Sexual themes are frequently used in science fiction or related genres. Such elements may include depictions of realistic sexual interactions in a science fictional setting, a protagonist with an alternative sexuality, a sexual encounter between a human and a fictional extraterrestrial, or exploration of the varieties of sexual experience that deviate from the conventional.
Science fiction and fantasy have sometimes been more constrained than non-genre narrative forms in their depictions of sexuality and gender. However, speculative fiction (SF) and soft science fiction also offer the freedom to imagine alien or galactic societies different from real-life cultures, making it a tool to examine sexual bias, heteronormativity, and gender bias and enabling the reader to reconsider their cultural assumptions.
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 civil rights movement and the emergence of a counterculture. New Wave and feminist science fiction authors imagined cultures in which a variety of gender models and atypical sexual relationships are the norm, and depictions of sex acts and alternative sexualities became commonplace.
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 popular literature, science fiction and fantasy often seem even more constrained than non-genre literature by their conventions of characterization and the effects that these conventions have on depictions of sexuality and gender. Sex is often linked to disgust in science fiction and horror, and plots based on sexual relationships have mainly been avoided in genre fantasy narratives.Clute, John & Grant, John,The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, "Sex" p. 854, 1st Ed., (1997), Orbit, Great Britain, 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.
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 Darko Suvin has called "cognitive estrangement": the recognition that what we are reading is not the world as we know it, but a world whose difference forces us to reconsider our own world with an outsider's perspective.Darko Suvin. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, Yale Univ Pr: 1979 When the extrapolation involves sexuality or gender, it can force the reader to reconsider their heteronormative cultural assumptions; the freedom to imagine societies different from real-life cultures makes science fiction an incisive tool to examine sexual bias. In science fiction, such estranging features include technologies that significantly alter sex or reproduction. In fantasy, such features include figures (for example, mythological deities and heroic archetypes) who are not limited by preconceptions of human sexuality and gender, allowing them to be reinterpreted. Science fiction has also depicted a plethora of alien methods of reproduction and sex.
Uranian Worlds, by Eric Garber and Lyn Paleo, is an authoritative guide to science fiction literature featuring gay, lesbian, transgender, and related themes. The book covers science fiction literature published before 1990 (2nd edition), providing a short review and commentary on each piece.Eric Garber, Lyn Paleo Uranian Worlds: A Guide to Alternative Sexuality in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, 2nd Edition, G K Hall: 1990
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 equality of men and women Male- and female-dominated societies, including single-gender worlds Polyamory Changing gender roles Homosexuality and bisexuality Androgyny and sex changes Sex in virtual reality Other advances in technology for sexual pleasure such as teledildonics Asexuality Mpreg, an abbreviation of male pregnancyAmy 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"Within fan fiction, a number of subgenres are well recognized....mpreg, where a man gets pregnant." Sexual taboos and morality Sex in zero gravity Birth control and other, more radical measures to prevent overpopulation
Scholarly Approaches Academic analysis of sexuality in speculative fiction often draws on frameworks from queer theory, feminist theory, and posthumanism. Scholars have used these approaches to examine how speculative narratives challenge or reproduce norms surrounding gender, embodiment, and desire. For example, theorists such as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick have influenced readings of speculative fiction that emphasize the constructed and performative nature of gender and sexuality, while the work of Michel Foucault has informed analyses of how sexual norms are shaped by discourse and power.
In addition, scholarship in science and technology studies and posthumanism, including Donna Haraway's concept of the cyborg, has been used to explore representations of artificial reproduction, non-human bodies, and technologically mediated intimacy. Studies such as Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction (2008), edited by Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon, and Bodies of Tomorrow (2007) examine how speculative fiction engages with questions of embodiment, identity, and biopolitics.
Scholars have also emphasized the importance of historical and cultural context, noting that depictions of sexuality in speculative fiction often reflect broader social debates, including feminist movements, LGBTQ+ rights, and changing attitudes toward reproduction and family structures. More recent research expands the field beyond Anglophone literature to include global and intersectional perspectives, as well as analyses of film, television, and fan cultures.
SF literature
Proto SF
True History, a Greek-language tale by Assyrian writer Lucian (120-185 CE), has been called the first ever science fiction story.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 The narrator is suddenly enveloped by a typhoon and swept up to the Moon, which is inhabited by a society of men who are at war with the Sun. After the hero distinguishes himself in combat, the king gives him his son, the prince, in marriage. The all-male society reproduces (male children only) by giving birth from the thigh or by growing a child from a plant produced by planting the left testicle in the Moon's soil.Wayne R. Dynes, Warren Johansson, William A. Percy, Stephen Donaldson Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, Pg. 752, Garland Publishing Inc: 1990
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. 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).Garber & Paleo, "Carmilla" p. 76
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.
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. 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. 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. Implied or disguised sexuality was as important as that which was openly revealed. In this sense, genre science fiction reflected the social mores of the day, paralleling common prejudices. This was particularly true of pulp fiction, more so than literary works of the time.
H. P. Lovecraft seminal short story, "The Call of Cthulhu", first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928, launched what developed into the Cthulhu Mythos, a shared fictional universe taken up by various other writers and considerably affecting the entire field of Fantasy. Bobby Derie's 2014 book Sex and The Cthulhu Mythos treats extensively the various sexual aspects of this Mythos:"H. P. Lovecraft was one of the most asexual beings in history - at least by his own admission. Whether we accept this view of his own sexual instincts or not, there is no denying that sexuality - normal and aberrant - underlies a number of significant tales in the Lovecraft oeuvre. The impregnation of a human woman by Yog-Sothoth in "The Dunwich Horror" and the mating of humans with strange creatures from the sea in "The Shadow over Innsmouth" are only two such examples."Sex and The Cthulhu Mythos examines the significant uses of love, gender, and sex in the work of H. P. Lovecraft, moving on to some of his leading disciples and noting that "The work of such significant writers of the Lovecraft tradition as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Ramsey Campbell, W. H. Pugmire, and Caitlín R. Kiernan, features far more explicit sexuality than anything Lovecraft could have imagined". Finally, Derie goes on to study sexual themes in other venues, such as Lovecraftian occultism, Japanese manga and anime, and even Lovecraftian fan fiction.
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." Recreational sex is promoted, often as a group activity; what passes for a religious ceremony consists of six men and six women meeting once a week to hold an "orgy porgy". To prepare for this life, little boys and girls are made to play sexual games with each other as part of the official curriculum in what passes for kindergartens and elementary schools. On the other hand, marriage, pregnancy, natural birth, and parenthood are considered too vulgar to be mentioned in polite conversation. An important part of the plot concerns the Savage Reservation in New Mexico, where marriage, pregnancy and motherhood are still practiced by the local Native Americans. Linda, a woman from 'civilized' London who was marooned there and sticking to her accustomed sexual mores, is persecuted as "a whore" by the local women whose husbands she seduced. John, Linda's son who grew up on the Reservation but was always alienated from its society, comes to London and there falls deeply in love with a girl - seeking a happy loving consummation with her and then violently assaulting her from jealousy when she behaves according to her society's sexual mores.