SEX AS A HARD PROBLEM IN SCIENCE FICTION, by David Lake

[1985]

I have a few comments about Russell Blackford’s views of sexuality in sf—both in his review of my Xuman novels and his article on sexuality in SF.

Blackford’s view of my work is generally favorable—sometimes perhaps too kind. But in his last two paragraphs he “blasts” my treatment of sexuality. He doesn’t like either the “casual eroticism” or the “bourgeois marriages.”

But the fact is that most humans enjoy both, and I don’t think there will be any change in this situation over the next thousand years (the period of my novels). By “bourgeois marriage” I take it that Blackford means simply “marriage.” There is no other kind really viable today; even the (non-bourgeois?) communist states of Russia and China are grimly devoted to permanent monogamy. And in fact, long-term pair-bonding (= marriage) is natural to the human species; it has been naturally-selected, and people who reject it tend to get eliminated from the population in the fairly short-run—i.e. they don’t produce as many viable offspring as the marriers. Especially if things get tougher (and I think they will), deviants will be weeded out.

As a matter of fact, like the vast majority of humans, I like marriage. It is the best kind of adjustment for long-term happiness, as I have found in my own life; I am sure it is here to stay; and that’s why I make it the ideal of my sf. As for non-marital sex, well, that’s nice too, especially as experimentation leading up to marriage. (By the way, I have not read Masters and Johnson. I was simply referring to masturbation, which needs no sexologists to teach us.)

The only real change we can make in marriage in the near future is to make it non-sexist. I entirely approve of that change. Women in fact are the essential human sex, and males are needed more peripherally, as fertilizers and protectors. Protectors mainly from other males, as Joanna Russ has rightly remarked. The trouble with us humans is that we have an unfortunate biological heritage. We are mammals, and in most mammals the males are bigger and more aggressive than the females. This paid off for a while, when we were tribal hunter-gatherers, but it doesn’t pay off now. I suspect that if we survive our present crisis, over the next few millennia a new species will replace Homo sapiens. The new species may well have a different pattern of sexuality.

I did not plan a Xuman series (Blackford is right about that); but when I had written Gods I found that that planet was still alive in my mind, and its culture was becoming clearer, so I had to write another novel. I would dearly love to write a third, but the only rational plot I can think of would be a racial clash between multiplying human migrants and native Xumans. That story would be, to me, rather a depressing one—too much like umpteen countries in our present world, including probably, over the next fifty years, Australia. Of course I could write of the emergence of a new human species, perhaps influenced by Xuman sexual patterns. But it’s really very hard to do a new human species—I think all attempts so far are brilliant fakes. Even The Left Hand of Darkness (a lovely book) centers on a fake—the Gethenians are really all men, as some readers have noticed; and Le Guin flinches from the physicalities of Gethenian sex where they would be appropriate (I agree with Blackford on that).

Yes, sex is a hard problem in sf....