I Who Have Never Known Men asks the readers a profound question: what happens if you are stripped away of all your humanity?

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Rating: 4/5

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Genre: Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction

“My memory begins with my anger.”

From the very beginning, the things that modern society considers to be basic necessities–privacy, love, creativity–are absent from our characters, leaving them with nothing but memories of the past to give their life meaning. In their confinement of metal bars and officers that seemingly have no other purpose except to keep them from touching each other, these 50 women live a haunting existence, of nothingness yet so full.  

After blurred years, our main protagonist, the sole teenager amongst elders, learns to think. She keeps herself busy by attempting to find the purpose of their prison, using everything that she has in possession. She counts her heartbeats to discover how much time is passing and uses mathematics to calculate the seconds and minutes and hours, something only she was curious enough to do. And despite never being taught what love is, she begins to feel a certain obsessive longing for the male officer that guards her. To me, she was the answer to our question; she is the very proof that no efforts can take away what gives us humanity, as our instinct to be curious and desire for love is situated in our deepest core. You might say that her condition has revealed our true form; being captured mysteriously when she was just a youngling, she is more of a prison than the “old world”, giving her no restrictions. 

“Survival is never more than putting off the moment of death.”

One day, a siren rings from above, and every one of the officers flee from the prison, leaving our characters unattended for the first time in what feels like eternity. Miraculously, they are able to open the door with a key, and gain freedom; they climb up the stairs to hopefully find signs of civilization, but all they find is a barren, empty land with only dark, brown bushes to dot the horizon. For years, our 50 women travel through this unfamiliar world, finding prisons only to discover rotting corpses that were not able to escape. They build a permanent settlement, but one by one, women die from unknown diseases that have no cure in this world. Sometimes, they beg our main protagonist to pierce their heart with a knife, as she is the only one brave enough to offer them peace. 

I do not want to write about the ending of this book, since I feel like it is best experienced without any spoilers. However, one thing is clear about this story: the author gives no explanation on why or how such things happened to these women. We do not even know if the setting is Earth or some distant planet out in the galaxy. Personally, it was pretty frustrating to not get any answers to any of our questions, and read an ending that is completely open ended. However, I think that’s the very reason why the author omitted the information; ultimately, this story is not about those little details behind the mechanics of our women’s capture and subsequent escape. Instead, it is about the curiosity that constantly leads society, the permanent longing for information that perhaps should never be found. The desire of the readers, then, further reinforces this idea, as we instinctively gravitate towards what we don’t know instead of the tale we have right in front of us. 

In conclusion, this book was an extremely thought provoking outlook on humanity, offering me a glimpse of the things that make us who we are. I definitely recommend I Who Have Never Known Men to anyone looking for a short, but incredibly rewarding experience. 4/5.

“I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.”