For centuries, writers, artists, and speculative thinkers have used science fiction to imagine the possible futures we might have. Imagining a different future requires imagining a different way of getting there, and the way we get there, the way any group makes it to any future, is by reproducing over time. Sometimes, such world-building can be lazy, gesturing towards a logical explanation for the fictional world without ever convincing the reader.
In other cases it can be almost neurotically belaboured: extended histories of alternative galaxies, chapters outlining the reactions of alien chemistries. It makes these dreamers answer the hard questions lying behind any form of gay separatism: can gay life reproduce itself without heterosexuality?
Can gay male desire only survive when gay men are able to control their own reproduction? Should we desire a gay planet? But just as science fiction is never only about the future, the planets it creates are born out of desires we can find, now, on this planet of our own. Gay men in the s, living under the shadow of AIDS, were far from the first to imagine a world where reproduction happens beyond heterosexuality. One of the earliest feminist science fictions, Mizora by Mary E.
Bradley Lane, is also one of the first outlines of a completely self-sustaining society populated only by women. In the novel, the women of Mizora have reached a level of scientific progress where they can reproduce life in laboratories, and have chosen to eliminate men, the source of all war and violence. That certain feminist aims could be achieved by eugenics was no mere speculative fantasy. Others feature coupling between humans and aliens, as in Octavia E.
Since the second-wave feminism of the s, several novels have introduced meticulously described societies consisting only of women. They use microsurgery to splice together two eggs and impregnate willing carriers with the resulting embryos, enabling conception and birth to take place without men. The novel is built around a series of gender binaries: Sharers are innately peaceful, while men, or Valans, are innately violent.
