Maul

What is the most characteristic thing in our contemporary urban lives. It is not the computer or the mobile phone or any of the other digital devices that surround us, it is the shopping mall. Here is the natural habitat of modern consumerism, a place for outings and social meetings as much as for buying. It is the hub that draws us all in at some time or other, and it is the all-encompassing magnetism of the place that lies at the heart of one of the two linked stories in this novel. The mall is the dystopia that all our lives are building towards, the setting where gangs of teenage girls engage in bitter warfare amid the goods that are forever beyond their reach.That is the near future strand of the novel, but it is balanced by a strand that takes us to a more distant future. Here men have all but disappeared, and the girl gangs of one future have turned into the ruling sisterhood of the other. A world without men has become a cliche of feminist science fiction, but though there is a feminist message underlying Sullivan's book, it is not an easy or a straightforward one. On the contrary, Sullivan constantly subverts and questions the notion, particularly by juxtaposing the seeming utopia with the violence and malice displayed by the girls in the dystopia. Why it's on the list: Feminism is a fundamental if sometimes unstated element in all of the books on this list; it is, after all, the different light that these authors have to shine upon the world. But no ideology should be unquestioned, and what makes all of these books interesting is the way they disturb and overthrow any simplistic notion of what feminism is. One of the things this particular novel does so well is dramatise the nature of that questioning.