Sex and sexuality in speculative fiction

[3] On the other hand, science fiction and fantasy can also offer more freedom than do non-genre literatures to imagine alternatives to the default assumptions of heterosexuality and masculine superiority that permeate some cultures.

[10][11] 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).

[15][16] In Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel Brave New World (1932), natural reproduction has been abolished, with human embryos being raised artificially in "hatcheries and conditioning centres."

Moore's 1934 story "Shambleau" begins in what seems a classical damsel in distress situation: the protagonist, space adventurer Northwest Smith, sees a "sweetly-made girl" pursued by a lynch mob intent on killing her and intervenes to save her.

But once he takes her to his room, she turns to be a disguised alien creature who spreads her inhuman long tendrils of hair, trapping Smith in a kind of psychic bondage and drawing out his life, and but for his partner arriving and killing her, it would have ended with his death.

Lewis's That Hideous Strength, a prominent place is given among the cast of villains to a monstrous lesbian – Miss Hardcastle, Security Chief of the satanic "Institute" which quite literally intends to take over the world.

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.

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.

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 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).

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.

[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.

Delany depicts, mostly with affection, characters with a wide variety of motivations and behaviours, with the effect of revealing to the reader the fact that these kinds of people exist in the real world.

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".

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.

He uses the computer to give himself a "super-virile" body, capable of a virtually unlimited number of erections and ejaculations – and then proceeds to transform his male enemies into beautiful women and induce in them a strong sexual desire towards himself.

Yet it brought him a subtle but unmistakable sense of fulfillment, of the completion of biological destiny, that had a kind of orgasmic finality about it, and left him calm and anchored at the absolute dead center of his soul".

Quentin and Alice, the extremely shy and insecure protagonists of Lev Grossman's fantasy novel The Magicians, spend years as fellow students at a School of Magic without admitting to being deeply in love with each other.

Lois McMaster Bujold explores many areas of sexuality in the multiple award-winning novels and stories of her Vorkosigan Saga (1986-ongoing), which are set in a fictional universe influenced by the availability of uterine replicators and significant genetic engineering.

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.

Sex is also an important ingredient in another of Harry Turtledove's works, the Worldwar Series of Alternative History, based on the premise of reptile extraterrestrials, nicknamed "The Lizards", invading Earth in 1942, forcing humans to terminate the Second World War and unite against this common enemy.

This leads to human beings in areas occupied by them feeling shocked and outraged by the "immorality" of their new masters - especially that the invaders, preferring hot climates, prioritize conquest of the Arab and Islamic countries.

However, when arriving on Earth they soon discover that ginger, an innocuous spice to humans, acts as a powerful narcotic on the invaders' physiology - and that it causes their females to become sexually active and emit pheromones, out of the normal season.

Glory Season (1993) by David Brin is set on the planet Stratos, inhabited by a strain of human beings designed to conceive clones in winter, and normal children in summer.

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.

In the series' cataclysmic scene of magical change, this becomes an evident physical fact, and Prince Tobin becomes Queen Tamír, shedding the male body and gaining a fully functioning female one.

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.