the Logi ambassador Fitz. When the alien Logi arrive on Earth they require human translators to express their thought-language into words, a process that makes translators feel and act drunk.
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