Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex

The youngest writer to be named a Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, author Joe Haldeman has regularly earned awards over his forty-three-year career. His novels The Forever War and Forever Peace both made clean sweeps of the Hugo and Nebula awards, and he has won three more Hugos and Nebulas for other novels and shorter works. Haldeman also won the Rhysling Award three times for best science fiction poem of the year. In 2012, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. The final novel in a trilogy, Earthbound, was published in 2011 (after Marsbound and Starbound). Director-producer Ridley Scott bought the movie rights to The Forever War.

Haldeman’s next novel will be Work Done for Hire. When he’s not writing or teaching—a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he has taught every fall semester since 1983—he paints, bicycles, and spends as much time as he can out under the stars as an amateur astronomer. He’s been married for forty-seven years to Mary Gay Potter Haldeman.

Jane Yolen, often called “the Hans Christian Andersen of America,” is the author of more than three hundred books, most (but not all) for children. Her books and stories have won two Nebula awards, a World Fantasy Award, a Caldecott Medal, three Golden Kite awards, three Mythopoeic awards, two Christopher Medals, a Jewish Book Award, and a nomination for the National Book Award, among others. She is also the winner (for body of work) of the Kerlan Award, the World Fantasy Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Grand Master award, the Skylark Award from the New England Science Fiction Association, the Catholic Library’s Regina Medal, and the 2012 de Grummond Medal. Six colleges and universities have given her honorary doctorates. For more information, visit her website at: www.janeyolen.com.

Okay, Joe: let’s see… Interspecial marriage love poem, at least three of the following words need to be used (and one of them in an unusual way): centerfold, pouch, larder, ruby, increment, sacrament, moon, engorge. A specific time period. The poem to be in a rhymed, traditional format (sonnet, villanelle, etc.) and not more than twenty-five lines or less than eight.

Want to play?

On either of our worlds our love would be obscene. But on free Ariel the hymns of marriage play in any key.

Your three breasts, the changing number of your limbs, the slippery centerfold that is the nexus of our love—my human sacraments never could apply. Your many sexes would confuse the law; our love incense the natives.

But on Ariel our marriage can have no impediments. For the space of one moon’s wax and wane, we are man and something. Let us move apace.

Let them tut, and mutter “Apples, oranges”—

I measure time by how a body changes.

If you are up for it, another poetic challenge to go along with the first. This time a human involved (somehow) in another species’ sexual activity—observer or commentator or involved in the act but not the actual other partner. Use at least two color words, one word from nature, and a set amount of time. Again the poem needs to be in a traditional rhymed pattern, but NOT a sonnet. Oh yes—there should be a pun somewhere in the poem, though it can be quite disguised and may be a second language pun.

Okay; I guess it’s time for me to issue a challenge. A rhymed poem with nine stanzas, describing an alien sex act that is not being performed for procreation or (primarily) pleasure. The first and last stanzas are introduction and summation; each of the middle (presumably short) stanzas concerns one of these seven senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, interoceptive (thirst, hunger, pain, nausea, suffocation), and proprioceptivity (equilibrium or kinesthesia), in any order. Alien POV.