4 Stars
I love a good thought experiment and often get a bit stuck in the “what would happen if…” and used to read a fair few feminist utopia/dystopia and non-fiction books back in university, so Fruits of our Labor instantly grabbed my attention. In it, Patterson explores how the world would change if women no longer needed men to reproduce.
The novel explores this near-future world in different points of time (thank you whoever in the publishing process decided to add a little time-scale illustration at the top of each chapter, I’m the kind of person that forgets when years are mentioned and this really helped me keep my bearings), from the late 2040s, which still feel mostly familiar if you follow American news, all the way to the 2080s, including hope, progress, hate, terror, science, history, politics, and the weird American hobby of joining a debate team.
The “teaching” segments are a slightly clumsy way of fitting a lot of exposition into not a lot of pages, but with a book this short you can’t expect to learn about decades worth of world changing without someone just summarising it for you. I loved that there was also a bit of an exploration of how the development of human parthenogenesis affected different countries, because at several times I disagreed with Patterson’s vision, but that section made me realise that I was looking at it through my own experiences and, knowing the US only through the news, yes, I guess over there things could be quite as intense as the novel proposes.
I would have liked to explore this world a bit more, maybe a few chapters set during the “Days of Horror” and following Samara’s pregnancy, as she remembers how it used to be as a single mother as opposed to how society is changing. I think that would make a stronger impression that being told about it in a history lesson. Also (and I can’t believe I’m saying that) I would have loved to see how some men feel in the 80s, both ones that remember the time before PG as well as some that were raised well after it all got established.
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