I am well aware that lately there have been several horrifying blog posts here, of a nature that might make a rational liberal want to hide under her bed or move to Scandinavia or something. So how about this for a change: Rudy Rucker has an article on the portrayal of sex in science fiction which will either titillate or weird you out. I suspect the difference will be on whether you like sex as the excitement of the exotic, or the comfort of the familiar (recognizing, of course, that everyone wobbles about a bit between those extremes). SF’s versions of sex can be awesomely weird, and sometimes very disquieting and unerotic — Delaney and Tiptree and Farmer didn’t always make it sound like fun and games.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Delaney is indeed a very sexual writer (and that rarest of things, a gay black SF writer) but I remember him saying in an interview (sorry cannot find it offhand) that whatever the location or time, he never wrote about anything but his beloved New York City.
Actually, they piss me off and make me want to tell conservatives to STFU (more often).
Sex in Sci-Fi does have some interesting permutations!
Heinlein’s Fear No Evil has an old man’s brain transplanted into an attractive young woman’s body, and the necessary exploration of the possibilities.
Alien: So they never really cover sex in terms of fertilization, but man there’s only one word to describe the sex that is there: FACEHUGGERHEADRAPE.
I always thought Cardassians were teh hotness.
I’m not sure what this says about me, but I read/have read a great deal of SF and I can’t recall ever really noticing the sex.
I have to admit, I am intrigued by the third sex, ooloi, in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy.
Cue Larry Niven and a discussion of rishathra (interspecies sex) in the Ringworld novels.
I was enjoying the scary vids, with Hollowing coming and all. I’m tired of Jason and Freddy Kruger movies. Your posts were much scarier.
What a coincidence!
I have just finished reading “Glory” by David Brin. This book describes a society where woman also have a second mode of reproduction – by cloning themselves and males are genetically altered to have bi-phase reproduction cycle (like in rutting animals).
Quite an interesting read, highly recommend.
robert j sawyers depiction of neanderthal/h.sapien sex will live on forever in infamy
Sorry, the correct book’s name is “Glory Season”, not “Glory”.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin has an interesting race of people that alternate sexes on a cycle, and explores the possibilities of how that would affect society. Sexism is out for a start. It’s been a long time since I read that, I may pick it up again, I remember liking it.
For those wondering as I did, Rucker’s site is work safe, unless maybe you are John Ashcroft.
Randy: (Really?)
I’m thinking you haven’t yet read Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.
Barry N. Malzberg does an amazing analysis of the late appearance of sex in SF in his book of essays on the subject of SF entitled “The Engines of the Night” (later expanded into “Breakfast in the Ruins”).
A giant ass from the forth dimension with a penchant for nuclear armagedon. I never thought I’d see anything that could top tenticle monsters on the weird-o-meter but that did it.
Tiptree was awesome, and her stories were definitely scary, but for a real good reason: she saw with clear eyes what happens around us every damn day. I like reading about Six-Legged Sex, for the really weird.
Or Dhalgren, my favourite Delaney.
There is one thing you can do in response to the madness that is the fundies:
RISE THE FUCK UP AND BEAT THAT SHIT DOWN.
We need to get more aggressive. (No, not violent, of course. I mean we have to get verbally and tactically aggressive.)
Ahhh, the Sex Sphere. Not to mention Wetware. I love Rudy Rucker’s books, unfortunately, last I looked they were damn difficult to find, and I’ve lost or loaned out most of my copies over the past couple of decades.
“RISE THE FUCK UP AND BEAT THAT SHIT DOWN.” – Katharine
I’m not even going to touch that in an erotic sci-fi context. Nope, not gunna do it.
OT,
But in the spirit of cheering people up, this is hilarious!
For some fascinating (not to say mind-boggling) science-fictional stories of sex and sexuality, try also Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series.
My inner pedant is forcing me to post this: it’s “Delany,” not “Delaney.”
Samuel R. Delany.
I never managed to get through Dhalgren but now that I have read Finnegans Wake twice, I have been tempted to return and try again.
Who can forget the Holdfast Chronicles by Suzy McKee Charnas… Men pretty much all become pedophiles while women (the free ones anyway) can clone themselves, a process initiated with horse semen.
And if I am posting as Zensunni I might as well mention ‘sexual imprinting’ and how much I was intrigued as a teenager by the Bene Gesserit and their fine control over each of 38 vaginal muscles in the later Dune books.
At Zensunni #26
I thought those were the Honoured Matres? the rougue offshoot of the Bene Gesserit after the diaspora.
In Isaac Asimov’s “The Gods Themselves”, the aliens in the parallel universe had three sexes, as well as asexual phase.
Very interesting read, specially the part on Earth about energy and political power.
Sorry, true, it’s been a couple decades. The Benegesserit developed it by the honored matres perfected it.
I remember being 15 and thinking that “Ringworld” was racy.
Damn, how times have changed.
Damn. I missed the scary stuff.
Zensunni –
been a while myself, I just Wiki’ed it.
The BG did do it too – I’d forgotten that part.
There is some seriously fucked up shit in Piers Anthony’s Apprentice Adept series.
Ah, another post gets sucked down the wormhole and into an unrelated topic. Either that or Katharine is showing a particularly sadistic side today.
But on the subject at hand, I can’t say I’ve fantasized about anything more xenophilistic than the green women on Star Trek TOS.
Piers Anthony is just fucked up. I have serious doubts about that man. I couldn’t read the website PZ referred us to. I’ve been up most of the night (insomnia, asthma or just bloody-mindedness) and the background pattern the gent uses was attempting to burn out my retinas. I only just escaped before losing the last of my sight.
Besides the fact that everybody needs to read more Ted Sturgeon, he put plenty of alternative sex(es) into his stories.
Sci-fi is the best place to extra current cultural mores — it’s like reading tribal mythology.
You can see in sci-fi from before the 60s the repressed, angry male-dominated sexually (‘cept for Heinlein, who always liked the ladies), and it’s transformation into a more expressed, less sado-masochistic desire.
Read the Lensman series to see just how fascist the US really was running up to WWII.
Yeah, he always like his own (intensely misogynistic) version of the ladies, but I don’t really consider that a good thing.
i’ve always liked how neil gaiman uses sex in his work. he writes it well (without the use of cheesy euphemism) and it is almost always fucked up in one way or another, yet hot. it seems to me that he tends to use sex as a device to denote exchanges of power. i love the scene in american gods with the cab driver and the jinn.
Has anyone ever read the novella, ‘The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect’? Now there’s a weird, sf take on sex. The whole premise of the story is that a godlike, super-powered supercomputer has taken over reality and humans live in simulations where, according to Prime Intellect’s interpretation of Asimov’s Three Laws, they can have whatever they want except death. Parts of it follow the… the psychological development of people given omnipotent control over their realities and themselves.
I also like, on occasion, Greg Egan’s takes on sex (which is never takes up a large portion of his stories anyway) – for instance, turning your simulated bodies four-dimensional and passing into one another, or merging your minds. Even the fact that he portrays plain old, vanilla biological sex as being disgusting or ridiculous. I really like sf’s take on sex and, humanity in general, not in the sense that it reflects the reality we know, but in the sense that it can be used to deconstruct the reality we know – how stupid is biological sex, really? How different would it be for some entity that was nothing like us? I especially liked in Egan’s Schild’s Ladder where a character describes “his” first sexual experience as “him” proving an original geometric theorem and “her” then extending that to apply in higher dimensional spaces.
Abbie, #33:
To those of us who had read Tarot or the Kirilian Quest series first, the sex in the Apprentice Adept series was tame. And they’re all tame compared to Chthon .
(Tarot, Kirilian Quest, Apprentice Adept, and Chthon are all by Anthony.)
Wow, I totally forgot about Brave New World… Orgy Porgy! Everyone Belongs to everyone else. Viviparous is a nasty insult! Malthusian drills.
Quirky, yet still one of my faves.
John Varley, Equinoctial (in The Barbie Murders):
Varley does indeed have more. Like The Persistence of Vision, a post-apocolyptic in which a man stumbles upon a deaf and blind community that uses sex for communication … they have an extensive vocabulary and they are facile in its use.
Hmmm, time for me to dust off my copy of the Alien Sex anthology. Pat Murphy’s Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates sounds intriguing …
Steel Beach by John Varley has some great stuff. Not only that, it has one of the best opening sentences ever:
I suppose I’m at the extreme of the “exotic” in the spectrum PZ mentioned. I hate plain-old vanilla biological sex in stories, it can make me gag. I take the view explored Egan’s novel, Permutation City, that things, subjective things, like sex, are whatever you want/need them to be, that there’s no “weird” or “good” or “normal”. I disagree profoundly with Rucker that people sitting in “pods” plugged into the Matrix, or “distanced” sex through “abstractions” such as text, or plastic, or anything not “face-to-face” is sad. Here, he’s just revealing his own personal constraints.
I just roll my eyes when people, especially sf writers who should know better, think they’re doing something for the reader, meaning something to the reader, when all they’re doing is indulging in their own parochial preconceptions of life and love. That’s not to say that vanilla sex is always pointless, but it’s flat and rings hollow when you can tell the writer is intending to overturn or upset standards and perceptions, when all they end up doing is mildly deforming their own provincialism.
I’m not sure what this says about me, but I read/have read a great deal of SF and I can’t recall ever really noticing the sex.
Odd, given your name.
:-)
Wow, I just realized my comment was also an oblique reference to anal sex.
@ Gerardo Camilo #28,
You beat me to it, I was thinking of “The God’s Themselves” as well. In my opinion, it’s one of Asimov’s most fascinating books. Up there with the Foundation trilogy and “The End of Eternity” which happens to be a very difficult book to find.
Katkinkate @35, you might wish to try selecting all the text and copy-pasting it into a text editor. It’s my standard technique for reading pages that are otherwise too visually annoying.
Wow, I just realized my comment was also an oblique reference to anal sex.
Oblique = cockeyed.
CW @#14:
Yes, really, dammit. I know – it’s ruined my chances of emmigrating to the UK if McCain wins, but what are you gonna do? Sue the folks?
You’re right. I have not read “Stars…”, but I’ll put it on the list. Thanks.
TruthMachine @#46 et al:
Alright. The name is unfortunate for the purposes of this discussion, but it’s all I can afford. Presumably, once the nation goes socialist like I keep hearing, I’ll be able to take a name from someone else who worked very hard to get it.
Or, I could go into porn for the especially undiscriminating. If I told you my actual last name you’d think I was making a terrible joke.
Whatever you say, Mr. Cox.
If you want to read SRD it’s a better place to start (imho) than Dhalgren. Dhalgren is, for many people, an extremely difficult book. (Many of them, sadly, therefore conclude that it’s a terrible one.)
SRD = Samuel R. Delany not Stephen R. Donaldson. Not much sex in Donaldson worth mentioning.
Eww, leprosy. Not to mention how he kills off his most appealing characters.
People who “like the ladies” (37) are usually fucked-up misogynistic creeps. ymmv
One of my favorite reasons from the religious wackos against gay marriage is that we’ll end up like SWEDEN! I say, “Bring it on!!!”
truth machine,
That’s “Mr. Privatebits” to you.
Rishathra anyone?
Those photos on the linked website were just disgusting, lewd and perverted, particularly that one of the mushroom… the author should be ashamed of himself… castration is too good for him. Actually it reminded be of Monty Python’s Episode 5: Man’s Crisis of Identity in the Latter Half of the Twentieth Century”
“Newsreader We understand a man is now helping police with their enquiries. And that is the end of the news. (he clips a piece of jewellery on to his ear) And now, ‘Match of the Day’.
‘Match of the Day’ music. We see a couple. They are standing at the foot of a largish bed. She is in bra and pants. He is in Y-fronts. They kiss ecstaticaly. After a few seconds there is the sound of a car drawing up. The crunch of footsteps on gravel and the sound of a door opening. The newsreader comes into shot.
Newsreader Ah, I, Um terribly sorry it’s not in fact ‘Match of the Day’-, it is in fact edited highlights of tonight’s romantic movie. Er. Sorry. (he goes out of shot; the two clinch again; after a second he pops back into shot) Ooh, I’m sorry, on BBC2 Joan Bakewell will be talking to Michael Dean about what makes exciting television. (pops out of shot, then pops in again) Ah, sorry about all that. And now back to the movie. (he goes)
The couple continue to neck.
She Oh, oh, oh Bevis, should we?
Bevis Oh Dora. Why not?
She Be gentle with me.
Cut to film montage. Collapsing factory chimney in reverse motion; pan up tall soaring poplars in the wind; waves crashing; fish in shallow water fountains; exploding fireworks; volcano erupting with lava; rocket taking off, express train going into a tunnel; dam bursting; battleship broadside; lion leaping through flaming hoop; Richard Nixon smiling; milking a cow; planes refuelling in mid-air; Women’s Institute applauding; tossing the caber; plane falling in flames; tree crashing to the ground; the lead shot tower collapsing (normal motion).
Cut back to the girl in bed.
She (smoking) Oh Bevis, are you going to do anything or are you just going to show me films all evening?
We see Bevis, with small projector.
Bevis Just one more, dear.
She Oh.”
The Sex Sphere features a giant ass from the fourth dimension. She’s called Babs. She has eyes, breasts, a mouth, a vagina–but no limbs. She can fly, she’s into nuclear terrorism, and her ultimate goal is to utterly destroy our universe.
Except for the lack of limbs and the power of flight, that sounds a lot like Sarah Palin.
I’m quite disappointed that in a thread about Rucker no-one has brought up the following bit of Postsingular, surely written with PZ in mind:
“Those aren’t tentacles. They’re genitacles!!!”
Turanga Leela – Futurama
bric wrote:
Not at first. Not in “Empire Star” or other early works. That came later with novels like “Triton.”
Randy@52,
Yes, I’m afraid your chosen handle is slightly comical to any Brit. Is “randy” in fact also used to mean “sexually aroused” in the US? (After all, I know British men called Dick and Willie!)
Private Eye (I think) reprinted a frame from an American comic, showing a very fifties couple, he saying:
“Happy, Gretchen?”
She replying:
“Ecstatically Randy”
– which is perhaps what we’d all like to hear from our chosen partners.
On the SF sex, aside from Butler and Le Guin already mentioned, there’s M.A. Foster’s The Gameplayers of Zan, and its (far inferior IMO) sequel The Warriors of Dawn. A second human species has been engineered, intended to be superhuman, but in fact just different. One difference is that their lives include 4 phases as physiologically and behavbiourally distinct as childhood and adulthood (and for women, pre- and post-menopausal adulthood) are with us: they have childhood; a hyper-sexual and promiscuous (though apparently exclusively het – at least no same-sex coupling is mentioned); parenthood, consisting of brief fertile periods separated by long asexual intervals; and a sexless old age. Actually, when I write it down, this sounds like how many early adolescents might imagine human life to be! Anyhow, in both Le Guin and Foster, the sex is part of a broader theme of transformed human gender/sex/reproduction systems, and the light they shed on our own. In this area, Swastika Night
by Katharine Burdekin (“Murray Constantine”) is a brilliant imagining, from 1937, about how Nazism might develop if it conquered the world.
In terms of alien culture involving anthropolgy, sociology and biology Ursula LeGuin constructs the most realistic and deeply rendered stories. “The Left Hand of Darkness” includes a species that can be either sex or no gender at all.
Didn’t see #12 about LeGuin before I posted.
(memo to myself: always read the the whole thread before posting.)
I agree with the earlier poster who said Heinlein’s attitude toward “the ladies” was still misogynistic. I’ve been reading SF since at least the mid-’60s, and the earlier stuff is hopelessly unimaginative regarding social change. But there’s no doubt that SF was a major factor in my becoming an atheist.
As for absolute woman-hating, though, it’s hard to top Norman’s Gor series. I started reading them in college, and I just couldn’t continue.
I adore LeGuin with an embarrassing intensity–and “Left Hand of Darkness” is one of my favorite books. Her work really influenced my philosophy.
Ann, I second your opinion regarding Gor.
As a teenager (in the 70’s), I was an inveterate SF reader, trawling local libraries and book stores, and reading everything I could get my hands on (good, bad or indifferent, I cared not). I initially considered the Gor books (the first few) to be in the mold of Edgar Rice Burroughs and liked the action/adventure, but then I found myself repelled by the misogynism to the extent I actually threw the books out and thereafter avoided his works. I found them abhorrent – even though in those days I too was inculcated in the belief that males were somehow “superior” – and in retrospect they were catalytic in my rethinking of my position on these matters.
. Is “randy” in fact also used to mean “sexually aroused” in the US?
Generally not. Here in the USA it’s a diminutive form of “Randolph” or “Randall” as a first name.
-jcr
jcr,
Thanks. I realised it had the derivation you give, but wasn’t sure if it also had its Bitish slang meaning. If not, as you say, then “horny” is the American equivalent. “Randolph” or “Randall” are both (uncommon) first names in Britain, but AFAIK neither is ever shortened to “Randy”.
Heinlein was sexist, but not unusually so for his era. Some of his female characters were remarkably independent and strong in their own right, although they seem to be a ‘conservative’ reaction against femininism by portraying strong, independent, intelligent ladies who, despite their ability to survive on their own without men, DON’T WANT TO. They want to form a long-term relationship with the right man (or men) and have kids. Well, so do most real women, even the strong and independent ones. The tendency of men to be the dominant partner in the relationship even with strong and independent women, on the other hand, is an expression partly of Heinlein’s sexism, and partly of his usual male character archetype, which generally includes a highly dominant personality that ends up getting everyone to be at least slightly submissive. I disagree that the attitude shown is misogynistic on Heinlein’s part. He does, in a number of situations, portray misogynistic characters, frequently in his juvenile novels, but these seem to be intentionally shown something of the error of their ways in the course of their adventures.
Ann:
True enough. The difference being that nobody would ever put forth that Gor tripe as feminist. Heinlein, otoh, is often presented in such a light.
@andrew: I agree with you, too. Your post brings to mind Podkayne of Mars.
You want women hating authors? Check the indy comic Cerebus.
It was a great comic until the author Dave Sim went off the deep end, and even then it had its moments.
Exactly.
If not, as you say, then “horny” is the American equivalent.
Although the word used here is almost always “horny”, the meaning of “randy” is widely understood, unlike, say “bisquit” or “bonnet”.
Well if you believe that “most women, even independent ones, want a husband and kids” is a feminist assertion, then yeah, Heinlein was a feminist, but it’s not. Heinlein’s women, however strong in their own right, were always, without exception, weaker than his male protags and always willing (or eager) to be dominated (usually physically or physically/symbolically) by them. (Spankings and threats thereof appearing far too often for my taste.) Plus they almost always manage to burst into tears at least once and to overtly treat some strong male character as a not-so-slightly creepy sexual-Daddy figure. Ick.
What his women generally were was not liberated, but merely sexually liberated… and pliable, and frequently bisexual or at least willing to consider it. That’s not feminism. That’s nymph-in-the-bedroom-matron-with-the-kids-Stepford-wife masturbation-fantasy territory.
CW@78,
Yes, the last of his I read was Stranger in a Strange Land. Jubal Harshaw gave me the creeps, and I got the impression he was Heinlein’s idealised self.
CW, I suspect I’m going to be castigated for this, but I think Andrew’s stance is not that “most women, even independent ones, want a husband and kids” is intended as a feminist assertion, but rather as an empirical claim. Had I thought otherwise, I would not have shown agreement.
Other than that, however, I agree with you, noting however that, in some of his latter works, he puts a male ego into a female body and implies that it leads to a change of cognition.
Nick Gotts, I agree with you too. Your post brings to mind I will fear no evil.
I too wish that PZ would spell “Delany” properly. And his work was, for its time, pretty sexual even in 1966 (Babel-17 is a great point at which to start reading him).
Eleanor Arnason’s furry gay alien warriors are also interesting on the sex/gender front.
Ha! No more campaign funding for Michele Bachmann from Republican Party campaign sources. She is now officially abandoned. It’s still a reddish district, but the Democratic candidate is flush with money and Bachmann’s unsuccessful GOP primary challenger is starting a write-in campaign. Can this be the end of the menace from Minnesota?
I don’t read a lot of sci-fi, but I’ve noticed that a certain subest of the genre will feature sex between underage females and men well into their 20s, or beyond. The typical age of the female seems to be 13, or sometimes 15. An example would be Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I would have enjoyed that book and others more if this creepiness of grown men humping barely adolescent girls had been absent. Don’t get me wrong–Snow Crash is a great book. I love it. Except for having the one sympathetic female be a 15 year old sexualized to provide a cheap plot device.
“I’m not sure what this says about me, but I read/have read a great deal of SF and I can’t recall ever really noticing the sex.”
Were you, perchance, reading with your eyes closed? So far as I remember (which is a bit dodgy, given my advanced years) one of the major reasons I got hooked on SF at the age of 8 or so was that you could get books with a great deal of sex in from the library and nobody would yell at you. And this was in The Old Days, before Man Had Walked On The Moon.
And as for Heinlein – quite likely him-as-he-was-then wouldn’t count as an avid feminist now and possibly him-as-he-might-be-now wouldn’t either but I really doubt that anyone married to Ginny Heinlein could get away with being noticeably sexist. I’ll certainly credit him with helping form *my* attitudes about the stupidity of prejudging any sophont by their sex, height, skin colour, number of limbs, or other external characteristic.
Nick,
I’m a little late, but it looks like your question has been well-answered.
So, if I can get scrape up enough points for the immigration form, I’ll go by my full name of Randolph… or just go all-out and change it to “Rumpy Pumpy”.
Off topic, but veering back to the Scary, I just noticed this appear on Digg:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026793.000-creationists-declare-war-over-the-brain.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=news1_head_mg20026793.000
Apparently the DI is pushing a rejection of “materialism” in neuroscience in favor of a theory that posits an interaction between the brain and the mind, insisting that the two are separate (but oddly, presenting no evidence of this).
Yeah, I wasn’t saying that it was a feminist position that most women want to get married and have kids, but that it was a reaction of what Heinlein saw as ‘realism’ against then-nascent feminism. Wrong or right, I believe Heinlein saw feminism as going too far and trying to break up the traditional male-female pair-bond-for-the-purpose-of-procreation and was trying, in part, to say, “Hang on, you can be sexually liberated and independent and assertive and still have a strong man to snuggle up with and marry and have kids with” — and he argues the feminist argument against male domination sometimes too, for example in To Sail Beyond The Sunset, Maureen accepts her husband’s divorce but steadfastly refuses to accept his unequal division of their property, goes to university and earns several degrees, and turns her understanding of financial markets (as well as her time-travelling son’s stock tips) into not only a significant fortune but also a board membership of the world-dominating Harriman Industries (the outfit that in Heinlein’s alternate history privately finances the first moon landing). She uses this position, as narrator, to point out how even in mixed-sex meetings of people who are officially equals, the women frequently take a subservient role, making coffee and such, and relates how one member of the board takes her for a secretary and tosses his coat at her.
And yes he seemed to have a bit of a fascination with the incest taboo, and other sexual complicatedness, but it’s entirely unfair to the depth and breadth of his fiction to dismiss him as misogynist.
Ahh, but I’m not dismissing him as, merely recognizing him as. I’ve read it all and enjoyed much (although certain passages are quite painful).
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/9/19/in-the-love-nest-of-harakki/
Someone mentioned: The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, not for the faint of heart.
James Triptree, Jr, of course, because she has the mind (and perhaps the training, I don’t know) of a biologist and she is relentless in her ideas: The Screwfly Solution is a classic.
And finally, John Varley’s Persistence of Vision, also mentioned above, though it unfortunately features in part a grown men having sex with a barely-teen girl, Varley’s writing is so evocative that it might qualify as the rarest of rares: An SF story that will inspire your sex life.
Don’t get me wrong–Snow Crash is a great book.
I wouldn’t go that far. I enjoyed it when I read it, but I haven’t had any desire to pick it up again, unlike Dune, or LOTR.
-jcr
Iain M Banks – Player of Games has much of interest. It has a quite detailed study of sex/power relationships in a three-gendered society. This society’s idea of entertainment extends to torture porn and gives a pretty good idea as to what the aptly named dick chaney gets off on.
Donaldson’s Gap series is the most disgustingly misogynistic 5-volume descent into female degradation it’s ever been my misfortune to encounter – although Orson Scott Card’s Wyrrms gives it a run for the money.
At the other end of the scale, Norman’s Sholan series includes the exploration of inter-species sex and the distinction between an inescapable biological drive and love.
“Piers Anthony is just fucked up. I have serious doubts about that man.”
Anthony published some good-to-great stuff before becoming a factory. Check out Cthon or Macroscope (his first two novels, I think, though I could be wrong).
I’ve tried to read some of the later things and just couldn’t. But these two books are very good. Or I remember them being very good.
Re. #93 – Banks’ Consider Phlebas has some interesting cross-species alien-on-alien action as well.
Although I recognize the importance and even greatness (in its genre) of Heinlein’s “classic” work, I have for a long time found him as he was in his later years (both as writer and person) an intensely troubling figure.
I recently read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress since it was one of those award-winners I’d somehow managed to miss reading in my teens. There’s a lot of good in the book, but there, right there at the center, is one of those (an early one?) incredibly annoying REALLY BRILLIANT Heinlein women WHO REALLY REALLY REALLY WANT BABIES ‘N’ DOMESTICITY. It shows up again and again in his later books: woman as total [Heinlein] fantasy construct of 1/3 Marie Curie, 1/3 Red Sonja, and 1/3 flirtatious mecha-baby-factory.
I find his later books, The Number of the Beast and so on, unreadably annoying.
First, apologies for spelling Prof. Delany’s name wrong. Ever so slightly off-topic is a Photoshop competition for the worst porno idea ever http://www.cracked.com/forums/topic/39210/24100-photoshop-contest-ending-10.29.08-worst-porno-idea-ever – about halfway down the page is something from Octopussy Productions . . .
I concur with the recommendation of “The Left Hand of Darkness”, but it’s not just about the sex; because there’s no cult of masculinity, there’s no war. There’s still small-scale violence and oppression, but massed warfare isn’t something the Gethenians are capable of.
Ann, if you loathed John Norman, you might also hate OH JOHN RINGO NO. Drink the haterade. Drink it up.
And Rev. BigDumbChimp, the tragic thing about Cerebus was that it continued to be brilliantly well-done, even well after “Reads”. I haven’t made it past “Going Home” yet, but I’m told it gets kind of repetitive when he starts constructing his own brand of monotheism. (Why is it entrancing when Alan Moore does it in “Promethea”, but brain-numbing when Sim does it?)
I read “The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect”, which begins with an extended sequence of the (female) protagonist amusing herself by having VR-sex with a bunch of /b/tards. There’s also some of what Aquaria mentioned–a middle-aged dude having sex with a barely-adolescent girl. And at least one of localroger’s other stories features a planet of women competing to best sexually please the protagonist. I reckon he knows his fanbase. (Yes, I pointed this out.)
And finally, I’d like to second the recommendation of every damn thing James Tiptree, Jr. ever wrote. It’s hideously dark, but it’s wonderfully mind-expanding. Pick up Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, the short story collection, if you get a chance.
It’s worth remembering that James TIptree jr was in fact http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Sheldon
Yeah I used to have all the comics up through 240 or so but they somehow disappeared between moving from NC, to WY to CO and then SC. I’ve been buying the “phone books” to re-read it. The ones when he’s the pope are genius in their mix of wit and snark but the early hints of his misogyny are very apparent.
I can’t believe that no one’s mentioned the truly bizarre sex of Storm Constantine’s Wraithu trilogy. Talk about tentacle penii…
Re #97 and others –
The lead pair in The Moon… is the same as in a number of Heinlein books. Also the same characters in Stranger In A Strange Land.
The male lead is obviously H himself (he’s not Jubal – I always thought JH was based on Asimov for some reason, probly the polymath thing), while the female lead is H’s real-life sweetheart. But not based on the lady herself but on H’s idealisation of her.
This just occurred to me–I remember an introductory Women’s Studies course I took where we discussed the effect of technology on gender and sexuality. There were approving nods when people talked about sex reassignment surgery, but I got some very, very askance looks when I suggested that some folks might want to design their own genitalia–maybe something with naughty, naughty tentacles, even.
In retrospect, I should have expected a more hostile reaction than I got. I mean, there’s got to be a reason why most people aren’t fascinated by weird SF sex, right?
I’ve come across a sort of urban legend saying that Samuel Ray Delany’s name is one of the most misspelled in SF, of which I can’t really make sense, since I’m not Anglophone (is Delaney more common? does it look more correct to you?). This must have to do with his dislexia and his equally legendary pathological intolerance of misspellings.
Funny to see the legend born out by you PZ, anyway :)
Don’t give up! Keep fighting for Transpenism!