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anti-Communist friend thought it was an allegory of the Cold War: the Collectivity as Russia, Martin the freedom loving American. The Star Wars theme - evil empire vs. freedom fighters. I liked using the names of freedom fighters as the official names in the Collectivity, but that's just my ironic sense that today's lovers of freedom may easily turn into tomorrow's oppressors. It happened in Russia, of course. But think of the Americans. They started as buckskinned snipers against the redcoats and became the world's major neo-colonial empire (even while still seeing themselves as Luke Skywalker). My own parents started as the joyfully liberated Oxford Group and turned into the oppressive MRA.
Societies which start with the best of intentions ossify and need to be reformed again and again: that's a given, there ain't no utopia no time. Endless struggle is what we are given, so find joy in it. Joy, so far as I know, is found in love, food, sex, kids, friends, nature, ritual, stories, analysis, games, work, running. But the greatest of these is love. For me, some of the best comments from readers have been ones that saw that in the novels.
My father thought the novel was a searing indictment of promiscuity. I was so surprised I laughed out loud. That wasn't my intention. In MRA we were forbidden close relationships and sex: but could I create a world where you had all the sex you wanted and still were not allowed relationships? Which would be worse? My old friend Patrick Conner, also raised by parents in MRA, saw that the Collectivity was MRA - smart man. Same experience, different ingredients. You can try to drain sex of its power by a culture of celibacy and purity. But couldn't you do it more effectively by just giving everyone lots and lots of meaningless sex? This was amusing to me, to try the thought experiment. Is it plausible? If so, then of course it is an indictment of meaningless sex, if not necessarily of promiscuity.
Having done this, my mind turned to the idea of another thought experiment. Why did men take the old pagan goddess religions, in which mother figures gave birth to the world, and turn these Mother's sons turn into mega Gods, giving orders to everyone? In a world without religion, if you introduced a good, basic nature worship, would some wretched male genius take it and turn it into its opposite, invent the dualistic spirit-is-better-than-body religion all over again? Wait for novel number 2.

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seemed to be to take the baby labs idea from one of my favorite books, Brave New World. With babies made by machine, gender could be ignored. Why would that happen? Because space is a terrifying place, accidents unthinkable, and the only way to get rid of human error might be to get rid of human emotion. The emotions are all bound up with mating, love, family, offspring, so you have to get rid of all that.
Now the thought experiment could begin. In this baby-lab genderless world, have someone use her vestigial plumbing for its original intention. Then see what the ones with different plumbing do to her. Would they oppress her, all over again?
Would they be jealous? Is male oppression all a result of womb envy, insecurity about the male's place in nature, the cosmos? For stock herders in particular (and didn't they invent the God religions?) it's obvious that most males, for all their size and bravado, are dispensable. What magic do males have, next to the ones who bleed and do not die of it, the ones who creates life? When I split with Tess, we had both got to the point of wanting to have children, just not with each other. She went ahead and did it, without being in a couple. My plumbing made that rather harder. It was with my next girlfriend I had my womb envy dream, which Jomo has in Children of Arable.
Or would a man try to control my fictional woman's reproductive capability, to ensure that she had his child only? Was male control of women all about being sure you know who your offspring are, so they can inherit what you have built?
That's what Children of Arable is: a social science thought experiment. Social science fiction. Well there are some other things in there too, some telekinetics, and the idea, amusing to an old leftie, of having the oppressed telekinetic workers go on strike. I used various ingredients from other sf I had read to bake the cake. I felt like everything I knew about the world went into it in some way or other--a heady experience.  The novel is derivative in its science or technology, I'm no hard science person, but I think the overall idea is a good one: to create a kind of Eden without gender, and bring gender knowledge back into it. Martin bites the apple.
People in my life had amusing reactions to the novel. An