Science fiction and sex

When a novel begins with the words, "The penis will be obsolete in five years," , one gets the idea that the interaction of sex and science fiction can be far more creative than pulp novels with scantily clad victims in the clutches of tentacled horrors.

Sexual concepts entered science fiction before the sexual revolution. Among the first, in 1935, was Olaf Stapledon with his novel Odd John. "It would be a stretch to say Farmer invented sexual science fiction (especially considering some of the people on this very list predate him), but he did shatter the mainstream notion that sex had no place in science fiction. His 1953 short story "The Lovers" was an overnight sensation for its sophisticated, intelligent depiction of love between a human and an alien, which he followed up with five more stories in a similar vein in his 1960 anthology Strange Relations.

When science fiction deals with sex, it most often treats it as a joyous activity, often with no concept of sin. It even may become a spiritual act, as in Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, or at least one that goes into an alternate state of consciousness, as with the "Orgy-Porgy" chant in Brave New World.

Alternatively, it can be treated with deep suspicion, although sex may be a privilege reserved to the elite.

Gender and identity

Varley's Steel Beach deals with a future in which people can easily change physical identity, including gender.

Sex and reproduction

One of the plot devices of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was to base the society on moving the reproductive process from the body and into a high-technology "hatchery", and making sex purely recreational -- and encouraged as one of the means of reducing social tension. "Mother" and "Father" have some of the connotation of "bastard" in our society, although variously with tinges of perversity and absurdity.

Incest and its relatives

Stapledon suggested that his advanced protagonist may have had a relationship with his mundane mother. Eventually, he concludes that relationships with normal humans would be too much like bestiality.

E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series has no explicit sex, but notes and conversations indicate that he may have had an unpublishable sequel to Children of the Lens in mind, for which sibling mating would be logical.