BOOKS - 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Having seemingly, and unconsciously, avoided sci fi novels since the death of Iain M. Banks, I found myself reading a work on which he seems to bear a significant influence on.

Another one, in fact.

In fact, I find myself thinking that the work is almost a prequel to Banks' "Culture" universe, with early forms of terraformed planets, terrarium spaceships with evocative names, and a form of AI that has developed well beyond Turing Test levels.

I'm probably a mile out with this assessment, but then again I'm hardly Clive James when it comes to criticism.

The story involves terraforming artist Swan being involved in an apparent accident on her adoptive home of Mercury when her city - which rolls around permanetly out of the scorching sun - suffers an apparent projectile strike that nearly claimed her life; and left her cancerous and wandering tunnels to survive in the company of a new acquaintance, the lanky Wahram, native of Saturn's moon Titan.

As she investigates the incident from one end of the solar system to the other, it becomes clear that the incident on Mercury was no accident, and only intelligences of the very highest order could have arranged the attack, but who? We also see her on Earth, attempting to re-introduce extinct animals to the North American landmass from "space ark" terraria to a flooded, struggling planet where most folk capable of doing so have long since left.

It is a far easier read than Banks' work, and although not possessing the incredible span of his imagination, it is easier to grasp the spaceborne society of the novel. It also acts as a fascinatingly deep study of sexuality and body modification; males and females as we know them are not the dominant genders with many people choosing to have the genitals of both, or neither. DNA from other species, both alien and not so, are also combined with human with varying degrees of taboo.

The world of 2312 is one where people can sing like birds, and have experience sex as a male and a female simultaneously.

The Sexuality of Sci-Fi

We are the only sentient species we know about at present, in a universe where the possibilities are nearly infinite.

It is thus disappointing, if unsurprising, that we can only see things through our own tediously heterosexual and missionary position eyes. Our imaginations, when they should be alive to every possibility, are thinking only of England.

We are so boring. This young child playing with his Star Wars figures, could see all manner of fun and games involving Squid Head and a Gammorean Guard, while EV9D9 the Smash Martian torture-bot of Jabba's Palace looked on approvingly. But no, long long ago in a galaxy far far away, there was only rubbish old male to female, humanoid snogging going on. The brilliantly realised array of species that frequented the Mos Eisley cantina or Jabba's Sail Barge were about as sexual as a packet of crisps, save for the constantly ejaculating phallus that was Jabba himself, his scenes with Leia a blatant earth bound bukkake signifier.

As the Holiday Special showed us, Wookies like pornography featuring humans, rather than other Wookies, and how disturbing is it that Han Solo gets the white girl, but Chewbacca's father has a black woman served up to him as his fantasy?

Contemporaneously, H2G2's Zaphod Beeblebrox may have been sporting an extra head and three arms, but there was nothing to show that his dealings with Trillian were anything past Page 32 of the Joy of Sex.

We all know that Kirk may have been canoodling with all manner of green skinned – or more shockingly for 1968, black skinned – women in the traditional manner, but leap forward into the Next Generation, and the excitement of the final frontier was sharing screen time with Nescafe advert style sexual tension with Doctor Crusher and Captain Picard, and with Riker and Councillor Troi – another example of a mixed species relationship being portrayed in typically heterosexual penis to vagina coupling.

The First Contact movie presented us with the spectacle (cringing!) of Data getting it on with the Borg Queen, but for all his announcement that he was “Fully functional, programmed in multiple techniques” it was clear that this android to cyborg corpse coupling was going to be of a very standard format. Indeed, any alt-sex activities of the Star Trek Universe were always of the cloning, or assimilating variety.

It wasn't until Star Trek Voyager, that anything different to these standards were offered up to the viewer – Harry Kim had some form of bizarre intercourse with the ever stunning Musetta “Mansquito” Vander - “I'm not sure that was even legal” - and Kes and Neelix's long term interspecies relationship revealed some interesting little tit-bits about Ocampa sexual physiology that were very different from ours.

Still all het though. Even the radically inhuman creations of Species and Splice engaged in fairly conventional heterosexual intercourse.

The world of sci-fi literature, however, had been a bit more open to alternatives. Arthur C. Clarke's universe was hard-sci and asexual a lot of the time, aside to joky references to shipboard relationships with genetically engineered apes called Simps in “Rendezvous with Rama”. However, by the 80s, there were open references to homosexuality in the relationship between an American and Russian astronaut aboard the Leonov in 2010, the “Feys” of 2061, and butch surfing spacedudes recalibrating their sexuality in “The Songs of Distant Earth.”

Going back to the 1930s, Olav Stapledon, in “Last and First Men” actually envisaged fully realised, highly complex and rather incomprehensible successor species of man, with sub-sexes and full intercourse involving a large group of individuals, but these were a later species of man, albeit barely recognisable to us, rather than aliens.

I think it is David Bowie, who else, who actually through the vision of Nicholas Roeg, gives us an idea of what a realistic form of alien sex could be...messy, genital-less, and with no-need for penetration at all.

And indeed, for all the stress and violence it causes, higher forms of life in the universe will probably have abandoned sex. And who can blame them?

Copyright Bloody Mulberry