In designing your world, you are going to be confronted with the need to deal with sex and sexuality, ethics, mores, customs and how your characters react in sexually charged situations.
There are significant differences among these issues and concepts. Speculative fiction authors have used them widely.
For example, “sex” is mainly biological. In the vast majority of worlds, it is about reproduction. For example, L. Neil Smith, in His Majesty’s Bucketeers, created a world populated by giant land crabs that have three sexes: male, female, and neuter. All three sexes are required for procreation and later child rearing. In his first novel, Mother of Demons, Eric Flint created a race of giant squid-like beings. Of course, there was Ursula Le Guin, whose novel The Left Hand of Darkness posited a race of people who change gender during estrus. The conflict in all these examples comes when standard cis-normal humans interact with the characters who are not.
Speculative fiction has been talking about sexual roles and practices in both humans and aliens since the 1950s. From Theodore Sturgeon on incest to Robert Heinlein on incest, polyamory, and plural marriage, to Larry Niven coining a word for sex between humans and aliens, rishathra, speculative fiction writers have explored sex for at least eighty years. Lois McMaster Bujold wrote characters who were gay (the Quaddies who only had one sex, male) and bisexual and polyamorous (Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen).
The point is, you can use just about any type or version of sexuality in your speculative fiction writing. It can either be background window dressing or a significant plot point. It is critical that you, as an author, write authentically about the sexual experiences of your characters. In Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor, the investigator is not only gay but also has had the terrible necessity of having his lover executed for treason. This provides a significant thread to explain the character’s experiences and motivations.
The sexual mores and practices of your characters and their societies can be used to emphasize the differences between our world and the one you are writing about. Writers do best in their treatment of sex when it is treated as “matter-of-fact” and used to advance a plot point or deepen a character portrait. Just as with language, sexuality is widely variable in our own cultures, and so it should be in any fictional world you build. George R. R. Martin uses the complete castration of the Unsullied at an early age to make a significant cultural point. And as Robert Heinlein’s character, Lazarus Long, says in Time Enough for Love, “Whenever the locals rub blue mud in their navels, I rub blue mud in mine just as solemnly.”
Writers who use sex and sexuality boldly can give their readers a look into cultures that are extremely different from our own, without becoming polemical about cultures in our own world. There is nothing about sex, sexuality, mores, and practices that you can write about that will be new and different. This is even true of YA fantasy. In Diane Duane’s The Door into Fire,” LGBTQ+ characters and themes are treated as normal, and even once or twice with a little bit of humor. “What are you doing up there?" Freelorn’s father yells up the stairs. “Fuuucking!” Freelorn shouts back. In this culture, one is required to provide an heir, but after that one is free to act as they will.
Transsexuality. Even as early as 1959, in the short story, “All You Zombies…”, the lead character changes sex, which is the central point around which the plot turns. Heinlein repeats this trope in I Will Fear No Evil. Roger Zelazny wrote in his Hugo and Nebula award winning novel, Lord of Light, about a group of body-changing sex-changing refugees from “vanished Urath” who keep the local populace in check by posing as the gods of the Hindu pantheon.
As speculative fiction writers, you have the ability to write anything you want about sex, sexuality, mores, and practices that have probably been written about before, and you will not be breaking new ground.
You are encouraged to boldly go and use the tropes of sex and sexuality to add even more color and depth to the tapestry of your writing.
Walt’s been an author and editor for fiction and nonfiction for more than thirty years. He was Editor in Chief of Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire Press and Editor of the Grantville Gazette magazine.
Currently he’s an acquisitions editor for Misti Media LLC and editor of their Nazca Press imprint. He’s edited over fifty novels and hundreds of short stories, and before that, he was an avid reader and fan.
Walt welcomes and encourages feedback and suggestions. He is also available for editing services.
