They ran in a landscape where not a stick was alive, not a floating seed. The air was thick with dust or rain that glinted like cartoon radiation. There were forests of shattered leafless trees and wetlands denuded of vegetation, where the water was thick with plastic trash. In a few clips, a half-city stood on the horizon, a skyline of partial buildings that appeared to have been gnawed by fire. Some places had entirely lost the contours of our world… We understood: this was a future world in which the men had never disappeared. It was the hell to which we would have been condemned, the Earth they would have made.

Lines like these might make you think that what we are dealing with here is a classic alternate world dystopia in the feminist mode. You would be wrong. Sandra Newman’s The Men is a radical departure from tradition, a provocative critique of the feminist utopia and a challenge to easy thinking. If more science fiction were this original, our literary environment would immediately become more interesting, and more dynamic.

Jane Pearson is a damaged person. In her earlier life as a ballet prodigy she was groomed by the mentor she idolised to perpetrate abuse on teenage boys. Demonised by a public hungry for scandal, the life she eventually builds for herself is very different from the one she previously imagined. Married to Leo and mother to Ben, Jane’s inner restlessness is merely a precursor to the bewilderment and incomprehension that is about to destroy her world for a second time.

One evening in late August, at 7:14 precisely every human being with a Y chromosome disappears from the world. Aeroplanes, suddenly pilotless, drop from the sky; patients die on operating tables; factories grind to a halt. Women all over the world find themselves widowed, orphaned, homeless, freed, bereft. In the weeks and months that follow, a new world order begins to assert itself. A key player in the new politics is Evangelyne Moreau, a woman with a remarkable mind whose family were wiped out in an act of brutal police violence. Jane knows Evangelyne from college. The two almost became lovers, but Jane ultimately chose Leo. As the world shifts and changes about her, Jane journeys across the country in search of Evangelyne and the truth of what she felt those many years before.

Meanwhile, something else is happening, something disturbing. Videos are appearing online, a series of cryptic film clips entitled simply The Men. In them, armies of lost men march through a world that turns increasingly strange, increasingly depleted. And for many of the women watching, these are men they know. The Men quickly becomes an addiction, a form of mass hypnosis. But are the men real, or CGI fakes? What do the films mean and what do they point towards? For many women, the disappearance of the men is a chance at a new beginning. For others it ushers in a form of stasis, a reality that is ultimately as discomfiting as the world glimpsed in the violent film clips they are watching online.

For Evangelyne Moreau, The Men is more sinister still, a portent of her own destruction. Once again, she asks Jane to make a choice. But is this truly a choice that is Jane’s to make?

From Herland to The Female Man, from Maul to The Power, feminist utopia has formed an important branch of science fiction, encompassing some of its boldest and most experimental ideas. The Men is an important and brilliant addition to the canon, not least in the way it interrogates what has gone before. The questions Newman poses are difficult to answer: would a world without men truly be more equal, more peaceful, more rational? How much, in the end, would we miss them? What is a man, even, and how much, if at all, does gender determine our identity? How far would we be prepared to sacrifice the safety of others in pursuit of our own desires?

The Men is that rare thing, a novel of ideas that pays equal attention to language, character and form. The eerie surrealism of the video sequences generates a sense of mystery and foreboding that is impossible to shake; like the women permanently hunched in front of their screens, we find it impossible to look away, even as the scenes turn darker and increasingly violent. The raw intelligence of this book, its brutal honesty makes The Men a bracing antidote to the more anodyne brand of supposedly political SF that in reality is little more than crowd-pleasing. Newman handles questions of politics, gender, race and philosophy with skill and compassion without succumbing to the platitudes of fashionable discourse or the temptation of providing comfortable answers.

And she can write. At a sentence level, Newman’s prose is fiery, passionate, poetical – in short, a joy. If science fiction’s core directive is to provoke, to interrogate established assumptions, most of all to re-imagine then it is writers like Newman that prove that science fiction as a mode of literature still has a future.

They opens with what at first glance appears to be a gentle slice of English pastoral: a house in the country, a house that is described as ‘rather splendid’ and that from the roof enjoys ‘a full sight of the sea.’ The scene, with its seabirds and confluence of rivers and quiet conversation between friends, appears idyllic. And yet even here, in the first paragraph of this remarkable short novel, threats hover in the margins, not so much in the action as in the author’s choice of words:

A natural bird sanctuary, one was conscious of flight as part of the landscape.

What follows is a gradual winnowing away, a gleaning, as Dick puts it, of every freedom, of every unguarded action, a pushing back of life into its own dusty shadow. We find ourselves in a world in which artistic expression has been deemed unnecessary and dangerous for society. A growing band of human surveillance drones – the ‘they’ of the title – move through district after district, destroying artworks and burning books and banning music. Artists themselves are not harmed unless they physically resist or offer verbal objections, at which point reprisals are swift, brutal and unequivocal. Unless they appear at the beginning of a sentence, they are never capitalised. We have no idea if they are government-sanctioned, or self-appointed. Artists seek sanctuary in out-of-the-way places, rural enclaves and coastal settlements where the worst of the new laws have not yet come into effect.

We sense that it is only a matter of time before there is nowhere left to retreat to. As more and more places become unsafe, acts of defiance become smaller and more internalised. As time passes, it is not only creative work that is deemed inappropriate but more or less anything that speaks of individual, quiet enjoyment: living alone, walks in nature, the companionship of animals. Bands of ‘sightseers’ follow the gleaning parties, despoiling the landscape, holding rowdy gatherings and revelling in the bloodshed and censure meted out to dissidents. When they are not out on the streets looking for a bit of civil unrest, they are walled up inside their family homes, watching television.

I have seen some commentary on this book that suggests Dick’s vision of dystopia is simplistic and highly selective, that her characters are privileged and – ah yes, that weasel word again – elitist. I would argue that such protestations entirely misjudge the purpose and tone of They, which is a small masterpiece, the finest and most penetrative kind of allegorical SF. It is always tempting with literary dystopias, to demand that they be literal, to want to draw comparisons with one’s own time and place. There is no shortage of these in They, for which one could cite recent instances of drones spying on lone walkers in the Pennines, neighbours reporting on neighbours having a cup of tea with other neighbours, the equating of journalists with organised crime, the media trashing of impartial news broadcasting and the withdrawal of government support for English Literature as an academic discipline. The violent sanctioning of any form of personal expression in the name of spiritual appropriateness when it is in fact a blatant exercise in social control is happening to Afghan people and in particular Afghan women right now under the Taliban.

We will always find plenty of examples to choose from – that we cannot help doing so points to the fact that Dick’s novel is not out of date, as some have intimated, but timeless – but we should resist such simplistic reductionism. What we have in They is a powerful philosophical argument, a refutation of the will to power per se, an upholding of reason and personal liberty in the face of prejudice, of groupthink, of the unexamined urge to censure what is different. They stands also as a metaphor for itself: Dick, a queer writer who faced rejection and condescension as a daily reality, saw her work repeatedly belittled and sidelined, with They being described as ‘menopausal’ by a male reviewer in a national broadsheet.

And yet, its final words are hopeful; words of quiet yet determined resistance:

‘Hallo love’, I said, greeting another day.

It is important to point up Dick’s landscape writing as a salient feature of They. For Dick, noticing and valuing the natural world, as an essential source of spiritual renewal yes, but equally in and for itself, is not just prescient but an act of subversion, one that places They in its rightful place alongside other works of roughly contemporaneous and distinctly British science fiction such as Anna Kavan’s Ice, Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex, Keith Roberts’s Pavane and Richard Cowper’s The Road to Corlay.

The story of how They was rescued from oblivion by a literary agent who happened to pick up a rare second hand copy in a Bath charity shop is beautifully told by Sam Knight in an article for The New Yorker, and elaborated upon by Dick’s champion Lucy Scholes in the Paris Review. The inspiration we can draw from Dick and from her writing – sparse, bold, direct, resolute and impassioned – is substantial, and I would recommend They to anyone who wants to learn more about how science fiction can still be ground-breaking and resonant without so much as a mention of new technology or alien planets.

We are lucky to have this book readily available to us again.