Children of Arable

After 20 years of pleasant, egalitarian, genderless civilization on the thousand plus planets of the Collectivity where babies are made only in baby labs, nine people decide to make their own babies in their own bodies. Eight can. One can not. So the concepts "woman" and "man" regain flesh. Only "woman" can. And so men had to start controlling women all over again, didn't they? The birthing circle would have remained a cozy elite fad but for Martin. Born on a green world, transferred to a metalbound city planet, she wanted to bring love and freedom to the whole galaxy. Jomo, the humble soy processor, who loved her, saw her astonishing transformation into a revolutionary. This is his story about her, told to their grandchildren. Martin is catapulted from her home farm into a galactic web of holie ghosts, pirates, buttoned-down followers of the Space Code, anarchists, sexless wraiths whose telekinetic powers spin the spaceships across the galaxy, spherical aliens and MAN, the virtual guru who keeps everyone under control. Gendering is a trilogy of stories about gender and God, revolution and religion. First published in 1987, Children of Arable is fully revised for this new edition as the first of the Gendering series.

David Belden is an Englishman living on the edge of the Catskills. He has worked as a religious volunteer in India and Ethiopia, a carpenter in England and America for twenty years, a college teacher and currently a corporate business writer. He has a doctorate in sociology from Oxford University, an ex-wife, a house which appears to be covered in fish scales, a severe reading habit and a tendency to absent-mindedness. He lived 30 of his first 32 years in communal houses, first religious then socialist/feminist, not to mention boarding school and college dorms, but forsook the communal life for a twenty-year year nuclear love affair with Debi Clifford, met by change on holiday in San Francisco, with whom he is raising a son, Rowan, and intending to celebrate a golden wedding and new siding on the house, whichever comes first. His dream is to do nothing but write books that are true (or truish), teach interseing people, make curious but entertaining objects, travel with Debi and Rowan and do good. But at the moment these activities have to be squeezed into about every other Thursday and the odd weekend.