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SEXUALITY, HUMAN OR OTHERWISE, has not traditionally been a major concern in science fiction—possibly because the genre was originally conceived for young adults. However, there was some early pioneering in the field. In 1952 Philip José Farmer explored the theme of interspecies love and sex in “The Lovers” and Theodore Sturgeon examined the nature of sexual roles in Venus Plus X (1960). Then, during the late 1960s and the 1970s, more science-fiction writers began to explore the issues of sexuality and relationships, and authors such as James Tiptree, Jr. (“The Women Men Don’t See”), Ursula Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness), Samuel R. Delaney (Dhalgren), Norman Spinrad (Bug Jack Barron), Brian Aldiss (Hothouse), and J. G. Ballard (Crash) wrote major works that treated the subject of sexuality seriously and occasionally explicitly. Part of the reason Harlan Ellison’s anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again Dangerous Visions were such breakthrough volumes was their inclusion of stories on previously taboo subjects. There have been three previous SF anthologies on sexual themes: Strange Bedfellows: Sex and Science Fiction, edited by Thomas N. Scortia (1972); Eros in Orbit, edited by Joseph Elder (1973); The Shape of Sex to Come, edited by Douglas Hill (1978), and a collection, Farmer’s Strange Relations (1960).

Sex in SF generally deals more often with the obsessions of human sexuality and relationships than it does with actual human-alien sex. For example, John Varley’s story “Options” created a society in which anyone could choose to alter their sexuality, physically and emotionally, at will. Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness, while concentrating on gender and its relationship to social and sexual roles, incidentally created the perfect sexuality: the inhabitants of the planet Winter are an androgynous species. During their periodic sexually active phase, they can alter their sexual identities to complement the person to whom they are attracted.

When I first had the idea for this anthology, I honestly intended it to be stories specifically about “alien sex,” concentrating on the alien as in “other world.” But as the book began to take shape, I realized that what the material was really about was the relationships between the human sexes and about how male and female humans so often see each other as “alien”—in the sense of “belonging to another country or people; foreign; strange; an outsider” (Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, college edition, 1966). Alien Sex offers a template for human relationships.

The stories herein encompass many of the ways the sexes perceive each other and deal (or don’t deal) with each other, even when actual, off-world aliens are depicted. Most were written since the 1970s, when feminism changed forever the way men and women (in the United States at least) relate to one another. Since then, relationships between the sexes have continued to be in flux, making for “interesting times,” as in the ancient Chinese curse. What do women want? What do men want? Indeed, do we want the same things? Less from design than circumstance, the stories are roughly balanced between male and female writers. While I don’t think that on the whole this anthology is particularly downbeat, I do think it gives a rather dark view of male/female relationships. Obviously, both sexes feel this way, and perhaps that in itself lends hope to the future of human sexuality.