Science Fiction’s Missing Bodies: Desire Beyond the Starship

By Marcus Bennett

NASA is willing to admit that no one has ever had sex in space, according to the Lit Hub essay “Science Friction: An Argument for More Sex in Sci-Fi.” The essay uses that omission to identify a contradiction: science fiction sends people farther than sailing ships but often treats desire as obsolete technology. It first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter.

The essay begins with sailors on months-long voyages watching sea mammals and turning isolation toward fantasy. Their thought amounted to a single word: Would. The essay treats this response as a product of boredom, sexual frustration and distance, not a sailor’s peculiar failing.

Christopher Columbus recorded mermaids in his journal. The essay identifies them as almost certainly half-ton, gray-skinned manatees. It says the motif of seductive aquatic creatures luring sailors to watery death probably originated with sailing itself.

The essay extends the point beyond sailors and men. Isolation and distance amplify boredom and sexual frustration by removing the people and distractions that usually occupy the mind. Better vision care does not change the condition. In many science-fiction novels, desire stays on Earth while the human characters become stranger than the aliens.

A human problem in an inhuman setting

The criticism targets a familiar science-fiction reflex: desire appears primitive beside warp drives, laser blasters and calculated expansion across the galaxy. The essay sees characters postponing touch because they have mathematics to solve. Its NASA point carries further.

The physical question of sex in space has become a field of study involving substantial technological problem-solving, according to the essay. Yet fictional worlds with artificial gravity remove any need to treat love as awaiting another round of testing.

That contradiction produces what the essay calls FutureSex™. Iain M. Banks’s Consider Phlebas features gender-switching, animal hybrids. Dan Simmons’s Hyperion includes a time-hopping soldier and a sexual encounter with the Shrike.

The essay imagines engineers hiding in a closet to document what the next release patch will fix. Its target is not the presence of sex, but a form of it that arrives frightened, strange and shaped by an author’s particular predilections.

The essay acknowledges that nothing is inherently wrong with those choices. It also links their frequency to science fiction’s male-dominated culture.

More broadly, the essay defines science fiction as a genre of exploration and explanation. It grants wish fulfillment, but supplies terms and conditions, like an instruction manual. Its stories move at great speed and unfold slowly. Sexual desire resists that structure because it remains inexplicable. The essay describes desire as older and stranger technology: primal, irrational, inevitable and fixed.

Writing about love and sex involves wish denial before fulfillment, according to the essay. Romance, in this formulation, tells slow stories fast. The argument sees romantasy as a natural result when desire appears more magical than logical. It finds an equivalent route within science fiction: understand what lust looks like in the vacuum of space. The sailors become the model again.

What changes when desire enters the starship?

According to the essay, the practical change is credibility. A hero looks out from a starship and sees a human face reflected in the glass. Between outrunning galactic empires and slaughtering alien civilizations, the character remembers having a body.

The essay treats that body as strange and terrifying as anything else in the universe. Desire gives advanced technology a human cost rather than allowing technology to replace every human need. No one is arguing that heroes should look out and see space mermaids. The demand is less fantastic and more exact: writers should stop editing human appetite out of the future.

The argument returns to the sea and states: “The sea was empty, so they saw sex. Because bored. Because horny.” It says no distance can separate people from desire, and no amount of data can, or should, fully explain them.

Advanced science-fiction worlds remain as ordinary to their characters as a Tuesday night at Applebees. The essay compares the impulse to the boredom and sexual frustration that accompanied humanity’s departure from its first cave. It calls this human nature, then, now and always.

The essay closes with a book recommendation: Any Time but This Time by Adam Peterson, available via Mad Creek Books.

Once writers start from that understanding, the essay argues, sci-mantasy will follow. In space, where nothing is alive, sex becomes one way to confirm that the living remain present. Its final proposition is blunt: “And it’s not math.”

The test for future science fiction is not technical novelty, but whether its people remain embodied, bored and recognizably alive.