Walk to the End of the World

Walk to the End of the World is a novel by Suzy McKee Charnas, originally published in 1974. It is the first book in the Holdfast Chronicles. Set in a horrifically misogynist future where all women are enslaved (and known as "fems"), the book tells the story of Servan d'Layo, Eykar Bek, Captain Kelmz, and Alldera the Runner, travellingtogether across the blighted landscape of the Holdfast on Bek's patricidal quest.

The first four sections of the book cycle through the limited third person points of view of each main character, making clear how very different their perspectives are. When we at last reach the fem's section, the book is turned upside down. Like all enslaved people, the fem is much more aware of her masters' reality than they are of hers, and the utter depravity of Holdfast life is laid bare for the reader.

This and the other books in the Holdfast Chronicles are crucial feminist science fiction texts. Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines were (together) one of the three winners of the Retrospective Tiptree Award in 1996.

Editions and translations

• 1974, first edition (Ballantine/del Rey)
• 1978, reprint paperback coincident with publication of Motherlines (Putnam/Berkley)
• 1979, Gollancz
• 1990, included in Radical Utopias from the Quality Paperback Book Club (with The Female Man by Joanna Russ and Triton by Samuel R. Delany
• 1999, republished with Motherlines as The Slave and the Free (Tor)

• ? year: German / deutsch Tochter der Apokalypse