Pax Femina

About the Book

By 1996, the war that ravaged the middle east finally exhausted itself. In its wake, millions of men from the Balkans across the Arabian Desert and southward into the highlands of East Africa lay dead. Millions of women lay devastated through rape and pillage as wave after wave of desperate armies waxed and waned across their land.

The “ethnic cleansing” continued. Capitals fell, monuments crumbled, fossil fuels declined to dangerous levels. On a global scale, ecosystems were disrupted, and as factories converted to wartime production, living standards plummeted and the children were forgotten. Starvation, pestilence and neglect rose to lend their evil countenance.

In the war’s last months, riots of indignation and protest swept the land from Europe to the Americas; liberal youths against their more conservative elders. In all, fifteen percent of the world’s male and five percent of its female population were decimated. Peace came at last, not through reason and negotiation, but from sheer, inexorable exhaustion. The war was over, but the seeds of rebellion were sown - and from a most unexpected source.

A theoretical geneticist, Ed Kinslow, is sent under mysterious circumstances by his employer to a health spa in the Sierras. There, he and other scientists, business executives and professionals are assigned beautiful young women as escorts. The men soon learn, however, that the spa is run by cruel guards and their female leaders. Kinslow’s first escape attempt fails and he learns the sinister truth. They are there as prisoners, not guests, and their beautiful escorts are in fact operatives of a newly formed, secret organization.

A meeting of the International Organization of Women is held in Mexico City. Speeches damning male domination and extolling female superiority are heard. Conferences are held, and plans are laid for a world-wide feminist revolution. Kinslow and a colleague are released to return to their research in Tucson. They are informed of their employer’s mysterious death, and that his ex-wife has been awarded ownership of their experimental labs. Similar feminine takeovers are recorded internationally. Slowly the men become aware of the changing political conditions. Kinslow becomes reluctantly involved in an attempted counter-revolution. But the women rally, and the counter-revolution is brutally crushed by superior forces of the newly installed world order - PAX FEMINA.

Kinslow’s life is spared because his experiments involving the re-engineering of the human genome to speed up and redirect the course of human evolution are deemed vital to the future plans of PAX FEMINA. Others are not so lucky. General of the Army, Paula Staggs, orders the brutal incarceration and execution of large numbers of rebellious males. But her methods are deemed too extreme, and under the stern leadership of Madam Chenault, Staggs is arrested and eliminated for the good of the movement. As the organization’s chief psychologist and architect, Dr. Fay Ulrich, explains: “Males cruelly treated will only rebel further. Appeasement and reason will quench their violent ways.”

Kinslow is returned to his work and is assigned a beautiful young woman as his lab assistant. He soon becomes involved. But she is, in truth, a carefully planted spy, and all of Kinslow’s progress is reported directly to Ulrich. Kinslow is reunited with his son for short periods of time under Ulrich’s supervision, and to induce further research progress he is allotted a small farm in the San Joaquin Valley. The epilogue reveals Earth four decades later. Crime has been reduced and warfare eliminated. Earth’s environment is being improved and PAX FEMINA has turned its attention to exploitation of the Solar System. Waves of explorers and prospectors reach the Moon, Mars and the Asteroids. But all are women. Males have been reduced to secon

About the Author

R.J. Cantwell, PhD. Retired adjunct professor of Geology, Biology, Geography, and Anthropology, resides in Dunlap, California.