Hopeful Futures

Kameron Hurley's column for the April issue of LOCUS explains how her writing has recently shifted from a pessimistic to an optimistic view of human possibilities. She decided "being grim and nihilistic is boring" rather than "exciting or edgy." Instead, in a world that seems increasingly darker, she finds her writing "to be a perfect outlet for exploring how people can still make good decisions in bad situations."

The Future Is Intrinsically Hopeful

This message resonates with me. As argued by Steven Pinker in THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE and ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, we are living in the best of times, not the worst of times (although, admittedly, with considerable room for improvement).

A few striking quotes from Hurley's essay on why she believes in the future:

"Humanity didn’t survive this long because of its worst impulses. We survived this long because, despite all of that, we learned how to work together."

"What a time to be a creator, when believing humanity has a future that is not just a series of dystopic post-apocalypse nightmares is the most radical position one can have."

"What if what we are presenting to our audiences, as artists, is 'This is how the world could be really different. Have you thought about how to get there?'"

"Increasingly, I find that writing any type of work at all is hopeful....It is profoundly optimistic to assume there is a generation after ours that will create a society one hundred years from now that is recognizable to us at all."

The last two quotes seem to me to encapsulate a major theme and purpose of science fiction. Dystopian futures serve the important function of warning us and potentially motivating us to change our course: "If this goes on...." The other classic SF question, "What if...?" is equally or more important, however. One reason the original STAR TREK became so beloved was surely its optimism about human destiny. At the height of the civil rights movement, the Enterprise crew portrays men and women (even if female characters didn't fully come into their own until later iterations of the ST universe) of many races and cultures working together to discover new worlds. In the middle of the Cold War, STAR TREK envisions Russian, Americans, and Asians exploring space as a team. And many of those "predictions" have come true! THE ORVILLE, as a drama-comedy homage to ST, further develops that hopefulness about mutual tolerance and cooperation and the joy of discovery in the context of 21st-century sociopolitical concerns.

Writing as if we "believe in the future" can infuse readers with hope and perhaps inspire them to create that kind of future.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Orville

Do you watch THE ORVILLE? Now that I've caught up with all the episodes to date, I'm still not sure how successful it is at what it tries to do. It begins as an affectionate parody of STAR TREK and gradually becomes more serious, grappling with some delicate issues, exploring character development, and going to a very dark place in the double episode of the past two weeks. As much as I like the show, I wonder whether its funny and serious sides fit together or clash. (Note: There will be spoilers here.)

The jokes sometimes verge on slapstick. For instance, the advanced sentient artificial life-form, Isaac (the Spock or Data character in the cast), gets into the spirit of learning about practical jokes by cutting off a human character's leg (painlessly, in sleep). This incident barely escapes being horrific by the fact that the medical technology of that century is so advanced that the character will have a new leg within days. The pop culture references come almost exclusively from the twentieth century, a detail that doesn't bear scrutiny. Wouldn't the characters show more interest in and awareness of such things from their own era? Most glaring is the Krill (the Klingon equivalent in this universe) deity's name—Avis, the subject of many jokes. Would the average person four hundred years from now have even heard of a twentieth- to twenty-first-century car rental company? Likewise, the incident when Bortus has a change of heart about his female offspring after watching RUDOLPH THE RED-NOSED REINDEER is cute and rather touching, but it takes generous suspension of disbelief to accept that RUDOLPH would become a classic still popular with general audiences four centuries in the future.

Several features of the show similarly seem to follow the "Rule of Funny" with little or no concern for plausibility. For instance, Bortus allegedly belongs to an all-male species (with rare, taboo exceptions) that urinates only once a year and lays eggs. With no indication that the writers thought out the implications of these traits in advance, I can only conclude Bortus's kind must be desert-dwelling reptiles. The brief glimpse of his planet, when he returns home for his annual urination ceremony—obviously inspired by Spock's return to Vulcan in "Amok Time"—shows a desert-like landscape. In the incisive, timely episode about a planet ruled by positive and negative social media votes, a senior crew member gets the landing party in trouble by fooling around with a statue of a cultural heroine. As his own superiors point out, he should have known better, yet the audience has to accept that an experienced officer with a record good enough to justify his assignment to a delicate mission would behave so irresponsibly. Even in the more serious moments, dedicated SF fans may notice weaknesses. In one episode, two members of a first-contact party get sentenced to an internment camp because they were born under the wrong astrological sign. Wouldn't it be obvious to a society advanced enough to attempt communication with interstellar life that constellations look different from different planets, so it's meaningless to assign their astrological signs to inhabitants of a distant solar system? And even if their taboos prevented their accepting the stigmatized visitors, wouldn't it make more sense simply to ban them from the planet? As for the dark, emotionally wrenching double episode about Isaac's world, didn't the builders of the AIs consider the probable consequences of creating potentially sentient robots? If the builders had no qualms about trying to enslave the robots once sentience emerged, why weren't the artificial life forms programmed with the equivalent of the Three Laws to begin with?

I'm very taken with this series, but in my opinion it would be even better if it didn't look as if the writers were making up things as they go along, tossing in anything that seems entertaining at the moment. That said, the balance between silly and plausible appears to be shifting in a favorable direction, and after the final two episodes of the second season, I'll be eagerly waiting for the third.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Pregnant Males

Do you follow THE ORVILLE? This TV series begins as an affectionate parody of STAR TREK (even the uniforms look similar) but—as far as I can tell from reading about it and watching the first few episodes—gradually becomes more serious. One alien officer, who lives on board with his mate, belongs to an all-male species. In the second episode, he lays an egg, which hatches in the third episode. I'm not sure why he refuses to take a break from brooding the egg; doesn't his mate help? And what about an artificial incubator? Anyway, the baby turns out to be female, a rare abnormality in this species, for which the standard remedy is an immediate sex-change operation. The serious ramifications of this problem mesh incongruously with the premise of an all-male, oviparous species, which the writers apparently introduced in accordance with what the TV Tropes site calls "the Rule of Funny." In fact, an all-male species that reproduces by itself couldn't exist. The sex that produces ova is, by definition, female. To lay eggs, people of the species portrayed in THE ORVILLE would have to be either female (reproducing by parthenogenesis) or hermaphroditic. Members of an all-male species would have to breed with females of some closely related species (as some all-female types of fish can be fertilized by males of different but not too dissimilar species).

The vintage sitcom MORK AND MINDY gets away with the pregnant alien male motif by presenting it in a funny context with no attempt at a biological rationale. Mork not only becomes pregnant, he gives birth to a "baby" who looks like an old man and, conforming to the life cycle of Mork's species, ages backward.

Octavia Butler described her classic work "Bloodchild" as her "pregnant man story." Technically, the human men don't get pregnant, though. They serve as hosts for the eggs of the centipede-like aliens who've allowed the Terran colonists to settle on their planet. When the larvae hatch, the mother removes them from the host's body before they start to eat their way out—usually.

The TV program ALIEN NATION offers a serious portrayal of how a seahorse-like humanoid male pregnancy could work. The Newcomer aliens have three sexes, including a variant type of male who penetrates the female to catalyze her fertility in some unspecified process before the father inseminates her in the "usual" way. The embryo begins to develop in the female's uterus. Part-way through the pregnancy, the fetus is transferred (in a pool of water) from the female to the male, where it grows in a pouch on the man's abdomen. The baby comes out when the pouch splits open in the course of labor.

Here's a page of speculation about how a single-sex species (female) could work in terms of Earth biology:

Single-Sex Species

In Joanna Russ's classic story "When It Changed," members of the all-female population reproduce by combining ova from two different women.

In isogamy, displayed by some life-forms such as algae and fungi, all gametes have the same size and morphology and so can be considered of the "same sex," which can't technically be labeled either male or female:

Isogamy

Some Earth organisms switch reproductive methods in alternate generations between sexual and asexual reproduction (e.g., budding).

The heroine of Megan Lindholm's CLOVEN HOOVES falls in love with a satyr she thinks of as Pan. This highly unusual novel starts out as, apparently, fantasy, in which at first we can't even be sure the paranormal encounters are happening outside the heroine's mind. Eventually, however, the story becomes SF, when the satyr reveals that he belongs to an all-male species whose members reproduce by implanting clones of themselves into human women through sexual intercourse. Thus, when the heroine gives birth to her satyr baby son, he isn't biologically related to her at all.

The occasional birth of females among the alien race on THE ORVILLE suggests a possibility for the evolution of their alleged all-male species. Maybe they once reproduced alternately sexually (through ordinary mating between male and female) and asexually (by cloning). Maybe some genetic disorder caused the conception of females to cease except in rare cases. Asexual reproduction became the only remaining viable means of perpetuating the species and came to be considered the only normal way. So when the male character in that series lays an egg, he's producing a clone of himself.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt