I held out against reading Maul for a good long while. All the reviews I read were positive, but still, something - and I can't quite put my finger on what - put me off. Perhaps it was the word 'feminist', used as a term of praise rather than a neutral description (since it is surely possible to have good and bad feminist novels); it carried connotations of a certain kind of serious, a particular brand of worthy. Perhaps it was something else entirely. Either way, though, I'm kicking myself now: Tricia Sullivan has written a sharp, stylish, intelligent book that fully deserved its place on the Clarke Award shortlist.

There are two narrative strands. The first is a kind of hyper-american near future, in which a feud between two gangs of teenage mallrats spills over into brutal violence. We experience the resulting chaos through the eyes of one of the girls, Sun, for whom the threat of the fashion police is nearly as serious as the threat of the regular police.

The second strand is set further in the future. Y-plagues, a range of related gender-specific viruses, have all-but wiped out the men of the world, and to breed a resistant population society is following two strategies. One is to force the men to compete in elaborate and dangerous contests intended to determine their fitness; and the other is to use some men as experimental subjects, in an attempt to engineer some form of Y-plague resistance. It's this latter route to reconstruction that Sullivan focuses the second strand on: the workings and politics of laboratory of the novel's most interesting character, Dr Madeline Baldino. It is not, perhaps, the most plausible set-up, but it serves Sullivan's needs, and the pacing is for the most part brisk enough that the reader is carried happily along.

It becomes apparent relatively early on that Sun's gang warfare is not real. Instead, it is a simulation running on the subconscious of one of Dr Baldino's experimental subjects, a man known as Meniscus. It becomes further apparent that everything that happens in the game is an elaborate metaphor for a (biologically unorthodox, but not screamingly so) immune response; the different gangs and the police represent, respectively, two viral strains and the host immune system. The metaphor is sharp and well-handled, although I felt that it took a few more chapters than was strictly necessary to make some of its points.

A larger problem, though - and I appreciate that this is going to sound like a strange criticism, but bear with me - is that the characters in Sun's strand are not real. To think of cellular-level activity in terms of conscious beings is a powerful metaphor, but also a very oppressive metaphor; it's a fascinating intellectual trick, carried off with style, but this very fact plays against the reader's emotional involvement in the mall-strand characters.

I was also slightly disappointed with the ending which, without wishing to give too much away, is more or less the point at which other stories (such as Greg Bear's 'Blood Music' or, more recently, Cory Doctorow's '0wnz0red') have started. The science fiction of it all is not Sullivan's main concern, however. What she's giving us is a culturally astute parable of gender; and although the novel is perhaps slightly too long for the conceit it carries, it is nevertheless memorable indeed.