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My aunt once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness.
�Jack Kerouac, in On the Road

Too late, Jack.

There are plagues, and then there are plagues, you see—and Lauren Beukes' 2020 novel Afterland brings us a pandemic we didn't get. The oncovirus called HCV ("Human Culgoa Virus") starts off mild, but goes to work on the prostate later... and by the time it's done, more than 99% of the world's people with prostates (most of whom are men) have died. What's more, there's no guarantee that the few fertile males left have any inheritable immunity. Their sons will die too.

The result isn't exactly paradise on Earth. Consider terms like "FEMA Mercy Pack" and "The Male Protection Act" just for starters.

*

Afterland begins in crisis. Miles and his mom Cole (short for Nicole—one of several masculinized names in the novel) are fleeing the overprotective custody of the U.S. government, across a post-apocalyptic America that felt profoundly alien to them even before all the men died, desperately trying to get to a plane, or a boat, or something that'll take them back to their home in South Africa.

Yeah, his mom. Miles (soon to be Mila) is one of the lucky ones, if by "lucky" you mean he lived—he's immune to HCV, which makes him precious. Which makes him a commodity.

And Cole's running from something more than just the angry guardians of a manless America, too: she's pretty sure she killed her sister Billie (short for Wilhelmina—see?), just before they fled the compound.

They stop at Walmart to buy clean clothes, a beanie to pull over her head, black with fluffy cats' ears, the only one that will fit over her bandage, and other essentials: a phone charger, bullets. The cashier doesn't blink at bullets, but the pharmacist refuses to give her antibiotics without a prescription. Fucking America.
—p.297

The essence of the road trip.

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Afterland fits squarely into a subgenre of speculative fiction that (I recently learned) is called "gendercide," but it did not seem like a typical example. Lauren Beukes isn't especially interested in creating utopias, or about scoring points in a pointless war. This novel does not come across as an especially feminist (or for that matter anti-feminist) polemic, nor a revenge fantasy, nor an essentialist attempt to sort out "real" men and women. (There was very little trans representation in this novel, but what was present seemed to me to be inclusive rather than exclusionary.)

The virus does not care whether people-with-prostates are worthy of survival—it just kills 'em. And the people who are left (most of whom are women) are left to pick up the pieces—a job they handle just about as well as one would expect human beings to do. A few manage quite well, but most of the survivors are, understandably, pretty fucked up.

Perhaps that very straightforwardness—that lack of subtext—is one of Beukes' more subtle points.

Afterland isn't really science fiction either, though. HCV gets rolling back in 2020, and the novel's action is set in 2023, much too soon to be plausible extrapolation. This is more of a horror novel, a thriller, and a travelogue for roads not taken in this timeline.

*

Afterland is the fourth Lauren Beukes novel I've read so far—the others being Moxyland, The Shining Girls and, most recently, Broken Monsters. Afterland gathers momentum toward the end, too, as a good thriller should. And while I would have to say this one was my least favorite of the four... it was still pretty damned good.