A feminist dystopian sci-fi novel.
Hope is a verb.
In 2086, corporations are monitoring fertility. Abortion is illegal. And the last person alive who can perform the procedure is in hiding.
Seven years ago, midwife Mae Bastet was arrested for infanticide in the fractious Arizona Territory for providing health care to women in need. She was torn from her sons and sent to Buzzard—a private prison deep in the Sonoran Desert, run by the paramilitary corporation Obsityan.
Desperate to reunite her family, Mae tries to keep her head down, swallow her prison-issued pills, and do her job as a glorified school nurse to Obsityan’s army of teenage drone pilots. But when mysterious, improbable pregnancies begin cropping up in her charges, she uncovers a web of secrets that has the power to destroy Obsityan. Mae must choose: stay complicit in Obsityan’s crimes or hold fast to her midwife’s oath and risk never seeing her sons again.
Buzzard is a ferocious dystopian debut that traces the possible trajectory of our current political and technological reality—and the power of our deepest human bonds.
Release September 22, 2026
Writer, birth worker, feral auntie…
Inez Ray is a California born, Puget Sound based writer. She has Bachelors of Arts in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.
Her futurist stories are populated by characters that aren’t always heroes, often reckoning with systems of power and control, with echoes and reverberations into, our own world.
She is represented by Brenna English-Loeb of Transatlantic Agency.
After working as a doula and midwife assistant for over a decade and witnessing the horrific state perinatal healthcare in America she was pulled further into advocacy and then back to writing.
She is a member of the BARN Writer’s Studio and an editor for the BARN Writer’s Studio Annual Collection. She will be appearing in person and volunteering at Story Island Writer’s Conference in November 2026. She is a founding member of Content Hospital, a rowdy critique group of speculative fiction writers based in Seattle. You can find them hiding in a dark corner of a conference.
When she is not inviting readers to think acutely about the future of humanity, she is parenting her children, dancing with her partner or throwing a stick for her two dogs.
Where to find me…
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