Those of a particular generation or a particular political bent might look at the vibrant catalogue of books Aqueduct Press is publishing by women about women and rage from a standpoint of white old male privilege. They release the exact sort of science fiction that the Rabid Puppies would hate and I couldn't be happier. I've reviewed a bunch of their books, most of them in their Conversation Pieces series, and enjoyed what I've found to be simply good fiction, often damn-good fiction.

All that said, I enjoyed this full length novel a little less, because it ends up diving so deeply into a world of wishful thinking that it becomes unrealistic. Even then, I still enjoyed it and in part due to it being about as close to what those closed-minded naysayers might well consider the worst of the worst when it comes to feminist pinko-liberal gay anti-American commie propaganda. I'll just state that it tries about as hard as any book I've read lately to be emphatically about today even though it's set in the 22nd century.

The back cover blurb tells us that we're in the Middle East, but in a very different environment. All the old conflicts have diffused in the face of a more dangerous threat, that of inequality of access to water. Much of Africa has moved to Canada or Greenland because that's where the water is. The power in the Middle East now is Turkiye because it controls the headwaters of the Euphrates and is thus able to not only provide water to its own people but export it to surrounding countries if they have the ability to pay. Not all can and that leads to a vast imbalance between which have water to drink and which do not.

All the major characters are women, at least all the good ones, but we focus primarily on two, who live at entirely opposite levels of privilege.

Our heroine is Sara, a young Kurdish girl in Rojava, an almost dry area in the northern part of what was Syria and which is now its own nation. She turns eighteen as the novel begins and finds herself sold as a whore to ISIS by her family who effectively want to swap her for a well, but she makes her escape amid a herd of dinostriches and ends up in the hands of the YPJ, an all-female Kurdish army led by Ruqia, her personal idol. Yeah, there's a lot there, I know.

Her nemesis is Kithuda, who has just been elected President of Turkiye, succeeding her father, who was known as Hamza the Great but who wasn't really great for his people, merely himself and the cronies he hasn't got pissed off with yet. She wants to rule her country, as a new Kemal Ataturk, an impression she promptly gives by renaming herself to Ataturka. However, her father plans for her to be nothing more than his puppet. Of course, leading Turkiye puts her in control of a substantial amount of water, which is worth more than gold in this future.

So far so good. We're in the twentieth century and Elizabeth Clark-Stern has built a detailed view of what water scarcity will do to global political dynamics. It's a fascinating setup and there are an array of wonderful little touches extrapolated from it, some technology-based but others merely a consideration that most authors wouldn't have thought up. There are In-Phones, implanted within the body; the Sun Shuttle, a "sand-roving mega-bus, powered by synthetic photosynthesis" and an array of Kiss-Off Stations to tie instant DNA testing to the rationing of public water. However, the birds are devolving back into dinosaurs, presumably an effect of the availability of water, or more accurately the lack of it.

And, if Clark-Stern had moved forward with that story, pitting her young Kurdish heroine and the army of women who give her a home against the woman who personifies the regional superpower and her fight to forge a destiny of her own by severing the strings wielded by her father, this would have been a far better book. Sure, the deus ex machina MacGuffin at the heart of everything, the so called Water Thread, is easily the worst and arguably the only bad technological advance in the book and that really doesn't help, but I was caught up in the political conflicts of this extrapolated future and I was invested in how it all played out.

However, the author can't resist talking about the present day, our now, in ways that only make a lick of sense from the perspective of Clark-Stern trying to tie everyone and everything she admires or despises right now into her future story and that gets old really quickly. So, sure, it's about how the disenfranchised find a way to gain access to water in a parched world. It is. A little. But it's also about abortion, the Taliban, Alexei Navalny, climate change, US immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, ISIS, the oppression of the Kurds, wealth inequality, Sakine Cansiz, the two state problem, the genocide of Stalin,,the war in Ukraine and more. You might wonder how the author could shoehorn all of this into a novel set in the Middle East two centuries from now but then that's my point.

Now, I was impressed by some of the names she dropped. It's always good to see Anna Akhmatova mentioned, a poet born in Odessa, then in the Russian Empire but ironically now in Ukraine. I was happy to see the Hymn to Inanna mentioned too, one of the oldest known texts, which provides the Sumerian goddess of fertility and war the ability to turn women into men and men into women. It's a very deliberate name drop because there's a focus on the Maasai's god Engai, neither male nor female and inclusive of all sexual identities. In fact, a Maasai brother and sister play a supporting role here, each deliberately taking their name from Engai, one Eng and the other Gai.

At the end of the day, though, while some of these references make sense in context, most of them distract from the story. I'm well aware that much speculative fiction serves to teach us about today in stories of the future, but it doesn't have to be so damn obvious. This reads to me less as fiction, a novel telling a story, and more as the raging of an author against the host of injustices apparent in the world today, many of them against women. I share her anger but I want to sit back and enjoy a story rather than listen to her solve all the world's ills with an unlikely MacGuffin. I should say that I enjoyed this more than this review perhaps suggests, but it's the first book from Aqueduct that's going to get a thumbs down from me. ~~ Hal C F Astell