Life on earth has long been obliterated. But lost among the stars a human colony has survived, grown, and spread across a far desert planet.

The new planet is dominated by old nationalisms and the threat of civil and global war, but one arena of battle is no more: the battle of the sexes. The female sex has been entirely eradicated and replaced by mechanized simulations — an experimental handful of whom have come to rebellious consciousness as Armageddon looms.