Book excerpt: Welcome to Planet Waybei, home of Zin Land, a utopian republic ruled by women. While the women of Zin Land dominate their providential society, men are enslaved as Pleasure Males in the government-run Red Light Rooms or worked to death in the fields and mines beyond the city walls. But when a field hand escapes across the Great Desert and raises an army to challenge the monolithic power of the Zin Corporation, it’s up to Alice, a rising star in the council government, to defend her country. To defeat Kwan’s army, Zin society must evolve—but can Alice change her world in time to save her people, or will Kwan’s horde make slaves of them all? The first installment of Pat Brown’s Waybei epic, Zin’s Red Light Room is at once social commentary and science-fiction opera, a novel that turns the tables on gender and society, inverts traditional power dynamics, and asks the question, Can utopia truly exist? If so, at what cost?