In Walk to the End of the World Charnas is writing highly didactic political fiction, and her single most important literary technique is relentless exaggeration. The bleak anger of her satire approaches at times that of Jonathan Swift at his most dark. In Motherlines, the sequel, the all-male society of the Holdfast moves off stage and, lacking a focus for her anger, Charnas adopts a more philosophical stance toward her work. In the latter novel satire is, at least in part, replaced by travelogue and fictionalized anthropology.