Sex and sexuality in speculative fiction
The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. (May 2012) |
Part of a series on |
Sex and sexuality in speculative fiction |
---|
Sexual themes are frequently used in
Science fiction and
Prior to the 1960s, explicit sexuality of any kind was not characteristic of genre speculative fiction due to the relatively high number of minors in the target audience. In the 1960s, science fiction and fantasy began to reflect the changes prompted by the
There is also science fiction erotica, which explores more explicit sexuality and the presentation of themes aimed at inducing arousal.
Critical analysis
As genres of
In speculative fiction, extrapolation allows writers to focus not on the way things are (or were), as non-genre literature does, but on the way things could be different. It provides science fiction with a quality that
Uranian Worlds, by
Themes explored
Some of the themes explored in speculative fiction include:
- Sex with aliens, machines and sex robots
- Reproductive technology including cloning, artificial wombs, parthenogenesis, and genetic engineering
- Sexual equalityof men and women
- single-gender worlds
- Polyamory
- Changing gender roles
- Homosexuality and bisexuality
- sex changes
- Sex in virtual reality
- Other advances in technology for sexual pleasure such as teledildonics
- Asexuality
- Sexual taboosand morality
- Sex in zero gravity
- Birth control and other, more radical measures to prevent overpopulation
SF literature
Proto SF
In other proto-SF works, sex itself, of any type, was equated with base desires or "beastliness," as in Gulliver's Travels (1726), which contrasts the animalistic and overtly sexual Yahoos with the reserved and intelligent Houyhnhnms.[2] Early works that showed sexually open characters to be morally impure include the first lesbian vampire story "Carmilla" (1872) by Sheridan Le Fanu (collected in In a Glass Darkly).[12]
The 1915 utopian novel Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman depicts the visit by three men to an all-female society in which women reproduce by parthenogenesis.[13]
Pulp era (1920–30s)
During the pulp era, explicit sexuality of any kind was not characteristic of genre science fiction and fantasy. The frank treatment of sexual topics of earlier literature was abandoned.[2] For many years, the editors who controlled what was published, such as Kay Tarrant, assistant editor of Astounding Science Fiction, felt that they had to protect the adolescent male readership that they identified as their principal market.[2] Although the covers of some 1930s pulp magazines showed scantily clad women menaced by tentacled aliens, the covers were often more lurid than the magazines' contents.[2] Implied or disguised sexuality was as important as that which was openly revealed.[2] In this sense, genre science fiction reflected the social mores of the day, paralleling common prejudices.[2] This was particularly true of pulp fiction, more so than literary works of the time.[2]
In
One of the earliest examples of genre science fiction that involves a challenging amount of unconventional sexual activity is
War with the Newts, a 1936 satirical science fiction novel by Czech author Karel Čapek, concerns the discovery in the Pacific of a sea-dwelling race, an intelligent breed of newts – who are initially enslaved and exploited by humans and later rebel and go war against them. The book includes a detailed appendix entitled 'The Sex Life of the Newts', which examines the Newts' sexuality and reproductive processes in a pastiche of academese. This is one of the first attempts to speculate on what form sex might have among non-human intelligent beings.
In
Golden Age (1940–50s)
Regarding the aversion to sexual material in science fiction magazines well into the 1950s, Sam Moskowitz reported:
Writing in the December, 1945, Fantasy Times, Thomas S. Gardner, Ph.D., said: “Sex should be incorporated into science fiction as a standard life pattern and treated from all phases just as political systems are discussed.... But just mention sex and one has not only a figurative fight but a literal fight on his hands. Sex is very, very tabu, and can cause the most violent disagreements possible. Just why that is so is hard to understand.” G. Legman, erotica authority, presented his theory. “The reason for this [aversion to sex] is neither due to oversight nor external censorship, but the fact that the largest percentage of the audience for … pulp science fiction literature is composed of adolescent boys (who continue reading it even after they are grown up), who are terrified of women, sex, and pubic hair.”[17] The foregoing might explain the policy that kept sex out of science fiction, but it fails to explain the absolute rejection of such material until Philip José Farmer’s The Lovers. The answer most probably is that science fiction is a literature of ideas. The people who read it are entertained and even find escape through mental stimulation. Sex, vulgar or artistic, is available to them in countless forms if they wish it, but the type of intellectual speculation they enjoy is presented only in science fiction.[18]
As the readership for science fiction and fantasy began to age in the 1950s, writers were able to introduce more explicit sexuality into their work.
Philip José Farmer wrote The Lovers (1952), arguably the first science fiction story to feature sex as a major theme, and Strange Relations (1960), a collection of five stories about human/alien sexual relations. In his novel Flesh (1960; expanded 1968), a hypermasculine antlered man ritually impregnates legions of virgins in order to counter declining male fertility.
Theodore Sturgeon wrote many stories that emphasised the importance of love regardless of the current social norms, such as The World Well Lost (1953), a classic tale involving alien homosexuality, and the novel Venus Plus X (1960), in which a contemporary man awakens in a futuristic place where the people are hermaphrodites.
When Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters was originally published in 1951, it was censored by the publisher to remove various references to sex. The opening scene, where the protagonist is called urgently to HQ on an early morning hour, was re-written to remove all mention of his being in bed with a girl he had casually picked up. The published version did mention that the book's alien invaders cause human beings whose bodies they take over to lose sexual feeling – but removed a later section mentioning that after some time on Earth the invaders "discovered sex" and started engaging in wild orgies and even broadcasting them on TV in areas under their control. Thirty years later, with changing mores, Heinlein published the book's full, unexpurgated text. Heinlein's time-travel short story All You Zombies (1959) chronicles a young man (later revealed to be intersex) taken back in time and tricked into impregnating his younger, female self before he underwent a sex change. He then turns out to be the offspring of that union, with the paradoxical result that he is both his own mother and father. In Time Enough for Love (1973), Heinlein's recurring protagonist Lazarus Long – who never grows old and has an extremely long and eventful life – travels backward in time to the period of his own childhood. As an unintentional result, he falls in love with his own mother. He has no guilt feeling about pursuing and eventually consummating that relationship – considering her simply as an extremely attractive young woman named Maureen who just happens to have given birth to him thousands of years ago (as far as his personal timeline is concerned). The sequel, To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987) takes place after Maureen had discovered the true identity of her lover – and shows that for her part, she was more amused than shocked or angry.
Poul Anderson's 1958 novel War of the Wing-Men, centers on a species of winged intelligent creatures and sexual differences are central to its plot. Of the two mutually-hostile societies featured in the book, one practices monogamous marriage, while in the other there are every spring several days of a wild indiscriminate orgy – and a complete celibacy for the rest of the year. Ironically, both societies alike consider themselves chaste and the other depraved: "We keep faithful to our mates while they fuck around indiscriminately – disgusting!"; "We keep sex where it belongs, to one week per year where you are not really yourself. They do it all over the year- disgusting!". Humans who land on the planet intervene in the centuries-long war, by showing members of the two societies that they are not all that different from each other.
Another Poul Anderson novel of the same period, Virgin Planet (1959), deals in a straightforward manner with homosexuality and polyamory on an exclusively female world. The plot twist is that the protagonist is the only male on a world of women, and though quite a few of them are interested in sex with him, it is never consummated during his sojourn on the planet.
A mirror image was presented by A. Bertram Chandler in Spartan Planet (1969), featuring an exclusively male world, where by definition homosexual relations are the normal (and only) sexual relations. The plot revolves around the explosive social upheaval resulting when the planet is discovered by a spaceship from the wider galaxy, whose crew includes both men and women.
Until the late 1960s, few other writers depicted alternative sexuality or revised gender roles, nor openly investigated sexual questions.[2]
More conventionally, A. Bertram Chandler's books include numerous episodes of free fall sex, his characters (male and female alike) strongly prone to extramarital relations and tending to while away the boring months-long Deep Space voyages by forming complicated love triangles.
Plots and themes
New Wave era (1960–70s)
By the late 1960s, science fiction and fantasy began to reflect the changes prompted by the civil rights movement and the emergence of a counterculture. Within the genres, these changes were incorporated into a movement called "the
In Brian Aldiss's 1960 novel The Interpreter (in the US published as Bow Down to Nul), Earth is a backwater colony planet in the galactic empire of the Nuls, a giant, three-limbed, civilised alien race. The plot, dealing with complicated relations between humans and their Nul rulers, touches among other things on Nul sex. The Nul wear no clothes, but their equivalent of hands and arms are wide membranes which are normally held in a fixed position before the body, not moving even when the "fingers" are manipulating a tool. Only in a sexual context are the hands moved aside, to reveal the genital organs behind – the equivalent of humans undressing. In one scene, the human protagonist is able to tune to an erotic (or pornographic) Nul sensory device, made for internal Nul consumption and not intended for humans, which replicates the wild ecstasy felt by Nuls when daring to move aside their membrane hands and reveal their bodies to each other – similar in some ways to human sexual arousal but also very different.
Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966) both depict heterosexual group marriages and public nudity as desirable social norms, while in Heinlein's Time Enough for Love (1973), the main character argues strongly for the future liberty of homosexual sex.[2] Heinlein's character Lazarus Long, travelling back in time to the period of his own childhood, discovers, to his surprise and (initial) shame, a sexual desire of his own mother – but overcoming this initial shame, he comes to think of her simply as "Maureen", an attractive young woman who is far from indifferent to him.
In 1968, Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight launched the Dragonriders of Pern series, depicting the lives of humans living in close partnership with dragons. In a key scene, the young golden Dragon Queen takes off on her mating flight, pursued by the male dragons – until finally one of them catches up with her and they engage in passionate mating high up in the air, their necks and wings curled around each other. On the ground the woman and man who are these dragons' riders share their passion telepathically – and inevitably wildly embrace and kiss, embarking in parallel human mating.
Le Guin has written considerations of her own work in two essays, "Is Gender Necessary?" (1976) and "Is Gender Necessary? Redux" (1986), which respond to
The complicated plot of Roger Zelazny's 1970 fantasy novel The Guns of Avalon includes the protagonist Corwin meeting and making love to Dara, who seems a normal (and very attractive) young woman. But at the end of the book, when she walks the powerfully magical "Pattern" she is changing, her hair "crackling with static electricity" and then she seems to grow horns and hoofs, then becomes an enormous cat, then "a bright winged thing of indescribable beauty" followed by "a tower of ashes". Finally, she again becomes a recognizable Dara, but "tall and magnificent, both beautiful and somehow horrible at the same time, her arms raised in exultation and inhuman laughter flowing from her lips". Shocked, Corwin wonders "had I truly held, caressed, made love to - that?". While Corwin struggles with feeling mightily repelled and simultaneously attracted as never before, the changed Dara declares herself his mortal enemy and nemesis - and disappears. Zelazny's publishers had no problem with this final scene and its ambiguous sexual connotations, but they did object to an earlier sex scene - straightforward but explicit by 1970s American publishing standards - between Corwin and the seemingly normal Dara. Zelazny was amused when the book's editor asked him to remove it "so that sales to libraries would not be jeopardized".[20] That deleted scene has never appeared with the novel, even in later editions when mores had become more elastic, but has been printed for the first time in The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, Volume 3: This Mortal Mountain.[21]
In his 1972 novel The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov describes an alien race with three sexes, all of them necessary for sexual reproduction. One sex produces a form of sperm, another sex provides the energy needed for reproduction, and members of the third sex bear and raise the offspring. All three genders are included in sexual and social norms of expected and acceptable behavior. In this same novel, the hazards and problems of sex in microgravity are described, and while people born on the Moon are proficient at it, people from Earth are not.[22]
Similarly,
In Anderson's satirical story A Feast for the Gods, the Greek god
Feminist science fiction authors imagined cultures in which homo- and bisexuality and a variety of gender models are the norm.[2] Joanna Russ's award-winning short story "When It Changed" (1972), portraying a female-only lesbian society that flourished without men, and her novel The Female Man (1975), were enormously influential.[23] Russ was largely responsible for introducing radical lesbian feminism into science fiction.[24]
The bisexual female writer Alice Bradley Sheldon, who used
In Robert Silverberg's novelette The Way to Spook City the protagonist meets and has an affair with a woman named Jill, who seems completely human – and convincingly, passionately female human. Increasingly in love with her, he still has a nagging suspicion that she is in fact a disguised member of the mysterious extraterrestrial species known as "Spooks", who had invaded and taken over a large part of the United States. Until the end, he repeatedly grapples with two questions: Is she human or a Spook? And if she is a Spook, could the two of them nevertheless build a life together?
In the centuries-long, futile space war described in Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, the protagonist's increasing feeling of alienation is manifested, among other things, when he is appointed as the commanding officer of a "strike force" whose soldiers are exclusively homosexual, and who resent being commanded by a heterosexual. Later in the book, he finds that while he was fighting in space, humanity has begun to clone itself, resulting in a new, collective species calling itself simply Man. Luckily for the protagonist, Man has established several colonies of old-style, heterosexual humans, just in case the evolutionary change proves to be a mistake. In one of these colonies, the protagonist is happily reunited with his long-lost beloved and they embark upon monogamous marriage and on having children through sexual reproduction and female pregnancy – an incredibly archaic and old-fashioned way of life for most of that time's humanity.
John Varley, who also came to prominence in the 1970s, is another writer who examined sexual themes in his work.[2] In his "Eight Worlds" suite of stories and novels, humanity has achieved the ability to change sex quickly, easily and completely reversibly – leading to a casual attitude with people changing their sex back and forth as the sudden whim takes them. Homophobia is shown as initially inhibiting the uptake of this technology, as it engenders drastic changes in relationships, with bisexuality becoming the default mode for society. Sexual themes are central to the story "Options": a married woman, Cleo, living in King City, undergoes a change to male despite her husband's objections. As "Leo" she finds out what it means to be a man in her society and even becomes her husband's best friend. She also learns that people are adopting new names that are historically neither male nor female. She eventually returns to female as "Nile". Varley's Gaea trilogy (1979-1984) features lesbian protagonists.
Female characters in
Modern SF (post-New Wave)
After the pushing back of boundaries in the 1960s and 70s, sex in genre science fiction gained wider acceptance and was often incorporated into otherwise conventional science fiction stories with little comment.
In 1968 Jack Vance introduced the Planet of Adventure, inhabited by four different alien races, each with its own distinct society and culture. One of these – the predatory, part feline, part bird-like Dirdir – is described as having a very complex sexuality, with many different genders that leads to many different combinations of gender-compatibility when it comes to sex and breeding, though each breeding still seems to involve only two individuals.
In a later part, a very
In
Also set on an alien planet,
In
Quentin and Alice, the extremely shy and insecure protagonists of
The next sequence depicts animal sex: "He locked his teeth in the thick fur of her neck. It didn't seem to hurt her any, or at least not in a way that was easily distinguishable from pleasure. He caught a glimpse of Alice's wild, dark fox eyes rolling with terror and then half shutting with pleasure. Their tiny quick breathes puffed white in the air and mingled and disappeared. Her white fox fur was coarse and smooth at the same time, and she made little yipping sounds every time he pushed himself deeper inside her. He never wanted to stop".[30] When resuming their human bodies, Quentin and Alice are initially even more shy and awkward with each other, and only after going through some harrowing magical experiences are they finally able to have human sex.
In the
Sex has a major role in Harry Turtledove's 1990 novel A World of Difference, taking place on the planet Minerva (a more habitable analogue of Mars). Minervan animals (including the sentient Minervans) are hexameristically radially symmetrical. This means that they have six eyes spaced equally all around, see in all directions and have no "back" where somebody could sneak on them unnoticed. Females (referred to as "mates" by the Minervans) give birth to litters that consist of one male and five females, and the "mates" always die after reproducing because of torrential bleeding from the places where the six fetuses were attached; this gives a population multiplication of 5 per generation if all females live to adolescence and reproduce.
Females reach puberty while still hardly out of childhood, and typically experience sex only once in the lifetime – leading to pregnancy and death at birth-giving. Thus, in Minervan society male dominance seems truly determined by a biological imperative – though it takes different forms in various Minervan societies: in some females are considered expendable and traded as property, in other they are cherished and their tragic fate mourned – but still, their dependent status is taken for granted. The American women arriving on Minerva and discovering this situation consider it intolerable; a major plot element is their efforts, using the resources of Earth medical science, to find a way of saving the Minervan females and letting them survive birth-giving. At the end, they do manage to save a particularly sympathetic Minervan female – potentially opening the way for a complete upheaval in Minervan society.
Sex is also an important ingredient in another of
In the far future human colony of Frederik Pohl's The World at the End of Time, the common way to produce new humans is for a geneticist to take DNA samples from two or more "parents" – regardless of their being male or female. The DNA is then combined in a laboratory, and the parents arrive to pick up the baby nine months later. The few couples who prefer to do it in the old fashioned way, a man sexually impregnating a woman, are considered strange but harmless eccentrics.
Elizabeth Bear's novel Carnival (2006) revisits the trope of the single-gender world, as a pair of gay male ambassador-spies attempt to infiltrate and subvert the predominately lesbian civilization of New Amazonia, whose matriarchal rulers have all but enslaved their men.[32][33]
The fantasy world of
However, any attempt at a sexual act without the other person's sexual consent is punished immediately and severely. The formidable Captain Zamira Drakasha is raising her two children aboard, and is well able to combine being a deadly fighter and strict disciplinarian with her role as a loving and doting mother – but having children aboard is a privilege reserved to the Captain alone; other female pirates who get pregnant must leave their children on shore.
The plot of
In Lateral Magazine, The freedom of a genre: Sexuality in speculative fiction: 'In another twist of today's society, Nontraditional Love by Rafael Grugman (2008) puts together an upside-down society where heterosexuality is outlawed, and homosexuality is the norm. A 'traditional' family unit consists of two dads with a surrogate mother. Alternatively, two mothers, one of whom bares a child. In a nod to the always-progressive Netherlands, this country is the only country progressive enough to allow opposite sex marriage. This is perhaps the most obvious example of cognitive estrangement. It puts the reader in the shoes of the oppressed by modelling an entire world of opposites around a fairly "normal" everyday heterosexual protagonist. A heterosexual reader would not only be able to identify with the main character but be immersed in a world as oppressive and bigoted as the real world has been for homosexuals and the queer community throughout history.[34]
The 2018
They were not in the sort of elegant pose that artists use for erotica, with graceful lines displaying the female's curves and the male's muscles. They were in an earthier position. The woman — a girl, really — was on her back, with her knees drawn up to her chest and her head raised as her blank stone eyes stared perpetually at the man's belly. Her mouth was open as if panting. Her partner was kneeling between her legs, leaning forward over her, one hand grabbing her shoulder, the other occupied elsewhere. His eyes were closed, but his mouth was also open; Morvash thought it was more of a moan than a pant. He could almost smell the sweat. Neither wore any clothing whatsoever, nor were there any artfully-placed draperies or fig leaves to obscure the details. Had the wizard responsible for this petrifaction timed it deliberately, or had he caught them in this position by accident?" Eventually, it turns out that the couple were Prince Marek of Melitha and Darissa the Witch's Apprentice, who had fallen deeply in love with each other during a war that threatened their kingdom and who sought to celebrate victory with a bout of intensive love-making in the privacy of the Prince's bedchamber – but were surprised and turned into stone by a wizard in the employ of the Prince's envious sister, who sought to seize the throne.
Afterwards, the couple spent forty petrified years, dimly conscious, perpetually caught in their sexual act and forming a prized item in Lord Landessin's sculpture collection. When the wizard Morvash finally manages to bring them back to life, they find themselves lying on the floor in a big hall, surrounded by various other people who were also revived from petrifaction, and hasten to disengage and look for something to cover their nakedness. After various other adventures, they finally get married and fully clothed mount the throne of Melitha as King and Queen.
See also
Notes
- ^ Georgiadou, Aristoula & Larmour, David H.J in their introduction: "...Lucian's Verae Historiae ("True Histories"), a fantastic journey narrative considered the earliest surviving example of Science Fiction in the Western tradition."
- ^ Gunn, James E. denotes True History as "Proto-Science Fiction", p.249
References
- ^ a b c "Science Fiction and Fantasy". glbtq. Archived from the original on 28 May 2015.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r John Clute; David Langford; Peter Nicholls (August 20, 2012). "Themes: Sex". The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
- ISBN 1-85723-897-4
- ISBN 978-0-300-02375-6
- ISBN 978-0-8161-1832-8
- ^ Amy Cuomo, "The Scientific Appropriation of Female Reproductive Power in Junior", Extrapolation, v.39, n.4, pp. 352-363 (Winter 1988).
- ^ Robert J. Sawyer, Male Pregnancy
- ISBN 978-0-7864-2640-9.
- ^ "S.C. Fredericks- Lucian's True History as SF". www.depauw.edu. Retrieved 2024-03-07.
- ISBN 978-0-8240-6544-7
- ^ a b "Encyclopedia of Homosexuality - William A. Percy". Archived from the original on 2008-01-08.
- ^ Garber & Paleo, "Carmilla" p. 76
- ISBN 0-8139-1742-5.
- OCLC 56068806.
- ISBN 978-1-61498-088-9.
- ^ AncientHistory (2014-10-08). "Some Excerpts from "Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos"". r/Lovecraft. Retrieved 2024-03-07.
- ^ The Horn Book, Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography (University Books, 1964).
- ^ Moskowitz, Sam (1965), Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science Fiction; Hyperion, pg 398.
- ^ "The SF Site Featured Review: Dhalgren". www.sfsite.com. Retrieved 2024-03-08.
- ^ "...And Call Me Roger": The Literary Life of Roger Zelazny, Part 3, by Christopher S. Kovacs. In: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, Volume 3: This Mortal Mountain, NESFA Press, 2009.
- ^ The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, Volume 3: This Mortal Mountain, NESFA Press, 2009
- ISBN 978-0-553-28810-0.
- ISBN 0-8161-8573-5
- ISBN 978-0-8161-1832-8
- ^ "Elizabeth A Lynn". Fantastic Fiction. Retrieved 30 November 2016.
- ^ "Locus: Elizabeth A. Lynn: A New Spring". Locus Magazine. 1977. Retrieved 30 November 2016.
- ISBN 978-0-8122-3466-4.
- ^ Holden, Rebecca J, and Nisi Shawl. Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler. Seattle, WA : Aqueduct Press, 2013.
- ^ Ferreira, Maria Aline. "Symbiotic Bodies and Evolutionary Tropes in the Work of Octavia Butler." Science Fiction Studies 37. 3 (November 2010): 401-415.
- ^ "The Magicians", Book One, Chapter "Marie Byrd Land"
- ^ Clute, John. "SF Novels of the Year." The Orbit Science Fiction Yearbook Two. Ed. David S. Garnett. London: Futura Books, 1989. 310.
- ^ Newitz, Annalee (May 6, 2008). "Environmental Fascists Fight Gun-Loving Lesbians for Alien Technology". io9. Retrieved January 19, 2016.
- ^ Kincaid, Paul (2007). "Carnival by Elizabeth Bear". SF Site. Retrieved January 19, 2016.
- ^ The freedom of a genre: Sexuality in speculative fiction, Lateral Magazine, March 2016, Issue 8
External links
- Media related to Sexuality in speculative fiction at Wikimedia Commons
- Imagined Sexual Futures: reading list
- Feministsf.org: Feminist SF, Fantasy & Utopias: annotated bibliographies
- The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: Sex ("This entry is primarily about human sexual relationships and sexual stereotypes as themes in s[cience] f[iction]; i.e., it is primarily about Psychology and Sociology.")
- Review and cover page of "Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos" by Bobby Derie, 2014
- Online excerpts from "Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos" by Bobby Derie, 2014