CHRISTINA DALCHER
Meet the writer of dystopias who used to be a researcher in linguistics
Words by 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’.”