One of the most grisly scenes of human affection that I can remember reading as a teenager comes halfway through Greg Bear’s ‘wet’ nanotech novel Blood Music. The book itself is a trove of bodyhorror but the sentence which ends the scene in which a couple, overcome by the noocytes in their bloodstream, lie in each others arms and succumb to the infection, is remarkable for its understated awfulness:

“Edward and Gail grew together on the bed, substance passing through clothes, skin joining where they embraced and lips where they touched”

Blood Music was one of the first works to speculate around the implications of nanotechnology, with Bear’s stomach-turning description of human flesh felled by nanobots predating Eric Drexler’s “grey goo” scenario by several years. In doing so it unfortunately fell in line with the notion of science fiction — SF — being a genre which predicts the future; a seductive idea which has led to far too many media articles in the vein of “Arthur C Clark Wrote About Communication Satellites in 1945, And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!” As befits its origins SF’s predictive capabilities are common associated with science and technology, but are rarely applied to the future/s of sex . This is a shame because the very reasons why SF fails spectacularly as a technical foresight tool are also why it has fascinating things to say about sexualities and the societies they sit in.

To begin: SF is not specifically in the business of setting up futures. It sets up differences by asking “What if?” This distinction between prediction and speculation is critical for understanding what science fiction is, and what it does. Literary critics Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson describe how SF works by jolting the reader out of their own environment to make the world that they live in strange and unfamiliar, thus offering a new perspective on how it works. Suvin argued that two tools are used to apply the jolt. Firstly, a form of cognitive estrangement is smeared on the SF world. “He awoke — and wanted Mars”. Something is different — the name of our protagonist, the part of the galaxy they work in, the colour of their coffee — which alerts the reader that this is not their world. But, secondly, a coat of epistemological gravity is also applied — that tug of realism which drags and tethers this unrealness back to the reader’s reality. Douglas Quail is — at least at the beginning of We Can Remember It For You Wholesale — a low-level clerk, a “miserable little salaried employee”. We feel how much he hates his job.

When the space between estrangement and gravity collapses then SF stops working, as seen in Charles Stross’s frustration that the speculative set-up which he planned for the final book in his Halting State trilogy was actually playing out in real time as the NSA revelations unfolded. For science and technology, these imaginaries are relatively binary — diagetic prototypes aside, either a faster-than-light drive exists or it does not, and if it doesn’t then that’ll do nicely for an estrangement post-it note to be stuck onto a story to make it speculative. But the social stuff — politics, economics, society, sex — is far messier; what is outlandish and unimaginable to one person is the mundane daily life of another. All of which is to say that the treatment of sex and sexuality in SF gets very interesting, very quickly.

Save the off-world colony, get the girl

For much of the classic Golden Age SF, technology worked perfectly well as a distancing device, thankyouverymuch. Many of the major authors from this era —Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert A Heinlein — had originally trained in the sciences before moving into writing, and built on their knowledge and experience to play with new forms of science that were emerging. Yet as fantastic as many of their new (off)worlds were, the racial and gender politics to be found on them remained firmly conservative: easier to think up the impact of the first nightfall in 2049 years on a planet surrounded by six suns that to imagine female engineers.

In part this reflected the make-up of the writers — scientists, yes, but also predominantly white men who wrote for each other. Isaac Asimov had argued loudly against putting female identified interests in a genre which he claimed was the preserve of male readers. But these patterns were exacerbated by the infrastructures through which these fictions were moulded, channeled and disseminated. Through his tenure as editor of the highly influential publication Astounding Science Fiction, John W Campbell Jr was credited with dragging the standards of the genre, kicking and wailing, from trashy pulp into a popular literary form. He nurtured his stable of prominent authors, encouraging them — pushing them — to develop the quality of their writing should they want to be published in his magazine. Yet he also applied other gatekeeping standards, refusing to publish Samuel Delany’s story Nova because the lead character was black, and was infamous for his “sexist thinking about representations of women in SF”.

Many of the tropes of the Golden Age were picked apart and set on fire in later strands of SF writing, yet stories in the vein of “Straight White Dudes Go To Mars” persist in contemporary mainstream Hollywood SF. Canon movies set up their estrangement through astonishing visual spectacle — think of the darkened burning cityscape of 2019 Los Angeles — yet apply their epistemological gravity like a hammer. Stories are grounded through the lives of protagonists who are predominantly heterosexual, white and male, and rewarded for being so: John Anderton, Rick Deckard, Douglas Quaid and Thomas Anderson all finish their adventures by smooching a pretty lady (let us not think about the various fates of Ellen Ripley for now).

“And you’re from outer space?” “Yes. And we’re all lesbians”.

If SF’s main party trick is setting up distance between “here” and “there”, what happens when sex gets used as that distancing device? This can sometimes just be an easy-on-the-male-gaze form of shorthand, a saliva-stained post-it note to be slapped on to say “This world is not your world because in your world no-one you know would be wearing silver lurex shorts that skimpy”. Fetish kit in particular is a nifty way of denoting other(world)ness, signalling both timelessness and sexxxyness — think of the excellent boots ‘n’ low-cut top combo worn by Terence Stamp as General Zod. The Matrix has fun with this conceit of kinkwear being the preferred clothing of speculative worlds: all those who are aware that they are just uploaded brains in a virtual environment choose to doll up in supertight PVC and leather, yet are forced to wear unflattering natural fibres in the “real” world.

Hypersexuality, sexualisation, and pornification can also be used to create and explain the politics and ideologies of new worlds. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is set in the near future, but with enough time elapsed to have given rise to the Pornomarts and Feels-on-Wheels which are amongst the first things to be shut down by the Christian fundamentalist shock-troops who tear down the USA and build up Gilead in its place. Pervasive pornography gets set up as a key plot point in Charlie Brooker’s Fifteen Million Merits, implying that at this stage in the future not only is hardcore material everywhere but people are so sick of the damn stuff that they would rather pay than watch it.

Adding sexual othering of bodies and cultures as a way of stretching out distance can be a fraught enterprise. The location of minorities and marginalised groups can work as a rapid positioning device, with the treatment of Valerie and other LGBT characters in V for Vendetta being used to flesh out the dystopian aspects of that world. This still relies, though, on assumptions about the set of norms in play and who abides by them. Representations of sex work in SF often get tangled up in this way. In Firefly, whilst Inara’s profession as a “Companion” is presented as highly respectable on the core planets, Amy Chinn argues that this acceptability is predicated on a “traditional pre-feminist representation of femininity [that] firmly endorses the link between romantic love and sexual monogamy”.

Descriptions of otherness are also bound by the author’s imagination. Although members of the Culture in Iain M Bank’s eponymous series are able to switch between being male or female on a whim, they still operate within the gender binary with nearly no other genderqueering of bodies or identities; so too does the computer in Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which moves only between the states of “Mike” and “Michelle”. Yet the activities of the Culture are more substantial than mere add-ons — they are fundamental aspects of that system, exploring the “what if?” of shifting, if not fluid, gender and sexual identities and offering up the possibility that in an ideal world, this flux might be desirable. Even the slimmest and schlockiest of representations can be repurposed by audiences, clichés being co-opted back by the folks whose lives gave rise to them- see Megan Rose Gedris’ comic I Was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space, which is exactly as much fun as it sounds.

New worlds, radical desires

The feminist, queer, and Afrofuturist writings which emerged in the 1960s reversed the polarities of earlier Hard SF, using the genre’s own conventions to explore questions of sex, gender, race and power, and even the institution of science itself. In this work, alternative and radical visions of sex and gender aren’t just part of the list that, together with blue coffee and names starting with X, set up the new worlds as being different. The new visions are the new world and form the questions at its heart: what if humans were able to reproduce artificially? What if a young African-American woman time-travels back to a plantation in the time of slavery? What if a “normal” male-female couple are actually abnormal?

These stories still carry the distancing tools of SF. Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is chock-full of the things: it is set on the world of Winter, a planet in constant polar vortex; space travel and time-jumping are real; and people can simultaneously communicate with each other between any two points in the universe by using ansible devices. Yet the core of the story is bound up in the people of Winter who spend most of their time as asexual “potentials”, only taking on male or female attributes during the monthly ‘kemmer’ period of high fertility, and is told by the outsider narrator who holds a fixed-male identity (“In permanent kemmer? A society of perverts?”).

The otherworldness of SF — a galaxy far far away — can provide a safe space to unpick radical politics and sexual desires; not the emphatically un-radical “natural order” of female submission in John Norman’s Gor series, but the elisions of queer, feminist, class and race politics which fills Samuel Delany’s writing. His 1984 space opera, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand explores themes of power and discrimination, and fluid forms of gender and sexuality. It also contains scenes of quite marvellous rudeness that “bordered on porn” (as one blushing reviewer writes) that might have been struggled to be published as a more mainstream form of literary fiction with its depictions of queer sex, interspecies sex, and then some more sex on top of that. Whilst the novel is certainly as sexually explicit as anything found on the top shelf, it also sets up clever questions about identity, language, power, and boffing, and creates a richly populated world through which to answer them.

On the circuit

What then of the speculative technologies of sex? As yet, there appears to be no adult toy manufacturer equivalent of John Underkoffler, ready to insert XXX diagetic prototypes into adult movies. The types of devices more readily seen in the booths at the ANME expo rarely get a look-in in mainstream SF films, and on the few occasions when they do — Barbarella’s “Excessive Machine”, Sleeper’s “Orgasmatron Booth” — they are there more as comic relief than forms of world-building. In their place are any number of sexbots which perform the double trick of distancing (“A ROBOT”) and grounding (“Oh, but like a human”), and can be set up as any form of metaphor around bodies and identities.

Beyond the bots there are also surprisingly thoughtful uses of SF technologies which give texture to worlds where the distance is established through social norms. Take Logan’s Run, inhabited by a population all destined to expire in their prime. Enter a technology with the perfect use-scenario for rich, bored, beautiful and hedonistic youngsters: The Circuit, a cross between Grindr, Tinder, Chatroulette, Makerbot and late night Channel 4 experimental programming, which allows its users to scroll through potential hook-ups.

SF birth control also demonstrates the place — and control — of reproduction in new worlds. The women of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World knock back cups of hot contraceptives and wear Malthusian belts carrying regulation supplies of the same; all sensible measures to control fertility in a society where sex is a recreational social activity, not a reproductive one, and intimate romantic relationships are pariah. The use of contraception is also enforced by the onboard medic in Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero, and by the state in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, to control the reproductive capacity of both societies. And sexual health draws down moral judgement too — Philip K Dick’s story The Pre-Persons was published a year after Roe vs Wade as a response. In it, the pro-life Dick brings forth a world in which abortion is legal up until the point when a person can do algebra — around the age of 12 — and the consequences when a 35-year old man pretends to have forgotten all of his algebra as protest.

“Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be.” (Samuel Delany)

Science fiction doesn’t predict the future of sex or technology any more than reading the entrails of pigoons does. But as a space of speculation and desire around sex and sexuality, SF is —unlike many of the universes it describes — unparalleled. Annalee Neuwitz asked why there seemed to be such a strong link between sci-fi geeks and kink, and the answer may lie in the heart of what the genre is and does. SF brings real and grounded desires, whether for technologies, social structures, politics or ethics, and pairs them with methods of distancing that allows them to be vocalised and inhabit whole spectacular worlds. In doing so, SF offers a playground to explore the messiness of what those desires mean and do, tethering the lived experiences of bodies, lives and identities into infinite and distant worlds.