This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. 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™. 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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
