Gynoid, not Android

"My name is Divine Endurance. I am feminine. I am twenty-five small units high at the shoulder, and sixty-two small units long from nose to tail tip. I am independent and it is therefore the more flattering when I respond to affection. I am graceful, agile, and especially good at killing things prettily."

I bought Divine Endurance by Gwyneth Jones in my very early teens, essentially because the protagonist was a talking cat. I lucked out, DE is one of sleeper classics of 80s fantasy, one of the first to really get to grips with changing sexual politics of the late 20th century. It confused the hell out of me by having Cho, the young girl travelling with Divine Endurance, initiate a sexual relationship with a bandit/revolutionary leader Anakmati who is also the Royal Lady Derveet. 'How can you have sex with a woman?' I wondered, in all innocence. [True Story from my schooldays from around the same period. On my way to the lunch hall I'm cornered by the Mean Kids. Them: "Are you a Lesbian? Do you know what a lesbian is?" Me: "Yes, they're people from the island of Lesbos, in Greece. Sappho was one." In the hindsight it's no wonder I had no friends].

Divine Endurance is set in that favorite dystopia of the 80s, the post-apocalyptic world. But it looks east instead of west, most of the action takes place in Thailand. It's hard now to understand just how strange that was, most fantasy one way or another still referenced Tolkein, with occidental, nordic perspective. The dominant ethics are Buddhist, the symbolism is Hindu. Fertile women are in purdah, but the politics are gynocentric. At its heart the book is about the power of Eros, both in a sexual sense and in its original Greek sense as the generative force of the universe, simultaneously destroying and creating. There's no happy ending, but it's an absolutely superb story.