Yes, his monkey. One sign that Y is going to be better than might be expected is that the Last Man on Earth isn't Mr. Generic but a specific guy whom we first see hanging upside down escaping from a straitjacket while talking on the phone with his girlfriend in the Australian outback. Another is that the world doesn't immediately transform into some sci-fi World Without Men; in the months that follow the disaster, the fact that all the men have died is still not quite as important as the fact that three billion people have. The roads are unusable, piled with crashed cars; collecting the bodies of the dead is a months-long undertaking; and almost everyone on earth has lost scads of loved ones. The fact that the clock is now ticking for all mammalian species — even if humankind can continue through cloning, it might not survive the ecological consequences — is something only a few are beginning to grapple with.

Of course, the nature of the catastrophe does have some interesting implications. It's not really an apocalypse — yeah, half the population is dead, but there are still more people around than there were in 1960. A bigger problem is that most power structures are gone. The US government is still reasonably intact, with the Secretary of Agriculture having succeeded to the presidency, but institutions such as the Catholic Church and all the stock exchanges have collapsed. The Israeli army, now with a huge advantage over its neighbors, goes psycho and tries to take over the world. And while there isn't enough testosterone left for the entire world to devolve into war, there is some chaos, and there are gangs and warlords (warladies?). One of these gangs is made up of crazed "Amazons" who are thrilled that the men are gone and attack "pro-male" mourners; when they discover that not quite all the men are gone (since Yorick, who's supposed to be undercover, has the amusing habit of announcing himself at the slightest provocation) they're determined to finish the job.

This is touchy territory, and Vaughan makes a point of not making the facile equation between "killer Amazon" and "lesbian" — "Nah, they're not gay. They're insane," he has a character say, and one of the chief Amazons is portrayed before the catastrophe as almost frenziedly heterosexual. What they are, however, is homosocial, and while homosexuality is just fine and dandy by me, homosociality I find quite disturbing. For instance — I generally prefer female company to male, so much so that I sometimes find myself not even thinking of men as people... I'll meet a woman or girl and think, here is someone I might potentially want to be friends with and get to know as a person and learn her hopes and dreams and thoughts and fears, and then I'll meet a man or boy and think, here is some guy. But, that said, for the past two years I've taught classes at Smith College and I must confess that, surrounded by hundreds of women strolling from class to class in a space specifically set aside to exclude Y-chromosome types like myself — hey, I just realized why Y has the title it does. Duh. Me am smart. — it's sort of a relief when I see a male professor or someone ambling amongst them. Similarly, I remember going to my first class at Northwestern and realizing that I was the only person in the room who wasn't white — that was seriously creepy, and one of the many reasons I left. And when Jen and I started scouting western Massachusetts for places to live, I started to have serious second thoughts when we stopped to eat and I was the only non-white person there. (Luckily, this proved not to be representative.)

But it's not just about being a lone outsider. When I lived in New York, I'd occasionally pop up to the Kabab Cafe in Queens, and I recall walking back to the subway one evening to find the sidewalks packed with hundreds of people, hanging out, playing backgammon, smoking hookahs — and looking up and down the street for blocks I saw not one woman. I fit in fine, at first glance — I even shared a lot of my ancestry with the people around me — but I was seriously skeeved. I got a pretty sweet job offer for a position in the United Arab Emirates recently, but even as a short-term thing, nuh-uh. They say it's pretty liberal for a Muslim country, but so's Steinway and 28th. I want nothing to do with any culture in which men and women are systematically kept apart, and am actually quite embarrassed to have roots in a part of the world where this is standard practice. If I were stuck in a world in which I could only interact with members of my own sex I might well put a gun to my head — as a woman does on the first page of Y: the Last Man.

Return to the Calendar page!