Buzzard by Inez Ray: A dystopian future where exploitation never ends

Inez Ray’s Buzzard is a ferocious dystopian novel about reproductive control, corporate power, and the terrifying possibility that our technological future could look very different while the fundamental structures of human exploitation remain exactly the same.

Set in 2086, Buzzard imagines an American future in which the United States no longer exists, abortion is illegal, fertility is closely monitored, and corporations have effectively replaced government. Midwife Mae Bastet has spent seven years imprisoned in Buzzard, a private prison in the Sonoran Desert operated by the paramilitary corporation Obsityan. She was arrested for providing reproductive health care to women and separated from her two sons. Now she is trying to survive long enough to get back to them.

Mae’s job inside Buzzard is to serve as a nurse for Obsityan’s teenage drone pilots. When mysterious pregnancies begin to occur among her charges, however, she uncovers secrets that reach far beyond the prison walls. Mae must decide whether protecting herself and her hope of seeing her sons again is worth remaining complicit in what Obsityan is doing—or whether she is willing to risk everything by acting according to the principles that made her a midwife in the first place.

What makes Buzzard particularly unsettling is that Ray’s future is simultaneously highly advanced and deeply regressive. Technology has progressed enormously, yet women are still subjected to reproductive control, powerful men continue to exploit vulnerable girls, and corporations wield extraordinary authority over people’s lives. The United States has fractured, borders have changed, and the environment has deteriorated, but some of the oldest forms of human domination have survived just fine.

That is where Buzzard became particularly interesting to me. I read a lot of dystopian fiction that imagines some catastrophic event transforming society, but Ray’s novel isn’t really about a sudden collapse. It is about what might happen if we simply keep going in the direction we’re already headed.

Modern capitalism is relatively young when compared with the civilizations that came before it. The capitalist system as we know it developed over the last few centuries, while the Roman Empire existed for centuries longer than that. Yet capitalism can sometimes feel so permanent that imagining a world organized around something else seems almost impossible. Buzzard takes that idea and pushes it into the future.

The novel’s 2086 doesn’t offer us a world in which capitalism has disappeared because the United States has collapsed. Instead, corporate power has become even more deeply entrenched. Obsityan is not presented as some temporary aberration that society will eventually correct. It is simply the system Mae has to live inside. The corporations have become the institutions that matter, and the people who control those corporations have enormous power over everyone else. This creates a particularly bleak form of dystopia because the problem isn’t merely that the system is oppressive. It is that the system seems almost impossible to imagine replacing.

There are two enormous problems facing any economic system built around continual growth: the limits of the environment and extreme inequality. A planet with finite resources cannot sustain unlimited consumption forever, and a society in which wealth and power become increasingly concentrated among a small number of people creates the conditions for social unrest and political instability. These aren’t problems that disappear simply because technology becomes more sophisticated. In Buzzard, they have instead helped produce a future that is frighteningly recognizable beneath all of its technological changes.

Ray’s dystopia is built around the idea that technological advancement does not necessarily mean social progress. We can have increasingly sophisticated technology while retaining profoundly primitive power structures. We can change political boundaries without changing the underlying relationships between those who have power and those who don’t. We can develop new ways of monitoring people while continuing to enforce some very old forms of control.

The result is a world in which the future doesn’t feel like an escape from our present. It feels like an amplification of it. That is especially apparent in the novel’s treatment of patriarchy. More than fifty years after the #MeToo movement, powerful men in Buzzard are still able to use their positions of authority to sexually exploit girls and women. The details of society have changed, but the underlying dynamic has not. The technology is futuristic. The abuse is not.

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That was one of the most disturbing things about the novel for me. Technologies, borders, governments, and environments can change dramatically over the course of sixty years, but the foundational logic of exploitation can remain remarkably durable. If the people who benefit from a system continue to have the power to preserve it, there is no guarantee that technological or political change will make that system more humane.

This gives Buzzard what I would describe as a strong sense of capitalist realism: the feeling that the existing economic and political order is so pervasive that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the system itself. Ray takes that idea into dystopian territory, creating a future in which corporate domination has become so normalized that resistance isn’t simply a matter of overthrowing one evil organization. Mae is confronting an entire structure of power. That makes her choices more complicated.

Mae isn’t trying to save the world because she believes she can. She is trying to survive, protect the people she can protect, and find her way back to her children. Her personal relationships give the story much of its emotional force, but they also raise uncomfortable questions about what we owe other people when protecting ourselves comes at their expense. Mae’s dilemma isn’t simply whether she is brave enough to resist. It is whether she can afford to resist when the consequences could include losing her sons forever.

That tension keeps the novel from becoming a simple story about good people fighting bad people. The system is monstrous, but the people trapped inside it still have to make choices about how they will live within it. Sometimes survival requires compromise. Sometimes refusing to compromise puts other people at risk. And sometimes the decision to do the right thing comes with a cost that no one should have to pay.

I enjoyed Buzzard, but I wouldn’t call it an easy or comforting read. It is bleak, violent, and claustrophobic, and Ray doesn’t give us the reassuring sense that everything will eventually work out if the right people just fight hard enough. There is a ring of hope in the ending, but that hope comes at an enormous cost. Too many people have been hurt and too many lives have been lost for the ending to feel like a clean victory.

In some ways, that may be the most unsettling message of the novel. Buzzard seems to suggest that perhaps we cannot simply change the system. Perhaps, at least for the people living inside it, the immediate challenge is figuring out how to survive without becoming completely consumed by it—and how to do as little harm to other people as possible along the way. And we should be prepared for it to hurt.

That is what stayed with me after finishing Buzzard. The frightening part isn’t simply that Ray’s 2086 is possible. It is that so much of it feels like a logical extension of problems we already recognize. The future may look radically different from the present, but if we don’t address the forces driving environmental destruction, inequality, corporate consolidation, and patriarchal power, there is no reason to assume those forces will disappear on their own.

Buzzard is ultimately a warning about the danger of assuming that progress is inevitable. Technology will change. Governments will change. Borders will change. The environment will change. But none of those things guarantees that human beings will change the systems that determine who has power and who doesn’t. And that may be the real horror of Ray’s dystopian future: not that everything has fallen apart, but that so much of what is broken has survived.

What do you think? Do you find dystopian novels more frightening when they imagine a completely unfamiliar future, or when they take problems we already recognize and push them to their logical extreme? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Buzzard by Inez Ray releases September 22, 2026. An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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