CHRISTINA DALCHER

Meet the writer of dystopias who used to be a researcher in linguistics

- Jonathan Wright

SOMETIMES, A WRITER CAN TELL YOU exactly where a book began its journey to publication. That’s the case with Christina Dalcher’s Femlandia, a dystopian take on a women-only society. It sprang into life when she read a synopsis for Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian Herland (1915). “I knew I wanted to flip Herland on its head and create not a benevolent all-female community but a sinister one,” she says. “A place where the idea of living without men is taken to an extreme.”

So why does Dalcher’s protagonist, Miranda Reynolds, choose to live in such a society? Well, she and her daughter, Emma, live in a country undergoing economic collapse, and Femlandia was founded by Miranda’s mother. “For ideas on how to ruin an economy in a short time, I went to a long-time friend who works in investment banking,” says Dalcher. “He told me three words: ‘pension fund crisis’.”

Dalcher also took inspiration from real-world intentional communities. Some of these have a culture that nurtures their members, but by no means all. “These are places built on a specific ideology, shielded from mainstream society and considered havens for their members,” says Dalcher, “The questions that kept popping into my mind were these: how far might the leaders of these communities go to maintain their ideas, and what happens when the members are kept in the dark?”

LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS