All-woman worlds encounter men

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When the men come back ...

A world of all-women encounters, or is encountered by, men, for good or ill.

  • Katherine Forrest. Daughters of a Coral Dawn. A race of human women leave earth to set up their own world. Eventually a ship from earth, with males & females, encounters this world.
  • Joan Slonczewski. A Door into Ocean. "The 'Sharers' [all female at the outset] use advanced skills of 'lifeshaping,' a kind of genetic engineering, to manage the ecology of their ocean-covered planet. They must use all their skills, as well as the discipline of nonviolence, to repel invading traders and soldiers [mostly violent military men], without destroying their own way of life."
  • Charles Eric Maine. Alph (also published as: World Without Men (sexist and anti-feminist; an all female world creates a man after five-hundred years of trying)
  • Merril Mushroom. Daughters of Khaton. Actually, it's not exactly clear that women are reproducing parthenogenetically, or if a plant is just making babies for them. The plant definitely seems to be doing it, but somehow by taking the genetics of the women ...
  • Kit Reed. Little Sisters of the Apocalypse (An island of women whose men have gone off to war must decide what to do if / when the men come back.)
  • Joanna Russ. "When It Changed" (initially published: 1972, in Again, Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison) (This was the first story published about Whileaway. In this story, Whileaway is "found" by men from Earth, who think it a tragedy that men have disappeared from the world 30-odd generations ago, and promise to rectify the situation. This story was a "dangerous vision": women have created a world and lived just fine without men; this was not a feminist utopia, but the women have done just fine and apparently not missed men at all. What kind of world do you have when you have only one sex? A world of people.
  • Norman Spinrad, A World Between (an all-male society and an all-female society meet)
  • James Tiptree, Jr. "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" (1976) - a spaceship of men encounters a future earth populated only by women.
  • Keith Laumer, "War Against the Yukks"
  • Poul Anderson, Virgin Planet
  • David Brin, Glory Season - Not quite an all-woman world, but a predominantly woman world settled by feminist social experimenters, now must prepare to meet the rest of humanity.

See also