The inevitable sex scene in Sci-Fi and Fantasy books. Why?

Cafe Society
1

It seems as though many (possibly most) Sci-Fi and Fantasy books contain at least one unecessary, generally poorly-done, and sqirm-inducing sex scene. Even the short story, where brevity should be a priority, is not immune, although not to the same extent as the novel. It sucks to come across what appears to be several pages of febrile prose, written one-handed by a hormonal teenager, seemingly cut and pasted into an otherwise intelligent story.

There are lots smart, literate people who enjoy the LOTR and Star Wars movies, to whom I will never be able to recommend nearly all of my favorite books because they are:
-Mildly prudish (or old fashioned), who would think that I’m some kind of pervert, deviant, or just immature.
-Really prudish, who would regard the whole thing as a mean-spirited joke similar to emailing them a photo of my genitals while claiming it to be a really funny LOLcat.
-Children, whose parents (my peers) would be very irritated if their little darlings saw the word ‘nipple’ or (turn away from the screen now) ‘penis’. Why murder on film is acceptable, where sex in print is not, is another discussion entirely.

Does it contribute to the continued ghetto-ization of the sci-fi and fantasy genres, and their fans? It seems unlikely that a book will be taken seriously by the critics if it contains laughable sexual material. Further, it could contribute to the unfair stereotype of the bookish virginal geek, more comfortable besieging his own Barad Dur than talking to girls.

Why must they do this? Is it an attempt to differentiate their work from that of kid-friendly writers? Like throwing 3 seconds of breasts or unnecessary profanity into a movie to make sure it gets an R rating? Do they not realize how badly this comes off in comparison to the sweaty, heaving mounds of garden variety internet wank-fic? Do they secretly want to write books with Fabio on the cover?

Anyone willing to estimate what proportion of books have such turgid, engorged prose? I’d guess about 3/4 of all ‘genre’ fiction from the last 50 years that I’ve read.

2

Could you give some examples? It seems to me that most of the science fiction I’ve ever read was either virtually sexless, or had no explicit sex scenes. (Of course, there was kind of an explosion of sex with the New Wave stuff from about 1969-1973, and I haven’t read a great deal of new stuff since about 1980.)

3

I think it’s supposed to appeal to the sexually deprived fanboys or something. By the time they get to these books, most of them are old enough to have access to real porn.

I remember reading in one of Mercedes Lackey’s Oathbound books a scene in which Tarma and Kethry rescue a chambermaid who was raped by some guy who had just slain a dragon and was given, among other things, a place to stay and the “services” of said chambermaid. There was also, if I recall, an author’s note that implied that the scenario of the hero having his way with a chambermaid had become quite common in fantasy fiction of the time (late 80s-early 90s), and this was the author’s response to that trend. Can anyone tell me if chambermaid seduction and/or rape was as common in fantasy novels as Mercedes Lackey made it sound? I don’t read much fantasy fiction, so am not familiar with this.

4

Off the top of my head and it’s been quite a while since I read some of these (hence the ‘maybes’), many or most books by:

Neal Stephenson
Bruce Sterling
William Gibson
Allen Steele
David Gerrold
Robert Heinlein (maybe)
Arthur C Clarke (the Rama books, except the first)
Fredrick Pohl
Larry Niven
David Wingrove
Frank Herbert (except Dune)
Norman Spinrad
Rudy Rucker (maybe)
Michael Crichton
John Varley
Alistair Reynolds (maybe)
Greg Bear (maybe)

Plus pretty much all comics aimed at adults.

Perhaps my taste in fiction sucks.

To be clear, I am not anti-sex, nor anti-sex in fiction. Just anti-bad sex in fiction that makes people look at me funny when I read in public.

5

Haven’t you just answered your own question? :slight_smile:

Seriously, your question is bizarrely contradictory. All genre fiction contains sex scenes but it ghettoizes science fiction? People are too prudish to read books with sex scenes but all of the wildly popular genre fiction has it? Isn’t romance fiction the leading genre?

BTW, how are genre books different from mainstream fiction? Don’t they all have sex scenes, gratuitous or otherwise?

This is just a classic of selection bias. You’ve seen a couple of books with sex scenes you didn’t like and you extrapolate from that to the hundreds of thousands of genre books written. And I mean that number literally. You haven’t read one percent of them. You’re going to get beaten up in this thread. Get ready for it.

6

Careful there. Don’t want to run afoul of the new rules, whenever they are decided, whatever they might be. I kid, I kid.

I’m talking about sci-fi and fantasy because those are the genres I’m familiar with. I don’t read any mystery, horror, or ‘regular’ NY Times bestseller fiction, and only rarely read stuff older than about 1960.

I specifically confined my comments to what I have read because I have never claimed to have encyclopedic knowledge of modern fiction. I qualified my statements in order to point up the possibility of selection bias and to leave room for people to broaden the discussion to other genres.

You believe my premise is wrong and believe many people will agree with you. Your opinion has been duly noted, thanks for the input. Why do you think ‘beating up’ will occur in a civil discussion of a frivolous subject?

‘Wildly popular’ (where did I say that?) genre fiction is still not very popular with the population as a whole. Where is the contradiction between “Much sci-fi contains gratuitous, badly written sex.” and “Such content might ghettoize (in terms of walling off from the majority of our culture) sci-fi by reducing it’s potential readership, bringing the sscorn of ‘serious’ critics, and promoting incorrect assumptions about it’s readers.”. Please note, I’m not saying that all books should be all things to all people. That road leads to bad pop music, reality TV, and Adam Sandler movies. I’m merely commenting on what is possibly an observable phenomenon and asking other people if they see something as well.

7

I’ve read a fair amount of fantasy and science fiction, and can’t say I’ve noticed this as a trend. I’m sure I’ve read some bad sex scenes, but it doesn’t strike me as an inevitable feature of genre fiction. Most of the books I can think of off the top of my head had either no sex or at all or sex that was mostly implied with no descriptive sex scene.

Several of the authors in your list are ones I haven’t read, or who I’ve only read one book by. I don’t remember any sex scenes in Jurassic Park. I doubt doubt that there was sex in Neuromancer, but I don’t remember it. I remember sexual situations in Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, but don’t recall any lengthy, immature wank-material sequences. I don’t know about the other authors, maybe they just wrote bad sex scenes. But plenty of fantasy and science fiction doesn’t contain such scenes at all.

8

I think there’s a big difference between say… Ringworld Engineers and books like the Piers Anthony Bio of a Space Tyrant series.

One deals with interspecies sex as an interesting sort of diplomacy and isn’t really all that prurient as such things go, and the other seems to basically be some old man’s fantasies playing out, and is up there with the Penthouse Forum.

The only example of the truly gratuitous was the sex scene in The Difference Engine.

9

If I may attempt a hijack here for a moment (“No one move! I’m taking this thread to Cuba!”) something that drives me nuts, especially with stories from the New Wave era, is that a very common theme is a frumpy middle aged man travels to a sexually open society where hot young girls throw themselves at him instead of the similarly hot young men who are members of the same society. It’s like playing to the SF fan and writer’s fantasies that if the hot women would just loosen up a bit they’d be screwing nerds all day long. That drove me nuts and it comes up all the time.

10

re: Alastair Reynolds

There is no explicit sex in *The Prefect, Revelation Space, Redemption Ark *or Absolution Gap.

I’ve just finished reading the Revelation Space trilogy for the third or four time. Antoinette Bax and Xavier Liu make love once or twice, but it’s mentioned after the fact as a “they finished this, made love then fell asleep together”. There’s no details at all. Ana Khouri says she made love with Thorn when they were falling towards Hades, but again, it’s mentioned after the fact and she’s explaining how she came to gain a daughter. There’s no salacious details whatsoever. It’s one sentence where she goes “Thorn and I made love on the long fall into Hades”.

I can’t give absolute answers, but I think Chasm City is a similar situation. There’s no sex in Pushing Ice.

I think there’s some very, very mild sex in House of Suns, but it’s over within a page, if that, and is very, very short on details.

I can’t comment on the short stories and haven’t read Century Rain in ages, but I think taking into account the whole body of his work, he doesn’t belong on your “tacky sex” list.

11

How soon they forget Philip Jose Farmer…

12

Hmmm. Being a pervert of good standing and long service, it’s possible that I just don’t notice the sex scene in all the sci fi that I read. It just doesn’t register as anything unusual to me.

That said, there have been successive waves of “sexualization” in fiction. What tends to drive it, apart from prurient interest, is the desire on the part of the author to depict life as it is, and sex is a big part of life. It’s not the most important part, of course, but it’s still a mighty big elephant to paint pink and pretend is not in the room, and I think there’s a lot of truth to this idea. Writers should be able to take the story wherever it needs to go, and sometimes, that’s sex.

Of course, if what you’re writing is erotica, the sex is the point. :stuck_out_tongue:

But I have not noticed there to be a lot of gratuitous sex in sci fi. Some is, indeed, badly written and out of place, and one gets the distinct feeling that it was not the author’s idea to include it, but some cigar-chomping caricature of a publisher going “Enough with that brainy stuff, let’s get some tits in there!”

The Difference Engine is, indeed, a highly egregious example of this, although given the book’s many, many, many other faults, it seems relatively minor. Why that book is so highly regarded is beyond me.

I don’t think the sex scenes are “fan service” for horny nerds. I’m pretty sure the sex quotient of written works does not enter into the decision to purchase much. Althought I could be wrong. If so, I plead naivety. :stuck_out_tongue:

13

Oh, and I forgot to add this :

SOmewhere between science fiction with gratuitous bad sex scenes tacked on and actual sci fi themed erotica is the science fiction OF sexuality.

Take something like Venus Plus X by Theodore Sturgeon, or all that gender switching in Varley’s works. Sexual ideas are very important to the human mind, and science fiction is the fiction of ideas, so there’s a lot of fascinating territory to be explored about sexuality via sci fi.

What will sex be like in the future?
Will virtual sex become better than the real thing?
What’s sex like in space?
Is sex with an alien bestiality?
Will aliens show up and want pornography, but our porn does nothing for them, what they actually want is films of plumbing installation? :stuck_out_tongue:

And so forth and so on.

14

I’m trying to forget Riverworld. What an exercise in pointlessness.

15

And no mention of Robert Silverberg or Michael Moorcock?

16

Just forget the third book. The first two are great.

17

All fiction these days has sex as a part of it, and most sex scenes are written not as a turn-on but rather to show something about the character (or the author, in some cases).

I don’t think the sex scenes in SF or fantasy are any worse or gratuitous than in any other genre. You run the gamut from tacked on scenes to those that are integral to understanding, from well-written to poorly done.

I know in my writing I include sex scenes as a way to show relationships and reactions. I actually wrote my first really explicit one (in the sense that I describe the sex instead of just cutting away) because I realized it was essential to the situation*. Originally, I skipped the actual sex, but the situation meant that I really had to describe it.

In any case, sex is here to stay, and implying that sex scenes somehow invalidate a genre means that there is no genre worth reading.

*What surprises me about it is that an agent is interested in marketing this as a Young Adult novel, even with a lot of references to sexuality.

18

I’d say at least 90% of the books that have made The new York Times Bestsellers List for the past, oh, 20 years have been genre fiction.

Here’s the current list.

That’s actually less genre than most weeks, though still over 50%.

Genre is all powerful. Mainstream is an in-cult joke, saleswise.

All I’m saying is that you aren’t aware of the realities of modern-day publishing. I think you’re wrong on the specifics and wrong in the generalities. You’re wrong on what’s being written and you’re wrong on what people read and you’re wrong on who reads what and everything else I can think of. And of course nobody is backing you up, because there’s nothing there to back up.

But I like the fact that you read and that you have standards for what you read and those standards include good writing and good scenes. You’re not wrong about that. That’s totally admirable.

19

Most modern novels have sex scenes.

Actually, Sci-fi is some of the tamest stuff out there, in terms of such, in my experience.

20

I’ve read an awful lot of SF and fantasy, and in most of the ones I’ve read, the sex scenes, where present, tend to be mercifully brief. Easy to skip over.

Now the guys who write SF and fantasy with strong sexual themes because they’re interested in that are a mixed bag. Heinlein sucked at it, big time. Piers Anthony’s sexy stuff is indeed skeevy. Philip Jose Farmer did some very nice work. Randy Andy Offut write some good, raunchy fantasy. The guy who did the Spaceways series (name escapes me for the moment) did some nice stuff. And there are one of two others I won’t mention.

Basically, I think the writers who like sexual themes do a good job and the writers who don’t should stay the hell away from sex scenes. Which most of them do, for the most part.