I Who Have Not Known Men poses a riddle to its characters. Why have they been trapped and abandoned? The one who cares most about answering this question is the only character who has never known anything else — the narrator.

But as a reader, I cared about it too. So much that I couldn’t stop myself trying to write it all out and solve it here. Maybe just because I’ve read too much detective fiction recently.

Here’s my solution.

Part 1: The Planet

If the narrator explored an Earth-sized planet widely enough, it is likely she would have eventually reached a remarkable feature that she would have written about, such as an ocean or a polar area with very distinct day-night patterns and seasons. I find it strange that she and her companions never thought to follow a river downstream to its end, since that almost certainly would have led to a large body of water (not necessarily the ocean).

Because this didn’t happen, we can guess that the planet is larger than Earth, with rivers that flow into a very distant ocean and poles that are extremely far away. But since the gravity is the same, this planet is likely made of less dense material than Earth.

The plants and animals appear to be imported from Earth. Perhaps this was a planet in the late stages of “terraforming” — being made habitable for humans — and the guards wore gas masks as protection from a harmful environment (either radiation or poison, which is also what killed them).

The planet might even be artificial. An artificial planet with technology on the inside would more easily answer some of the other questions too: where did the guards go, where does the power come from, and why does the luxury bunker seem so hard to find and access from above? Maybe the guards retreated deeper underground.

Part 2: The Pre-Story Events, the Prison, and the Disaster

The prisoners appear to have been drugged and kidnapped from the near past, brought to another planet, and made to live sterile, sex-segregated lives.

The suppression of sexuality and emotion in the prisoners gives us what might be our biggest clue here. Perhaps these prisoners were being taught to hunger for the opposite sex so that they would interact differently or be more likely to reproduce when released, as part of some larger experiment into the nature of humanity or an attempt to repopulate a new world. Until the world was ready (maybe from terraforming, which also could explain the gardening handbook), they were kept in conditions as neutral as possible.

Their guards could be future humans, maybe with some cyber implants that made them implacable. When the siren went off, the guards must have immediately feared for their lives, or something else greater than their mission. Perhaps a spaceship was about to leave, or a natural disaster like a radiation spike threatened the planet (and killed the guards on the bus). We can only assume they left in some kind of air- or spacecraft that left no traces on the ground, or that they went underground into a deeper bunker.

No Escape?

So, we have a likely very large natural or artificial planet, partly terraformed and about to be populated with people from the near past as some kind of experiment, but the experiment is abandoned at the last minute because of a radiation spike.

Even if this solution is correct and the narrator managed to verify it with clues on the planet, it doesn’t change much. To move on from her planetary prison she would need a means of off-planet communication or escape. She might be able to make the planetary equivalent of a smoke signal using her unlimited power supply and basic technological skills — but there’s no guarantee that anyone seeing it would care, let alone help. And let’s say our narrator was rescued — would she even be happier among “normal” people, who has never known anything other than her lonely planet?

This desperate situation doesn’t mean the narrator wouldn’t try, or that as readers we wouldn’t will her on. As one online commenter (ZeroBlood13) put it, “like most humans, I would rather drive myself mad with questions than ever accept answers that refuse to be given. I’ll die pondering, just like the narrator.”

Other Cool Theories

Another online theory from cantspellawesome suggests it’s imagining a world without pollination as a neat way of linking together the sex segregation, the scarcity of flowers and insects, and the gardening handbook. This is a beautiful theory, although it seems too subtle to me as the intended resolution of the novel’s setting.

Yet another theory from whoisyourwormguy_ suggests that each cabin represents a planet, and the escaped women represent the universe’s vanishingly rare intelligent life forms searching for others. I love this reading of the novel, whether intended or not, and how it leads us to questions about our own somewhat barren universe: why is it empty of life, and did someone make it on purpose?

If you want to have a go at solving the novel’s mystery, I’ve put all the relevant facts I could think of at the end of the article.

Beyond Solutions

Some of these answers are elegant and some reconcile almost all the facts. But they’re not very satisfying to a reader, are they? Why write this puzzle if it can’t be solved?

Jacqueline Harpman’s family fled the Holocaust when she was a child. For me, that is part of the real solution. The forlorn riddle of the novel doesn’t lead us to answers about space stations and radiation leaks, but it does ask a lot of painfully human questions: why was I born into a life like this? Why don’t I feel the same as other people? Why do powerful people trap and hurt us? Why does escaping one weird prison seem to lead only to another, even weirder one? Why does no-one else seem to be curious like me?

As the future of our world gets more uncertain and truthful answers seem to melt away, it’s easy to see why these questions have suddenly resonated as the book is rediscovered 30 years after its publication. As Harpman may have felt during the war, these questions hover around us and their answers surely cannot be good.

But there’s a seed of hope here too. Not all the plants are gone. Joy can come from anywhere, as simple as counting, creating a secret, or gathering one tiny hint about the nature of the big questions. The narrator refuses to see her empty planet as a curse — instead she accepts it as a gift and makes it her own. Maybe that hope is the real reason people like this book.

Thanks for reading!

I had fun writing this, particularly nerding out about the planetary science like polar zones and rivers.

What other theories or pieces of information strike you? See what you make of the puzzle:

• The narrator had lots of time to explore and hiked across much of the land around her, probably thousands of kilometres.
• She does not mention finding any oceans, areas where the sun’s angle was very different, or very different climates (deserts, tundras, rainforests).
• She does not mention finding rivers flowing into anything, such as the ocean or an inland sea.
• She mentions finding a limited range of plants and an even more limited range of animals, but the other women are able to identify a handful of them, suggesting at least some are from Earth.
• The guards on the bus were dead and wearing gas masks.
• The prisons were built far underground.
• The prisons have a power supply that does not fail even after years of abandonment.
• The setting for the story appears to be the future, but the characters remember a time apparently not far from ours.
• The prisoners are fed food that they recognise.
• The guards appear to be human, but are supernaturally quick with their whips and never speak.
• The prisoners are not allowed to touch, cry, or harm themselves or each other.
• The prisoners are not told why they are there.
• Countless groups of 40 single-sex prisoners are held all over the landscape.
• The guards in the bus were carrying a gardening handbook.
• A luxury suite was created but hidden and apparently unused.
• A sudden siren caused the guards to flee immediately and drop their tools.
• By the time the prisoners got to the surface, about 11 minutes later, the guards were gone and left no marks at all.
• The guards seem to have left all the prisons at the same time and never returned.
• The books carried by the guards and in the luxury suite were written in the same language spoken by the prisoners.
• The women seem to have mostly died of cancer.

Here are a few highlights. For a discussion of how these relate to the projects I’ve mentioned in London, take a look at this critical summary article.

Bikemaps

Bikemaps is a mapping project aiming to show collision rates across cities worldwide. It was started by a team at UVic in Canada, and still has a strong base in Victoria and Vancouver. In London, the data looks nice on the map below, but it has only about 50 contributions since it began in 2014. The project has undoubtedly helped research as it has led to 14 academic publications, but it is hard to pin down any specific impact on urban planning.

PING If You Care

An app developed by European organisation Bike Citizens and promoted by Mobiel 21, PING if You Care is a project that was run in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Munich between 2017 and 2019. The project uses physical buttons with Bluetooth connections to allow cyclists to log incidents as they ride very simply. They can then give more information about what happened after they finish cycling.

The results from Amsterdam have been made publicly available here.

Safetipin in Bogota

Indian women’s organisation Safetipin has a mission to create gender-responsive cities in the global south. Most of their work is not related to cycling, but in 2015–16 they mapped Bogota’s cycleways to judge how safe they were for women.

By using camera footage to analyse road type, route quality, and lighting, they were able to produce results about cycling safety and how to plan routes in the city. The project started a national media debate about cycling safety for women — read more here about the project or see one of the nationally significant articles here.

Cycling citizen science has the potential to bring citizens together around a healthy, sustainable activity that they love, giving them a purpose and creating scientific data to inform better city planning. Many of the featured projects on this blog are inspiring glimpses of this, like the LCC Women’s Network report on unsafe cycleways.

Meanwhile, TfL wants 80% of journeys in London to be made by sustainable transport by 2041, and cycling is a big part of their strategy.

So why are there so few examples of cycling citizen science projects having a direct impact on infrastructure policy? Even TfL’s own Cycling Action Plan doesn’t mention citizen science (or its synonyms like community science).

Reason 1: Not enough people do it!

Many people aren’t aware of citizen science

Even among cycling campaigning organisations like London Cycling Campaign, citizen science is not widely used.

You’re helping to change that just by reading this article!

Only cyclists can contribute, but privileged people are more likely to be cyclists

Safety is the biggest barrier to cycling in London. But partly for this reason, cyclists are disproportionately likely to be fit young men. Less than a third of cycle journeys in London in 2023 were made by women, compared to over half in the Netherlands, according to an LCC Women’s Network report.

There are ethnic blockers to cycling too — cycle lanes are more likely to be located in neighbourhoods with fewer ethnic minorities, according to a recent paper.

Cycling citizen science can inherit this problem: LCC has over 20,000 supporters, but its Women’s Network has only 2,000.

Some individuals contribute much more than others

Some cycling citizen science projects, for example Bikemaps collision reporting, suffer particularly from the 90–9–1 rule. This rule of thumb in citizen science states that 1% of participants will provide 90% of the data in any given project. When measuring collisions, this is not much help if you only have a small pool of volunteers — you want everyone’s input, not just the keen people who would report anyway!

Some projects require awkward data collection methods like taking a photo while cycling

Submitting a photo to a project like the CycleStreets Photomap while cycling is a hassle. You have to stop, dismount, get out your phone, open the right app, and submit the photo and a description. This was one reason I struggled to get people to scan my QR code.

Reason 2: Projects are usually not coordinated well

Projects don’t work together effectively

Cycling citizen science is characterised by lots of small, fragmented projects across the world. The UK is blessed to have the CycleStreets family of apps (including a route planner, photo map, suggestion submission tool, forum, and database), but even these have not always coordinated well across their targeted area.

Cyclescape, for example, seems to have been a popular forum tool several years ago (pre-pandemic), but has barely been used since outside of its native Cambridge. The same goes for Widen My Path.

London Cycling Campaign have their own activities (such as the Dangerous Junctions campaign) that do not reference or link Cyclestreets data. Meanwhile, other projects like Bicizen and Saddle Sense are unconnected to any of these and do not integrate their data in any way.

Data is usually published and analysed in isolation

Citizen science data is rarely systematically used, even by citizen science campaigners. Freely available police collision data (known as STATS19) is used by both Bikedata and the Dangerous Junctions campaign to calculate collision heatmaps — even though this approach ignores collisions that did not cause injury, or near misses, which are estimated to be 2000 times more likely to occur than collisions (and therefore could be a more complete and quick-responding data source).

Projects like Bikemaps, Bicizen, and Collideoscope (a UK project that ended in 2020) could have achieved more if they had worked together with existing datasets to create more comprehensive near-miss and collision maps. Moreover, Bikedata and Dangerous Junctions should have actively looked to use this data.

The same issue is faced by water quality mapping in the UK, where despite all the citizen science efforts to hold water companies to account, Environment Agency data ultimately determines whether a water company hits its targets.

Projects don’t catalogue or celebrate success enough

Citizen science cycling organisations rarely celebrate publicly when they get results, eg with press releases. When Widen My Path data has been actively considered by councils, for example, the consideration has been mentioned as a one-off in the council reports but not trumpeted by Widen My Path.

Similar problems are present for Cyclestreets Photomap. Photomap data has been used by advocates in some settings, such as creating galleries to prove where cars always block cycle paths — but there is no systematic collation, review, or submission process that I could find.

Key lessons for individual cyclists

Participating in these programs is still worth it! But here’s how I would recommend focusing your effort:

1. Take advantage of what’s already out there. Use CycleStreets’s route planner if you find it helpful; shoot off a quick Widen My Path suggestion if you can think of one; take a look at dangerous junctions in your local area. These are quick, free actions where getting involved can give YOU a direct benefit, and you’ll still be engaging with and supporting the projects.
2. Tell a friend if any of that was useful! Cycling citizen science suffers from a lack of participation, especially from everyone other than fit, white young men.
3. If you really care… get involved as a campaigner! Signing up for London Cycling Campaign is a great first step. If you get really involved in this, you could have an outsize impact as a key individual— like the two founders of CycleStreets, who have single- (double-?) handedly created the best cycling citizen science ecosystem in the UK and changed government cycle planning for the better.

Key lessons for cycling citizen science organisers

1. Lower barriers to entry. This could include copying the PING! if you care approach, where instead of opening their phone, participants could just press a button to record data. This made it easier for anyone to participate smoothly while cycling. Campaigns for safe women’s cycling like Safetipin’s Bogota campaign and LCC’s Women’s Network also have the power to start levelling the playing field in favour of groups who cycle less. Cycling campaigners have the opportunity to create a positive spiral of inclusivity, where safer bike lanes lead to a more diverse cycling community.
2. Evaluate and coordinate projects better. Most of these projects seem to exist in geographic isolation and to end without any ongoing or final statement on their progress. Better project management can ensure that projects build properly on each other across the world.
3. Argue effectively for the use of citizen science data as scientific data. There is a wealth of scientific literature on this to explore, addressing questions like participation bias and how to ensure good data quality.

This project about citizen science awareness is part of my university assignments. I chose cycling citizen science because I cycle everywhere anyway. For a quick separate introduction to what cycling citizen science is, check out this 1-minute article.

Spoilers: Cycling around with the QR code did not go well. It’s not painful or embarrassing or anything, it just doesn’t work. (To be fair, maybe it is embarrassing. I didn’t think too hard about it.)

After a couple of weeks of wearing my QR code around major routes C2, C3, and C10 in London I only had ONE person scan it.

Even after I added little QR code tabs that people could take instead of scanning, they just didn’t take them.

This highlighted two problems with London’s current cycling citizen science projects in general:

1. Riding a bike around London in a hurry takes a lot of attention.

Cycling is an awkward time for most people to take a photo of a QR code or chat about cycle lanes with some dude wearing a multicoloured jumper, let alone contribute to citizen science by taking photos or entering data on a map. Even for experienced riders like me, it’s not easy to stop for a minute, because we’re concentrating so hard to avoid being skaboosh’d by an Uber.

As I discovered, this applies even if they’re waiting at a long red light, and even if they can just take a piece of paper.

The irony is: this is also a reason why we need better cycling infrastructure. If we want to encourage more cycling for a greener city, it needs to be something that less confident riders can do safely too.

But there’s another reason:

2. Not many people know the value of citizen science. The phrase “cycling citizen science” didn’t seem to catch many people’s attention, even though it’s created some really cool results — like the London Cycling Campaign Women’s Network map of socially safe and unsafe cycle paths below.

But just by reading this article, you’re helping to change that!

Contributions from individual cyclists have a big part to play in improving our cycling infrastructure, but as the QR code adventure shows, it’s not always easy to take part or gather support.

For more discussion on what the problems are with cycling citizen science in general, how this compares to other forms of citizen science, and what we might be able to do about it, check this article.

If you enjoyed this, please do leave a like (clap) below — it will help bring citizen science to a wider audience by increasing my visibility on Medium. It’s also a little opportunity to nudge my grades up ;)

Plus, if you have your own ideas why the QR code thing didn’t work very well, feel free to drop a comment or DM me!

Cyclescape & Photomap Galleries

To see what citizens can do when armed with the right data, have a look at Cyclescape. Part of the CycleStreets family, this is a dedicated forum for cycling activists to organise, keeping track of planning applications and proposing changes supported by data.

When it works well, this can mean citizens conducting their own research, such as Bruce Lynn’s research on contraflow cycle paths here.

Successful campaigning activities like these in Kingston’s Go Cycle scheme a few years ago can contribute to great cycling infrastructure — you can still see the campaign discussion threads on Cyclescape and the results.

CycleStreets’s Photomap also supports the creation of galleries for campaigning, like this one showing consistent evidence of vans parked in the cycle lane.

Bikedata

Another CycleStreets project, Bikedata has a mesmerising map of collisions based on publicly available police collision data, but it also incorporates user-reported data like photos, cycle parking, and a range of issues such as obstructions and roadworks. Bikedata supports all kinds of other integrated data, and you can select what to display before downloading a GeoJSON or spreadsheet to build evidence in your own projects.

London Cycling Campaign (LCC) Women’s Network: Women’s Freedom After Dark

LCC is the overarching organisation campaigning for cycling infrastructure and safety in London. As well as general campaigning, they take action for women in particular: their Women’s Network published this report using citizen science data in 2025. Women cyclists classified the entire of the TfL Cycleway network as safe or unsafe on criteria covering the type of route (eg, is it overgrown with vegetation?) and features of the route (eg, is it poorly lit?). Nearly a quarter of the route was found to be potentially unsafe after dark. You can read more technical details here.

This particular project is finished, but if you’re interested you can become a member of LCC here and look for other ways to get involved.

Saddle Sense

If you’re keen to be at the cutting edge, you can also sign up to new schemes like Saddle Sense’s bike-mounted air quality sensor. There are opportunities to improve route planning for all cyclists, and build infrastructure policy influence, by showing where air quality is better and worse.

Check out the other articles for more, including a critical discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of these schemes.

Cyclestreets Photomap

The best place to start with UK cycling citizen science, Cyclestreets (web/iPhone/Android) is a route planning app that also allows you to add photos and reports. The app’s cycle route planning is top-quality (based on OpenStreetMap citizen science data), and the UK government uses it to plan new cycle lanes through its Rapid Cycleway Prioritisation Tool.

The photomap and reporting feature can show you other users’ recommendations about cycle infrastructure, including parking. And the photos can form the basis of persuasive campaigns for safer cycling, even if you don’t get directly involved in the campaigning.

Bicizen

A new initiative launched by an Austrian company with EU support , Bicizen is designed to log good moments as well as bad ones when cycling. It doesn’t have widespread uptake in the UK yet, but you can be a trailblazer!

Compared to the other projects here, Bicizen has more of a focus on your personal experience than infrastructure or serious collisions, with the opportunity to report happy cycling moments, collisions without injury, and near misses.

Widen My Path

Widen My Path allows you to suggest improvements to cycle infrastructure, or to support people who have already made suggestions.

Over 200,000 suggestions have been made on the app already. Local councils actually use it, as seen in this quote from a report by Surrey County Council:

“Data from ‘Widen My Path’ [… has] been reviewed and subsequently informed the measures that are required at specific locations.”

FixMyStreet

At the time of writing, over 60,000 reports submitted through FixMyStreet have been fixed in the past month. It’s the UK’s go-to app for letting your local council know about acute infrastructure problems like potholes or broken traffic lights, both of which can be big problems for cyclists.

Police collision reports

Finally, if you’ve been in a collision that causes injury, make sure you contact the police to add to the official STATS19 collision data. This is not exactly citizen science, but lots of citizen scientists make use of this, like Bikedata.

A couple of examples:

iNaturalist

With over 4 million users worldwide, iNaturalist allows anyone using the app to take a picture of any living thing, identify it with AI, and post it as a scientifically useful research data point. All the data gathered is shared publicly online through GBIF.

UK river water quality monitoring

Retired professor Peter Hammond put a spotlight on sewage discharges into UK rivers, by using his own statistical modelling approach to show that illegal discharges were common all over the country. Since then, many projects have sprung up with local communities monitoring their own rivers to hold water companies to account.

Citizen science covers a wide range of activities. Sometimes citizens are used purely as “sensors” to gather data for professional scientific research, and sometimes a research question is proposed, researched, written up, and used as evidence entirely by non-academic scientists.

Citizen science is easy to apply to London’s cycling scene. With millions of journeys happening every day, cyclists can easily contribute photos, road status updates, and thoughts on infrastructure for many reasons. Most importantly, citizen science allows communities of cyclists to band together and present strong cases to local councils to advocate for better infrastructure.

Most of the projects mentioned in this blog are run by professionals at companies or nonprofits, with participating members of the public acting as data gatherers. Participants can find issues and see where others have marked them, but any data analysis or advocacy resulting from the data is carried out by the organisers.

The exceptions are Cyclescape and Widen My Path. These initiatives put participants front and centre, asking them to propose their own solutions and giving the opportunity to join a community in gathering data, building a case, and lobbying for change. This makes Cyclescape and Widen My Path “co-created” CS projects.

See more about what cycling citizen science projects are already active in London in these other articles.

Even the strongest of nerves get twanged on our cycle paths every now and then

Cycling in London is very popular, accounting for 1.5 million journeys per day in 2025. And the city is home to the world’s oldest cycling club, Hackney’s Pickwick Cycling Club.

But you would be right to be cautious:

• Almost 1000 cyclists were seriously injured in London in 2024; 3 were killed
• Safety is the biggest barrier to more cycling in London
• London has a less-joined up approach than other cities such as Paris with greater local powers; the cycle lane network is fragmented and borough-dependent
• Cycling in the UK suffers from gender and age inequality due to lack of safety
• And for the record… the single best thing you can do for your road safety on a bike is beware of lorries turning left into your path!

Maps like the one above from Bikedata, or London Cycling Campaign’s Dangerous Junctions map, have been made show where the most dangerous places are. Have a look at your local dodgy junction, how’s it doing?

Still, these maps don’t tell us everything. They only contain data from collisions which:

• Caused personal injury, AND
• Were reported to the emergency services.

(All collisions which cause personal injury are supposed to be reported to the police, but that doesn’t mean they are!)

If you’ve been in a collision that didn’t cause injury, like I have, then this feels like it’s missing something. Not to mention near-misses, which are about 2,000 times more frequent than actual collisions but are not usually reported.

Added to that, gender, age, and ethnic inequality in cycling could be contributing to biased under-reporting in certain areas.

Citizen science — data collection and research by everyday cyclists — is a great way to map road danger and near-misses. While there aren’t any super active near miss projects right now, there are plenty of initiatives where you can report them, and you can also get involved in campaigning to make them more prominent if you feel strongly. Just by reading this article, you’re making a difference!

Have a look at the other articles I’ve written for this project if you’re interested, and feel free to leave a like (clap) or comment, either on Facebook/LinkedIn or here, to support citizen science and my writing in a meaningful but very quick way!

Sorry if you came here because of the April Fools. I’ll write the fanfic if this gets 20 claps.

Citizen science means participating in research as a member of the public. In the case of cycling, submitting photos and reports through citizen science apps can help build momentum for policy and infrastructure changes.

This includes:

• Problems or potential improvements you spot, like that one spot where cars always park in the cycle lane
• Good cycle infrastructure that you’d like to tell other cyclists about
• Collisions, near misses, or conflicts
• Happy moments you had while cycling

Three highlights of London’s cycling citizen science

1. Cycle mapping: Bikedata combines police collision reports with citizen reports to create a complete cyclist’s guide to UK roads. How dangerous is your local junction?

2. Got a good idea? Widen My Path allows you to suggest where you’d like infrastructure improvements.

3. DIY research on Cyclescape: You can even get involved in a community of keen cycling campaigners and put together your own reports!

How to make a quick start

Download the CycleStreets app (iPhone/Android). It has the best cycle route planning engine in the UK, and it allows you to contribute to a huge network of photo observations of your cycling environment through its Photomap.

If you have another minute to spare, please do take this quick questionnaire to support this blog post and my Master’s project:

Cycling Citizen Science Mini-Questionnaire — Fill out form

Happy cycling and congratulations on your new scientific credentials!

If you’d like to know more about a specific topic, check out my other more in-depth articles.