 glory season is a 1993 science fiction novel by david brin. it was nominated for both the hugo and locus awards in 1994. an announcement in the back of one edition of earth is for a novel titled stratos, to be released in spring of 1992. it seems likely that this was delayed, and renamed glory season. ==plot summary== three thousand years before the story starts, lysos, founder of the human colony on the isolated planet of stratos, led an effort to reengineer human life into a happier, more pastoral life. briefly, she developed a strain of human beings that conceive clones in winter, and normal children in summer. all clones are female, because males do not bear. further, males and females have opposed seasons of sexual receptivity. men are sexually receptive in summer, and women in winter. this scheme is said to be stable over evolutionary time because women gain an evolutionary advantage from self-cloning, while men only reproduce themselves in summer. finally, men have been adjusted so that they are far less aggressive during the times that they are less sexually receptive. the social result is that the vast majority of the population of stratos consists of financially successful groups of female clones. over centuries of normal self-interested business and political arrangements, these groups dominate the society. the society is also extremely stable, because, it is said, most violence is initiated as competition between males. stratos is portrayed as a practical feminist society, literally dominated by numerous strains of identical, financially successful women. men are confined to relatively few professions (such as sailors), and characterized as helpless. however, stratos is not static. variations still exist. people conceived in summer are normal mixtures of male and female genes. this provides a continuing source of sexual variation, letting the society perform biological adaptation. a small fraction of each generation of variant women becomes financially successful against the intense competition, and founds a hive of clones. how
1990s_science_fiction_novels 1993_novels American_science_fiction_novels Cellular_automata_in_popular_culture Novels_by_David_Brin Single-sex_worlds