The Last Man

[sawyl]

After a mysterious event that might have been caused by a magic ring, the birth of a clone, the removal of a mysterious artifact, in fact pretty much anything, all male mammals on Earth are dead. All? Well, not quite all: Yorick Brown, escape artist, English major with moderate-to-poor computer skills and Ampersand, his Capuchin monkey ("He's more like that evil monkey from Monkey Shines, or the Nazi monkey from Raiders") have survived intact.

Unmanned follows Yorick as he tries to pull the remains of his life back together, going to Washington to meet his ma, who just happens to be a congresswoman ("I prefer Representative Brown. Twenty-first century and all that"), so that he can head off to the outback to meet up with his financée. Trouble is, his ma has other ideas and pretty soon he's shipped out with a secret agent from the Culper Ring to find a cloning expert and to work out why he was the only man to survive the event. Along the way, he runs into the usual bad guys: a group of super-militant feminists Amazons that includes his sister Hero (their father was a literature professor and thought it would be cool to name his kids after Shakespearean characters), a group of elite women soldiers from the Israeli Defence Force guided by a mysterious tipster who seems to know way too much, the usual sorts of everyday post apocalyptic problems...

I rate it as officially shiny — it reminds me a bit of Day of the Triffids, but with more action, fewer blokes, more chicks and less nostalgia for a passing empire in the subtext. I'm seriously looking forward to reading the rest of the series.