Seven Surrenders (Terra Ignota, #2)

by Ada Palmer

Variables are pandoras.

slim and ancient like a cliff-face tree that keeps its trunk pole-thin as it puts the growing strength of centuries into its roots.

In the last centuries of the Exponential Age gender began to be liberated from biology, but that process wasn’t nearly finished when the Church War came. The worst cults in the war were also associated with gender oppression, so after the war the nascent Hives tried to purge all gender differences so abruptly that there was no time to come up with substitutes for all the other social functions gender used to have.