All-Male Societies

Androtopias are rarer in fiction than gynotopias, probably because the agora has always been dominated by men, so the idea isn't as much of a fictional stretch. Still, such fiction has been written.

O why did God,
Creator wise, that peopl'd highest Heav'n
With Spirits Masculine, create at last
This noveltie on Earth, this fair defect
Of Nature, and not fill the World at once
With Men as Angels without Feminine,
Or find some other way to generate
Mankind?
~Milton, Paradise Lost

The Last Amazon is part of the "John Grimes" space adventure series. It takes place on Sparta, a planet that was originally colonized only by men. After several centuries, contact with other planets was restored and women came to the planet at last. Naturally, there are many men who wish the planet was still all male, and others who think women are well enough in their place. On the other hand, for many, actual females are compellingly attractive.

A lower-class woman with her eye on the main chance manages to catch the eye of the planet's ruler and before he knows what hit him, he's married to her. He indulges her feminist schemes and her assembling of an Amazon army because he doesn't take either seriously and life is more peaceful if he just lets her do it, pretty much how feminists got a foothold here on Earth. Like the men of Earth, he doesn't realize the danger until it's too late. His wife arranges for him and several other powerful men to be kidnapped or killed so that she can seize power. She promptly institutes martial law, and soon any men who weren't misogynists are inspired to become so.

I doubt Chandler was being sexist; John Grimes is helped to rescue the ruler and restore legitimate government by four women: one spy, two martial arts experts, and a reporter.

Ethan of Athos is a charming and perceptive account of an all-male world. These men live on an agrarian planet and consider themselves terribly lucky to be free of women, who among other things used to bind men in financial servitude. When a young doctor is compelled to leave the safety of his world, he does find that women are people too, with good and bad points, but he is nonetheless still happy to return to his home and his own way of life. Given the hostility to both sexes that shows up in this kind of fiction, I found this novel very refreshing. The story is neither anti-male nor anti-female, and while the hero discovers that women are not evil demons (well, not all of them, anyway), he nonetheless values his own home because of its values, not because of its dearth of girl cooties.

The Strange Experience of a Misogynist by Jack London
According to this short story, without women, men would lack the motivation to achieve:
"And what weeks they had been! Most truly had the vaticinations of Curtis been fulfilled! And why not? Though I had discovered it, alas! Too late, woman, the one incentive, was lost. The world had not been prone to realize it at first; but now, moribund, in the last stages of extinction, the truth was all-apparent."

In Full Fathom Five My Father Lies, human men colonizing an alien planet had to adapt their technology to allow them to reproduce when all the women died, of what we are not told. Despite having no women, homosexuality is very taboo except in ceremony.

The Screwfly Solution by Raccoona Sheldon
Note: Raccoona Sheldon was a pen name for Alice Sheldon, better known as James Tiptree.
Aliens who wish to claim Earth for themselves kill all the women with a plague and subsequently wait for the men to die off.
Made into a "Masters of Horror" episode which can be viewed online at Netflix.

The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal by Cordwainer Smith
On a planet colonized by humans, the female hormonal balance became carcinogenic. All females, human and animal, died, until one figured out that massive injections of testosterone would save them. They turned to technology to reproduce, and generations later they had no women and no use for them.
"Their science, their art and their music moved forward with strange lurches of inspired neurotic genius, because they lacked the fundamentals in the human personality itself, the balance of male and female, the family, the operations of love, of hope, of reproduction."

The camp classic Mars Needs Women loosely fits into this genre. Apparently Mars is having an underpopulation crisis and attempt to kidnap a bunch of fertile Earth women to solve it.

I include Roger Corman's Last Woman on Earth only because of the title. An unexplained disaster kills all the people in the world except three: two men and one woman. Instead of doing something sensible like trying to survive, they have a tiresome love triangle.

The below are androtopian works I have not read or watched, for the benefit of those who wish to explore further.

World Without Women
This is a comedic webisode series.

The Last Woman on Earth
Short film made in 2006.

The White Plague by Frank Herbert. From Amazon: "It begins in Ireland, but soon spreads throughout the entire world: a virulent new disease expressly designed to target only women. As fully half of the human race dies off at a frightening pace and life on Earth faces extinction, panicked people and governments struggle to cope with the global crisis. Infected areas are quarantined or burned to the ground. The few surviving women are locked away in hidden reserves, while frantic doctors and scientists race to find a cure. Anarchy and violence consume the planet."

Spartan Plan (originally False Fatherland) by A. Bertram Chandler.

Another Rib by Marion Zimmer Bradley & Juanita Coulson

Last Man by Jon Inouye.

AE: The Open Persuader by Auctor Ignotus depicts a gay male utopia.

The World Without Women by Virgilio Martini.

Lucian's 2nd-century work The Works of Lucian of Samosata describes an utopian all-male society which lives on the moon.

A Voyage to Cacklogallinia with a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs, and Manners of that Country by Captain Samuel Brunt, written in 1727. Like Lucian's work, this depicts an all-male utopia on the moon.

World Without Women by Day Keene & Leonard Pruyn.

In The Disappearance, the men and women alternately disappear, leaving the other sex to try to get along without them.

The First Century After Beatrice by Amin Maalouf.
From Amazon: "a popular drug that ensures women will give birth only to boys has sharply reduced the world's female population and cut fertility rates. The industrialized nations, seeking to curb Third World population growth, have encouraged the drug's use in poorer countries, which collapse economically. Men everywhere, frustrated sexually and deprived of normal family life, turn to violence and delinquency. An American televangelist launches a massive airlift of impoverished newborn girls from Brazil, Egypt and the Philippines, transporting them to Europe and the U.S., where ethnic protest riots subsequently erupt."

Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin. Sort-of androtopia: According to Amazon, "Published in 1937, twelve years before Orwell's 1984, this novel projects a totally male-controlled fascist world that has eliminated women as we know them. They are breeders, kept as cattle, while men in this post-Hitlerian world are embittered automatons, fearful of all feelings, having abolished all history, education, creativity, books, and art. Not even the memory of culture remains."

World Without Women by Thornton Ayre.
I know nothing about this story beyond the title, but it seems likely to be androtopian.

Hatching Stones by Anna Wilson.

Back