Houston, Houston, Do You Read?

    Often times science fiction stories amount to something as simple as a thought experiment; for example, what if a trio of male astronauts became lost in space, and returned to find Earth entirely devoid of the males and populated entirely by females. That simple thought experiment kickstarts what becomes a complex and decisive take on issues related to gender and toxic masculinity. The crew of a NASA solar mission, the Sunbird, takes a hit from a solar flare and is sent careening through space. After drifting for some time, a transmission is picked up by the ship. The communique had all female voices discussing strange slang terms; at first thought to be a hallucination brought on by deep-space isolation, they soon realize that they are being offered rescue by these interstellar strangers. The captain of the mission is initially dubious of their potential rescuers, however the entire crew is shocked to hear off their own mission being referenced as being lost for quite a long time. They come to find out that through the process of time dilation they have arrived back within Earth-space centuries after their mission lost contact, to a planet in which a world-wide pandemic has reduced the population to some millions of survivors. After agreeing to the rescue effort the astronauts find the ship named Gloria cluttered with flora and fauna, powered by somewhat technologically obsolete devices, and with an all women crew. Andy was believed to be male, but was simply given a drug to allow for higher strength tasks; as for the state of the planet, the culture of the future Earth is decidedly unadvanced for the time that has passed. The plague which hit Earth left only 11,000 women alive, so the current survivors were all cloned from those survivors. Without the male sex, the society is portrayed to be relatively peaceful and happy; however the leader of the crew views this as a great tragedy and that he was divinely chosen to subjugate the women. Another views this as on opportunity for physical conquest of women who have never felt a man's touch; the final crew member realizes that they have been drugged by the crew of the Gloria to unveil their true intentions. This leads with acts of striking and jarring violence committed by the first two crew members of the Sunbird, and sexually explicit and violent thoughts expressed vocally by the third crew member. The crew of the Gloria decides to kill the Sunbird crew because of their proclivity towards violence and toxically masculine and misogynistic behavior.

This novel is a stark departure from many of those previously read because of how decisive and unambiguous it is about the message. These kinds of toxically masculine attitudes have no place in a peaceful society, and therefore must be jettisoned to preserve progress/society. However I did find the prospect of their being a non-violent peaceful society by sheer virtue of their being no men a little naïve, however I suspect it was a deliberate oversight by the author to better communicate the themes of the thought experiment/allegory.

Why are the men portrayed as having the only connection to theology through the captain's claim of being chosen by god to subjugate the remaining female humans?