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For centuries, sailors enduring months-long voyages would gaze out at sea mammals sunning themselves and think the thought as old as thought itself:
“Would.”
Even famously reliable Christopher Columbus—[jerkoff hand motion]—claims in his journal to have seen mermaids (almost certainly half-ton, gray-skinned manatees) though the legend goes much further back. Seductive aquatic creatures luring sailors to a watery death is a story that pretty much originated with sailing itself. Isolate men on a ship, send them into a vast and vacant sea, and, well, they’re going to see some stuff. Anyone watching is going to see some stuff.
Some stuff is going to happen.
This frustrated, misdirected desire isn’t something unique to sailors or men, and it’s not something that went away with better vision care. Being bored and horny is pretty much the human condition—one exacerbated by isolation and distance and anything else that removes us from the people and distractions we’ve assembled in our lives to forget this fact for as long as we can.
Which is why it’s odd that in our literature when we imagine the most extreme voyages we can—departing our planet and heading out into the stars—sexual desire too often gets left on Earth, and the most alien thing to be found can be the human characters.
Why would they possibly touch each other when there’s all this math to do?
In many science fiction novels, desire is treated as a technology too primitive for future worlds of warp drives and laser blasters. A thing humanity must evolve beyond (or at least learn to control) to reach our highest destiny as galaxy conquering space lords or whatever.
That’s maybe even understandable because, at least as far as NASA is willing to admit, no one has ever had sex in space. The question of what it would even look like is an entire field of study that actually does involve a fair amount of technological problem solving. But in fictional worlds with artificial gravity, there’s no reason to treat love as something that needs a few more rounds of testing before it’s launch-ready.
Even those canonical sci-fi writers who do feature sex in their works often approach it this way. Characters can’t just have sex but have to have something more like FutureSex
. Think Iain M. Banks and his gender switching, animal hybrids in Consider Phlebas or the time-hopping Shrike-screwing soldier in Dan Simmon’s Hyperion. You can imagine the engineers hiding in the closet taking notes on what the next release patch will fix.
So the sex that does occur in science fiction is commonly a little scary and a lot weird and arriving with more than a touch of an author’s particular kinks. Nothing inherently wrong with that, of course, but in the unfortunately male dominated world of sci-fi, it probably goes a long way toward explaining some of what’s happening here.
Science fiction is a genre of not only exploration but of explanation. Wish fulfillment, sure, but if the wishes came with an instruction manual. Here’s all this fantastic stuff, but first let me give you the terms and conditions. Stories of great speed told slowly. This creates a natural tension with sexual desire, which is by nature inexplicable. Because science fiction writers aren’t exactly wrong in recognizing sex as an older, stranger technology. Primal and irrational but also inevitable and fixed. Our first and forever.
But it doesn’t fit neatly into stories that value the science over the fiction.
Writing about love and sex also involves wish fulfillment, of course, but only after a whole lot more wish denial. Romance is slow stories told fast. And so the romantasy genre feels inevitable when sexual desire is more magic than logic, but that doesn’t mean the equivalent in science fiction is impossible. There’s a natural lane here for understanding what lust looks like in the vacuum of space. We just have to go back to those sailors trapped exploring their own era’s final frontier.
The sea was empty, so they saw sex. Because bored. Because horny.
And that’s as natural at lightspeed as it is sailing around the Mediterranean. No distance will separate us from our humanity. We won’t reject our desires simply because no amount of data can—or should—explain them. We were bored and horny when we left our first cave, and we’ll be bored and horny when we leave this planet, whatever we find. Because while we might be in awe of our sci-fi worlds, to our characters they’re as unremarkable as a Tuesday night at Applebees. Another thing to be endured before they get another chance to get off.
It’s human nature then, now, and always.
No one is arguing our heroes should look out the windows of their starship and see space mermaids, but they should at least recognize a human face reflected in the glass. They should still take a moment between outrunning galactic empires or slaughtering alien civilizations to remember they have bodies. And having one of those is as strange and terrifying as anything else in the universe.
Once writers start from that understanding, sci-mantasy (Science-friction? No? Fine.) will pretty much take care of itself. Because in space, where nothing is alive, there’s only one way to assure ourselves that we are. And it’s not math.
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Any Time but This Time by Adam Peterson is available via Mad Creek Books.
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