In the 1970s Suzy Charnas produced two books of a trilogy: the first a very bleak condemnation of patriarchy, the second often taken as an uncritical vision of a separatist women's utopia. Walk to the End of the World was set in a tiny and starving coastal enclave—the ‘Holdfast’—where a wretched remnant of white males struggled to survive, long after ‘The Wasting’—a slow catastrophe of environmental degradation that had destroyed global civilisation. The men held white females captive for labour and breeding. All other races, and most animal and plant species, had vanished or been deliberately exterminated. The book placed the blame for ‘The Wasting’ on the evils of patriarchy, evils which persisted, intensely concentrated, in Holdfast society. Terror, superstition and madness ruled. Drug-induced ‘dark-dreaming’, random violence and sexual humiliation were the tools of control of the dominant senior males. Dread surrounded all dealings with women, regarded as mindless but dangerous pieces of property. In the course of the novel the institutionalised hatred between the ‘seniors’ and the younger men who must inevitably supplant them, led to war— a miniature dust-up by old standards, but disastrous in this context. From the collapse emerged three characters, one young woman and two young men, each endowed with a grimly irrelevant will to live, in a dying world.

Walk to the End of the World, showed women treated as domestic animals—pets, draft animals, factory-farm breeders; and finally slaughtered for meat. It was powerful science fiction. But a vision of the future that appeals to the ravening imagination of William Burroughs— who praised the book highly—isn't likely to offer much comfort to female readers. Motherlines followed Alldera, the only significant female character in the first book, as she fled, pregnant and desperate, into the wilderness. She was found and rescued by the Riding Women of the Grasslands. These people—whose existence was barely suspected in the Holdfast—were the descendants of a long ago experiment in parthenogenesis. They were able to conceive, using horse semen to trigger the process, (a breeding population of horses had been preserved from ‘The Wasting’ by this same experiment).