God in the Image of Woman

by D.V. Bernard

Description

A genetic apocalypse is ravaging the earth, women are disappearing from the planet, and the only hope to keep civilization from crumbling is a ten-year-old girl. In the future, people lose the ability to have daughters; and as women begin to disappear from a world already gripped by chaos, some people begin to think that a 10-year-old black girl will be the next Messiah. Seven years after the onset of this genetic apocalypse, all women have disappeared from cities like New York. show more Civilization, itself, seems to have ground to a halt as men, numbed by the holographic pleasures of their technological age, wait for the inevitable death of their species. It is then that a powerful military force, known simply as The Horde, begins a systematic offensive against the world's great cities. As this final battle unfolds, the girl presumed to be God escapes from the fortress where The Horde had been keeping her and thousands of other women. Once free, she forms a series of alliances--first with a cult convinced of her divinity, then with the scientist originally responsible for the genetic apocalypse, and finally with a man without a past, whose evolving conceptualization of reality seems to be the key to saving the human race. Interwoven with a rich mosaic of characters--like the seemingly supernatural Quibb; the industrial magnate, Shaka; the gender-defying cyber witch, Circe; and the revolutionary firebrand, Tio Mendez--God in the Image of Woman tells the epic story of people searching for their humanity in an age where the end of the human race seems terrifyingly close. show less

Member Reviews

Featured Recent Thumbs

All Ratings
1
No Rating

1 review

mmodine 206 reviews

I didn’t finish thi- (record scratch)

I barely started this 684-page monster before I gave up on page 9. Page 9! This means I read only a hair over 1% of this. I’d have to think for a long time to remember a book I gave up on so quickly.

This was a #randomusedbookstorefind that intrigued me with the title. I read the back of the book and I was hooked: “In the future, people lose the ability to have daughters; and as women begin to disappear from a world already gripped by chaos, some people begin to think that a 10-year-old black girl will be the next Messiah.” Good start…might be a fun read…dystopia land, here i come…

But then the author stuck me in a Mercedes with a boring old geezer who turns out to be the scientist that show more started the whole thing. AND in his thoughts we learn that everything is his fault. AND AND the narrator helpfully tells us that the bad doctor (formerly Norman Needlebaum, now Dr. Mansmann…those names make my head hurt) rubbed one out to confirm that his wonderful formula for hair regrowth nuked all of the X chromosomes in his sperm for some reason. AND AND AND this monster chemical had gotten into the air and entered the bloodstream of the entire population in like three days or whatever. AND AND AND AND the narrator reveals, still stuck in the mind of Dr. Whatshisface, still stuck in the Mercedes, still stuck in Manhattan traffic, “a story about a notorious doomsday cult, whose leader was a 10-year-old black girl from the South Bronx.” It’s a little bit like the wedding scene in the first Godfather film, including the awkward dancing, but excluding Sonny banging Vincent’s mama up against a door, but including Sandra bragging about the size of Sonny’s sonny. The hair growth formula, you see, apparently adds inches to penises, as if we needed to know that. Ugh, ugh ugh, ugh ugh ugh.

Before I sum up, I have to share the dreadful language of how the doctor discovered his error: “Going on a horrible hunch, he had EKED a sperm sample out of himself and done a DNA analysis of it” (emphasis added). I don’t know about other people, but “eked” is not a word I would choose to describe, erm, self-love, even in the name of science.

Here’s the summary: if you’re writing a nearly-700-page dystopian sci-fi novel, *don’t* reveal everything before the end of page 7. Also, the enormous Roman numerals for the chapter stops were disconcerting. And when I say enormous, I mean E-NORMOUS! The things take up nearly half of an otherwise blank page.

I know I shouldn’t expect much from a novel that (as of review date) only nine other LT users admit to having on their shelves, but still… show less

Ratings