Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex

Introduction

ALIEN SEX, PUBLISHED IN 1990, was not so much about aliens and sex but rather about human sexuality in all its strange forms and how men and women interact. It included about half reprints—classics from between 1968 and 1985, and half original stories written around 1989. Science fiction has traditionally been a bit hesitant about dealing with sexual and gender themes. There have always been notable exceptions—Philip José Farmer’s “The Lovers” (1952), Theodore Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X, and the writings of James Tiptree, Jr., Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Gardner Dozois, Joanna Russ, Brian W. Aldiss, and John Varley. But in the past ten years, science fiction seems to have become a hothouse of speculation on sexuality and gender. This may be a result of the AIDS crisis or the extraordinary breakthroughs in bioengineering; for whatever reason, there are more writers than ever before exploring and questioning sexuality in their work. Nicola Griffith, Michael Blumlein, Eleanor Arnason, Geoff Ryman, and Richard Calder are just a few of the newer ones.

In contrast to Alien Sex, more of the stories in Off Limits deal with the physical dangers of sex. There appears to me a more overt awareness of the AIDS crisis and how it affects our relations to one another. At least four stories in Off Limits take place in societies beset by sexual plagues and focus on the personal and political ramifications of these plagues for individuals and society at large. Paranoia looms large, it brings out the worst in people, and generally, those in power have not made what most of us would consider the right decisions dealing with the crises. Instead of finding cures they blame the victims (sound familiar?). Brian Stableford, Elizabeth Hand, and Mike O’Driscoll have all imagined worlds in which the worst future has happened and adjustments have been made—usually to the detriment of females.

One thread running through the stories in Off Limits is the “prostitute as protagonist”—the outsider, as independent woman, as whore; prostitution as a means to avoid entanglements. Who has the power in these relationships and why? Is prostitution honorable? Why do men (and occasionally women) feel they need to pay for sex? No matter one’s views, the oldest profession is inextricably tied to gender politics and is here to stay—although some writers see future prostitutes biologically enhanced with special pheromones or as living dolls. Another common thread is the third world serving as fodder for the more “civilized” world, with individuals using the beautiful and alien in unclean ways.

The four reprints run the gamut from the innocence and experimentation of the sixties and seventies (Silverberg’s “The Reality Trip” and Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah…”) to radical feminism as a political force (Ings’s “Grand Prix”) to right-wing fanatics who long to, and who have the power to, turn back the clock on sexual freedom (Hand’s “In the Month of Athyr”).

In general, I have found that most of the material submitted to both anthologies was tinged with a paranoid view of male-female relations. What’s especially interesting is that both men and women are looking at the issue with jaundiced eyes. As for the stories that actually have aliens in them (by Susan Wade and Roberta Lannes), the question arises: how can we know what aliens want when we can’t even agree on what humans want from each other in a relationship? There are some lighter-hearted stories here, but again, as in Alien Sex, most share a dim view of the present and near future as we fumble toward an answer to the question “what do women/men want?” Martha Soukup’s, Gwnyneth Jones’s, and Lisa Tuttle’s stories seem to indicate that women want just what men think they want—power as symbolized by the penis and the beard. Or perhaps women don’t know what they want. The stories are disturbing and seem to ask whether men and women can ever communicate? Or will we all remain alien to each other? Let’s hope that this fictional analysis of the problems confronting male-female relations leads to reconciliation in real life.