Fresh from their triumph in the Tiptree, our good friends at Aqueduct Press have sent us four new books. They are:

• Gaia’s Toys a dystopian tale of eco-terrorism by Rebecca Ore
• Necessary Ill by Deb Taber, which apparently envisages a world without gender
• Slow Funeral, a fantasy story set in the American south by Rebecca Ore
• The Queen, the Cambion, and Seven Others by Richard Bowes, a collection of fairy tales.

Necessary Ill looks particularly interesting to me. The idea of deliberately spreading plague to reduce the human population sounds disturbingly Tepper-esque, but the book moves beyond that. There’s an enthusiastic blurb from Suzy McKee Charnas who notes, “…the reader finds an in-depth exploration of what a human society minus sex hormones might be like”. Personally I’m rather partial to my estrogen, but I do have an essay on the future of gender to write, and consequently this book has flown to the top of my To Read list.