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For ages, sailors on lengthy voyages would occasionally spy sea mammals basking in the sun and entertain a thought as old as contemplation itself:
“Would.”
Even the famously steady Christopher Columbus—[gesture]—insists in his journal that he saw mermaids (though most scholars agree they were probably hefty gray-manatees) and the lore has a longer pedigree still. The tale of alluring aquatic beings steering sailors toward a fatal trap is a tale born from seafaring itself. Isolated crew, a boundless, empty ocean, and—inevitably—eye-catching phenomena. Something is bound to unfold.
Something will occur.
This restless, misdirected longing isn’t a trait confined to sailors or men, and it didn’t vanish with clearer sight. Boredom and arousal are almost universal human conditions—amplified by isolation, distance, and anything else that parts us from the people and diversions we’ve built to forget this fact for as long as we can.
Which makes it peculiar that, in literature, when we imagine the most audacious journeys—leaving Earth to pursue the stars—sexual longing too often remains tethered to Earth, and the strangest things we encounter are the human beings themselves.
Why would they ever touch when there’s so much calculus and data to grind through?
In many science fiction novels, desire is treated as a technology too primitive for futures filled with warp drives and photon weapons. A trait humanity must outgrow (or at least master) to attain our most exalted destiny as galaxy-spanning dominators or whatever grand fantasy is proposed.
That stance is perhaps understandable, given that, at least as far as NASA will admit, no one has had sex in space. The question of what it would look like is an entire research field, laden with practical engineering puzzles. But in imagined worlds with artificial gravity, there’s little reason to regard love as something needing a few extra test flights before launch-ready status.
Even among canonical science fiction writers who do include sex in their works, the approach often leans this way. Characters don’t just have sex; they have something closer to FutureSex. Consider Iain M. Banks and his gender shifts, the animal hybrids in Consider Phlebas, or the time-jumping Shrike-fondness of Dan Simmons’s Hyperion. You can imagine engineers skulking away to take notes on what the next patch will fix.
Thus the sex that appears in science fiction tends to be a little terrifying, wonderfully odd, and tinged with the author’s own peculiar quirks. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, of course, but in the overwhelmingly male-dominated field of sci-fi, it probably goes a long way toward explaining many of the patterns we observe.
Science fiction is a genre concerned not only with exploration but with explanation. Wish fulfillment, yes, but often accompanied by a manual of terms and conditions. Here comes all this marvel, but first the rules: stories of rapid motion told with deliberation. That setup creates a natural friction with sexual longing, which, by its nature, defies explanation. Because science fiction writers aren’t entirely wrong to recognize sex as an older, stranger technology—primal and irrational yet inevitable and enduring. Our first and enduring impulse.
Yet this doesn’t fit neatly into narratives that prize the science over the story.
To write about love and sex is, of course, to engage in wish fulfillment, but only after a substantial period of wish-denial. Romance tends to compress time: slow-burning emotions conveyed quickly. And so the romantasy genre feels inevitable when desire behaves more like magic than logic, but that doesn’t imply a science-fiction analogue is impossible. There’s a natural lane here for mapping what lust looks like in the vacuum of space. We simply need to revisit those sailors who were exploring the edge of their era’s final frontier.
The sea’s emptiness prompted them to notice sex. Because they were bored. Because they were aroused.
And that, at lightspeed as much as on the shores of the Mediterranean, is a natural consequence of our humanity. No distance will sever us from our core. We won’t discard our desires simply because no quantity of data can—or should—explain them. We were bored and aroused when we left the first cave, and we’ll be bored and aroused when we leave this world, whatever we discover. Because while we may marvel at our science-fictional cosmos, to the characters they’re as unremarkable as a Tuesday night at a casual restaurant. Another obstacle to endure before they get another chance to experience pleasure.
In short, it’s part of human nature, then, now, and forever.
No one argues that our heroes should merely peer out at the vastness and glimpse space mermaids; they should at least glimpse a human face reflected in the glass. They should still pause between outrunning interstellar empires or eradicating alien civilizations to remember that they possess bodies. And to inhabit one of those bodies is as strange and terrifying as any other facet of the universe.
Once writers start from that premise, sci-mantasy (Science-friction? Sure—let’s go with that) tends to take care of itself. Because in a realm where nothing is alive, there’s only one way to prove we exist. And it isn’t mathematics.
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Any Time but This Time by Adam Peterson is available via Mad Creek Books.
