The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison

Although she doesn’t always find acceptance among the communities she encounters, she refuses to hide her gender identity even when traveling alone, preferring the risk of being female to hiding who she is. Assigned male gender at birth, Flora was castrated as a youth by a slaver, and, as an adult, identifies as female. The notion of choice is one that Elison takes a step further in the trilogy’s latest and final installment, The Book of Flora (47North, 2019). Fortunately, this isn’t as heavy a lift for Etta as it had been for the midwife since Etta prefers to be called Eddie and identifies as male. In this evolved world, Etta is allowed to choose the traditionally male job of raider, although she must still pretend to be a man to travel across a sparsely populated Midwest. The midwife’s legacy lives on in the town of Nowhere, where women are decision-makers and leaders. In the next volume, The Books of Etta, set a century later, gender remains fraught but the rules have changed. To avoid rape and enslavement in this male-dominated landscape, the eponymous midwife must present herself as a man to survive. Dick Award-winning The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, set the tone with a pandemic that destroyed civilization, leaving behind 10 men for every woman.

This week on New Books in Science Fiction, Rob Wolf talks to Meg Elison about the final installment in The Road to Nowhere, a trilogy that’s as much about gender as it is about surviving the apocalypse.

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison