LET ME GET THIS out of the way immediately: I thought Margaret Atwood`s The Handmaid`s Tile was a fine novel, provocative and elegant. Alice Munro is a wonder; "Boys and Girls" is perceptive and poignant. And I am a male. There. Cards on the table. But I don`t think that The Y Chromosome is a very good novel - not because of its subject matter, but because it tries to use the novel form and the science-fiction genre as vehicles for its subject matter. It is several hundred years in the future. The few men who remain alive are hidden on farms and taught to regard themselves as inferior. The narrative shifts back and forth between the somewhat Utopian "Hospital University-Commercial-Residential" Complex at Leth (Alberta) and the farm region, with excerpts from the 21st-century diary of (male) Adam Markov inserted into the first and last thirds of the book. But what are we to make of a novel where the world is female and ever gentle, where the women live in harmony together and make lesbian love in peace and reproduce via "ova-fusion"? Where the university history teacher organizes vidspools of Kung-Fu, Mandrake, and The Incredible Hulk ("a hero quest subgenre, the male searching for nor, malcy")? Where males, as they were dying out in the 2 1 st century, furious at women, "attacked mostly women`s centres ... or places like libraries, museums, universities. Hospitals. Anyplace, it seen-is, where they think there`ll be women. Maybe anyplace that represents to them culture, civilization"? Where Adam Markov reports watching crowds of men on TV "beating and kicking" women, while the women beside him watch with "little moaning sounds breaking from (their) ducats"? Where a woman who lives on a farm with livestock "never quite believed ... about the existence of males"? Where Markov, writing in his journal, describes himself masturbating in front of the mirror, "hunched over like a moron," and later states that "introspection makes me constipated"? Where when another male, Daniel, awakes, "the first thing he noticed was the smell: the sour stink of old sweat and semen"? Where characters` dialogues from the past are reported as: Dave: "...it`s some goddamned plot by those goddamned dykes to get rid of us" Clara: "...the reek of testosterone is making me nauseous..."? And where none of this has even the remotest hint of Swiftian tongue-in-cheek, but takes itself dead seriously? What are we to make of it indeed. Brian Aldiss, in his perceptive history of the SF genre entitled Billion Year Spree, notes that the most adolescent forms of the genre are concerned with power fantasies, of exactly the type characterized by comic strips such as The Incredible Hulk. While Gom clearly despises such power fantasies in principle, she is apparently unable to see the irony in the fact that her own book is exactly that: a feminist power fantasy. As a novel, The Y Chromosome`s weaknesses are its tendencies to force unrealistic dialogue and to make characters do unrealistic things that don`t ring true - all to support the intrusive pulpit of the author. Nor is there any narrative tension or suspense to sustain a reader. As science fiction, this extrapolated future is unconvincing and narrowly conceived, with great gaps that deter the willing suspension of disbelief. If anything, Gom is more the angry poet than the sophisticated novelist, and in this book there is probably a powerful poem lurking about, if not a curious short story.: