On a planet where men are contained in ghettoised isolation women enjoy the fruits of a queer
matriarchal utopia -- until a boy escapes and a young woman's perception of the world is
violently interupted. Two old friends enjoy cocktails on a holiday resort planet where all is
not as it seems. A bickering couple emigrate to a world that has worked out an innovative way
to side-step the need for war only to bring their quarrels (and something far more
destructive) with them. And in the title story Suzuki offers readers a tragic and warped
mirroring of her own final days as the tyranny of enforced screen-time and the mechanistion of
labour bring about a shattering psychic collapse. At turns nonchalantly hip and charmingly
deranged Suzuki's singular slant on speculative fiction would be echoed in countless later
works from Margaret Atwood and Harumi Murakami to Black Mirror and Ex Machina. In these
darkly playful and punky stories the fantastical elements are always earthed by the universal
pettiness of strife between the sexes and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs
whatever planet that ladder might be on.
