God the Image of Woman

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. 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— tells the epic story of people searching for their humanity in an age where the end of the human race seems terrifyingly close.