This book confounded me, as every time I tried to think through how anything about the “science” or societal structure would work, things fell apart. It requires more relaxing into the weirdness and not questioning things too much than I found easy to do; but when I did manage to relax, I found the concepts Porter is working with interesting. Though I resist the reading of this as a straightforward utopia. Loss of free will is too sinister to me, even if what’s being forced upon you is what’s best for you, even if you end up liking it.

Also, you can tell that a queer woman wrote this book, because it mentions hands more than 80 times over the course of 200 pages and has hands all over the cover.