the battle. The police and other interested parties arrive to save the survivors of Maia's side. While recuperating, Maia is dragged into politics and kept a prisoner discreetly by one clan because she has become a symbol. She tells her story to a group of male heads of sailing clans. One of them turns out to be the father she had never known. For her actions, they offer her "clan" an alliance. At the end, with Renna dead, Maia becomes an embarrassment to her captors, so she is allowed to walk away free. She decides that she will not found a clan of clones, but rather have offspring the old way. Major themes The nature of the novel is a subject of some contention, some believing that the setting is a feminist utopia, others holding it to be a dystopian work functioning as a post-feminist critique of feminism. The structure of the society is complex enough to make either interpretation possible, though the society's origin and structure is based on an extreme of separatist feminism. Also, the structure of the society as seen within the narrative supports the view of biological determinism when it comes to the relationship between genetics and gender roles. The author, in the novel's afterword, explains that the idea for the society in which the story takes place originated from a study of reproductive cycle of aphids, which is heterogamous. Aphids alternate between asexual reproduction in the summer, i.e., when the environment is favorable and there is plenty of food, and sexually in the fall when the organism is stressed by its environment. This has the biological advantage of ensuring identical copies of the parent will be well suited to take advantage of the favorable conditions, and variation in offspring in a stressful environment in hopes some of the offspring will find the environment favorable, even when the parents do not. The entire social construct in the novel is therefore an extrapolation of this idea onto a human culture, where successful female clans (female, because only they can produce offspring) can take advantage of their sociological niches by producing exact copies, and unsuccessful females produce variable offspring sexually. See also , the inspiration for the game called Life in the book Virgin Planet – an SF novel by Poul Anderson where a male explorer stumbles across a lost planet of all women who reproduce by cloning