I recently reread three thematically similar books: Poul Anderson’s Virgin Planet, A. Bertram Chandler’s Spartan Planet, and Lois McMaster Bujold’s Ethan of Athos. All three imagine single-gender planets: worlds whose populations are either all men or all women. This particular selection of books to reread and review was mere chance, but it got me thinking…
There are actually quite a few speculative fiction books set on single-gender planets (in which gender is mainly imagined in terms of a binary model) 1. Most of them are what-if books. As one might expect, they come up with different extrapolations.
Some single-gender planets are near-utopias; humans manage quite well with just one gender, once reproductive solutions are in place.
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Houston, Do You Read” suggest that the world can get along just fine without the missing gender. In these cases it’s men who are superfluous.
- Bujold’s Ethan of Athos depicts a world without women, one which also seems to work fine. Mostly.
Perhaps a world might actually be better off without the other gender:
- The Joanna Russ short story “When It Changed” posits that the sudden reappearance of men is a terrible tragedy for the isolated world Whileaway. Pesky men.
- A great many of Bujold’s Athosian men agree that they are much better off without those pesky women.
Some planets demonstrate that even if one gender is eliminated2, a single gender will display the full range of human frailties.
- In Nicola Griffith’s Tiptree and Lambda Literary Award-winning Ammonite, folks is folks.
- Ethan of Athos might also fit again, here. Athosians may have fled the dreadful temptations of womankind, but they cannot escape human nature.
Other authors have set out to prove that difference is the spice of life.
- The men of Spartan Planet have, in the absence of women, devolved into brutes. Their idea of fun is getting drunk and punching each other in the face. I think there was a sequel, with women, which I have long since forgotten. I suspect that life may have improved, but not completely. (Because without a problem, how can you have a plot?)
There are books in which gender differences are funny. Slapstick funny.
- In Anderson’s Virgin Planet, our hero, David Bertram, discovers that being the only man on a planet of beautiful women can be daunting. The women have imagined the long-lost men as heroic creatures. David Bertram is… not.
A number of the unigender worlds have caste-based social systems, presumably inspired by the social arrangements enjoyed by ants and bees.
- Again, Virgin Planet is a fine example: each family is a clone line, with known strengths and weaknesses.
- Neil Stephenson’s Seveneves is much the same, although in that setting, deliberate variations have been introduced.
- David Brin’s Glory Season does not quite eliminate men (although they are relegated to secondary reproductive status), but the parthenogenic lineages are, like those in the Anderson and Stephenson books, known quantities with established specializations.
Another, unfortunately large, category of unigender worlds consists of those novels in which the author has seemingly forgotten that the other gender exists at all. The absence is not intended to make some point, but simply because the author neglected to include any characters of the missing gender, even as supporting characters3.
- The novels of Stanislaw Lem are very low-grade ore when it comes to finding women characters. Lem’s protagonists often struggled to communicate with the truly alien. Judging by the dearth of women in his books, however, women were too alien for Lem.
- Perhaps the most remarkable examples come from Andre Norton books like Plague Ship, in which women are completely and utterly missing even though the author was a woman and presumably was aware that women existed4.
These unigender settings can be distinguished from the what-if books because the question “why is there only one gender?’ is never raised or answered. Whereas the what-if books generally explain exactly why one gender is missing.
It should also be noted the missing gender in such books is usually female. This isn’t an accident. It must have something to do with the perceived audience for SF being young men (presumably unacquainted with women or why would they have time to read SF?). Olden time authors also tended to have firm notions as to what kind of story might be genre-appropriate: if SF is about scientists inventing things, or can-do he-men having adventures, well, that’s not what women do. To quote Poul Anderson’s “Reply to a Lady: “The frequent absence of women characters has no great significance, perhaps none whatsoever.” It’s just that authors like Clarke and Asimov “prefer cerebral plots (…).” It’s not that women cannot feature in narratives—however, proper SF narratives concern thinking and doing important stuff. Women don’t do that sort of stuff, so far as Anderson was concerned. Curiously, Anderson seems not to have been rewarded for this reply with the rousing accolades he perhaps expected…
There has been, to my knowledge, only one novel ever published in which men are completely absent and where the author feels no need to explain where the men went: Kameron Hurley’s The Stars Are Legion. Which came out at in 2017. So, plenty of untapped genre potential here!
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1: Disclaimer: I know that there are many variations on gender, and that sorting people into two hard-and-fast categories does violence to biology, psychology, culture, and individual choice. But authors–even authors of SF—have often defaulted to binary conceptions of gender, although that is evolving in more recent years.
2: Officially. In some cases, and to say which cases would be a spoiler, it turns out the world had the supposedly absent gender all along. This at least helps explain where the babies are coming from, although uterine replicators, clone vats, and vigorous, sustained handwaving can also serve.
3: Tangentially connected to SF (but not actually SF so I cannot use it as an example in the main text): Harry Stine’s The Third Industrial Revolution manages to wrestle with the weighty matter of population growth without ever mentioning women.
4: Norton is an interesting case because despite contributing to the issue herself (or perhaps because she contributed to it), she was well aware that women were curiously absent from speculative fiction. From her “On Writing Fantasy”:
These are the heroes, but what of the heroines? In the Conan tales there are generally beautiful slave girls, one pirate queen, one woman mercenary. Conan lusts, not loves, in the romantic sense, and moves on without remembering face or person. This is the pattern followed by the majority of the wandering heroes. Witches exist, as do queens (always in need of having their lost thrones regained or shored up by the hero), and a few come alive. As do de Camp’s women, the thief-heroine of Wizard of Storm, the young girl in the Garner books, the Sorceress of The Island of the Mighty. But still they remain props of the hero.
Only C. L. Moore, almost a generation ago, produced a heroine who was as self-sufficient, as deadly with a sword, as dominate a character as any of the swordsmen she faced. In the series of stories recently published as Jirel of Joiry we meet the heroine in her own right, and not to be down-cried before any armed company.
Norton decided to address this issue herself. What was the reaction, you ask?
I had already experimented with some heroines who interested me, the Witch Jaelithe and Loyse of Verlaine. But to write a full book (The Year of the Unicorn) from the feminine point of view was a departure. I found it fascinating to write, but the reception was oddly mixed. In the years now since it was first published I have had many letters from women readers who accepted Gillan with open arms, and I have had masculine readers who hotly resented her.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviewsand Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
Is it a fixation or just an obvious sci-fi idea that has been used multiple times?
Hey, don’t forget A Door into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski, a classic of feminist science fiction.
I don’t actually name these pieces but one way to read the title is “here is a leading question which James… actually didn’t directly address, although the answer is implicit.” What’s up is that there are stories inherent in single gender worlds.
I did in fact completely forget Door into Ocean. If only Mount This Needs Rereading wasn’t even taller than Mount Tsundoku.
Wylie’s The Disappearance is notable because women-only and men-only worlds both exist (and as the title suggests, the separation into two worlds is sudden).
Theodore Sturgeon explicitly refers to the Wylie book in his single-sex novel “Venus Plus X’
Actually, it struck me while reading that that there’s no reason to believe that the characters are human, or even necessarily humanoid. Except for the fact that Hurley herself characterizes it as “Lesbians in Space”.
And the other thing that struck me is that there very obviously is a ‘male’ (if not a man) on every ship. The ships fertilize the females.
Seveneves doesn’t belong on this list because it isn’t set on a single-gender planet. After the human race is almost wiped out at the end of Part Two, it is reduced to seven women – the seven Eves of the title – but they all then produce both male and female offspring. Part Three shows a human culture split into seven tribes, one descended from each Eve, all of which contain both men and women.
Also: does The Left Hand of Darkness count?
I was wondering that myself. I would think “Yes”… No, “No”…
There’s also the whole subgenre of ’50s B movies where intrepid travelers encountered a future/alien/isolated island society consisting entirely of women and eager to reproduce with the manly heroes — Queen of Outer Space, Fire Maidens from Outer Space, Cat-Women of the Moon, etc. Then there’s the reverse trope of an alien society that’s lost its women so that its men need to mate with Earthwomen to avoid extinction, like Mars Needs Women or I Married a Monster from Outer Space.
9: Raiders from the Rings falls into the second class, doesn’t it?
@10/James: Never heard of that one.
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Cordwainer Smith’s short story, “The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal,” which appeared in Amazing Stories in May 1964: A human-colonized planet where femininity turns out to be carcinogenic. The surviving women undergo surgical and pharmaceutical gender-change, and an all-male society develops. The story is considered problematic, to say the least, today for its depiction of that all-male society in arguably homophobic terms.
@13: And less than a year before that, in the June F&SF, there was “Another Rib” by Marion Zimmer Bradley and Juanita Coulson in which the all-male crew of a starship are the only survivors of the human race and are aided by some aliens in procreating. It’s certainly less homophobic than the Smith, though the main character has definite problems adjusting to the changes.
There is also Norman Spinrad’s A World Between. Although the scene of the action is a planet with both men and women, there are also representatives of a purely female culture and a strongly masculine culture with very few women.
A lot of these books were written in response to each other. @9 Virgin Planet sounds like a parody of those pulps. Joanna Russ also wrote When It Changed in part to critique the pulps. Nicola Griffith wrote Ammonite in response to Joanna Russ, because she felt like it was more feminist/truer to show woman-only worlds as imperfect. It’s less about a set of tropes and more about a conversation.
Joanna Russ wrote a scathing article about single sex worlds: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4239306?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Justine Larbelestier wrote her phD thesis on the history of The Battle of the Sexes in Sf. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Battle_of_the_Sexes_in_Science_Ficti.html?id=R1EppLpAdz0C
I think my favorite among the early utopian single-gender worlds I’ve read — though “favorite” mostly for sheer over-the-top bizarreness — is Mizora: A Mss. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch by Mary E. Bradley (published 1890). (See my extensive review here.) Not a separate planet exactly, because it uses a hollow-earth motif.
There’s a whole genre of all-female-world/society novels coming out of the lesbian fiction community, including works like Katherine V. Forrest’s Daughters of a Coral Dawn and its sequels. The trope seems to have been peculiarly popular among early lesbian SFF of the ’80s and ’90s, driven in part by being the simplest way to focus the story on women, but at the same time by what feels like a difficulty in imagining woman-centered cultures (or even egalitarian cultures) without the artifice of removing those awkward men from the stage. Having used that mechanism, and working from the presumption that woman-only societies will naturally result in same-sex romantic/erotic partnerships, this genre curiously fails to engage with the question of whether the concept of “same-sex orientation” is meaningful when no alternative is available. The trope has become much less common in more recent lesbian-published SFF, one suspects because authors have worked past the imaginative difficulties.
@8, Possibly it’s just Genly Ai’s perception but it seemed to me that the Gethans had two genders, it’s just they switched back and forth between them. Certainly they had two sexual modes.
Tillie Walden’s webcomic On A Sunbeam is a fluffy, happy depiction of a (mostly) all female world with one non-binary character. It never really goes into what it means to be non-binary in a single sex, mostly single gender world.
The first volume of Ody-c is the Odyssey IN SPACE where all the humans are female and all the gods are gender fluid.
It is an interesting question why it is such a common scifi trope. I would guess on that it’s just such an easy premise. Planets that are entirely something (ie. ice, forests etc.) are a long running trope in scifi, and the step to planets entirely of men or women is an easyone to make. Mainly, and especially in regards to stories where women seem to have been completely forgotten, I think the trope may come from pop culture. You just have so many other 20th c. fiction genres (ie. western, war stories) where women are virtually nowhere to be seen. I think scifi writers may have just picked up on this and thrown the extreme version or the reverse into speculative stories. That’s why you get an abundance of ‘dudes in space’, taking to the extreme the ‘dudes at war/on the trail’ stories, and ‘planet of the women’, flipping the conventions on their head.
As for notable examples. I always remember that bit in the Lensman series (I think Second Stage Lensman) where Kinnison, our square jawed lensman (no girls!) ubermensch, is stranded on a planet of communist, naturalist matriarchs, and dated ‘hilarity’ ensues. As I recall the matriarchs are concerned that if Kinnison leaves he might reveal the existence of their ‘utopia’ to others and get man-hands all over the place, thus ruining it. Kinnison’s response is something to the effect of: ‘Listen here chicky-girl-lady, I would never dream of sending any red-blooded lensman to your cuckoo dame planet for the sake of their own sanity. 23 skidoo.’ This is one of many moments in Lensman where you are reminded that you are reading a 30s pulp story written by a crazy, yet manly, yet also crazy donut scientist from a different time…
There’s a John Wyndham novella, “Consider Her Ways”, about a post-apocalyptic all-female society run on eusocial grounds: there’s a reproductive caste, the Mothers, a Worker caste, a Soldier caste and a ruling caste of Doctors.
And the Tleilaxu of the Dune books are male-only, or so it seems for most of the series (mind you, we don’t actually see their home world at any point).
The closest you’d probably get in real life would be the male-only monastic societies of Mount Athos, the planned female-only resort of Supershe in Finland, and the various societies (Saudi Arabia, southern Afghanistan) where women are perforce still around but are kept hidden as far as possible (cloistered, forced to wear disguising clothing, social barriers against mentioning them in conversation; it’s considered offensive to ask after the wellbeing of your host’s wives or daughters, while it’s OK to discuss sons). As someone or other said, there are some societies which force you into bikinis and some that force you into burkas, and the latter are worse because they don’t just think you’re inferior, they want to pretend that you don’t exist at all.
Possibly it’s just Genly Ai’s perception but it seemed to me that the Gethans had two genders, it’s just they switched back and forth between them. Certainly they had two sexual modes.
It’s been a few years since I read it, but I thought that in fact they had three modes: most of the time they were neuter and weren’t really interested, and then they came into season (kemmer) and became either male or female; the same Gethenian (Gethan?) could be male one season and female the next.
So you could argue
a) Gethen is a planet of one gender, and that gender is “Gethenian”; there’s no distinction between Gethenians on grounds of biological gender. You can’t categorise Gethenians into genders by saying “these ones could all bear children, and these ones could sire children” as you can with humans. They could all do both. Therefore, all one gender.
b) Gethen is a planet of two genders, male and female, and its inhabitants can be both at different points of their lives.
c) Gethen is a planet of three genders; male, female, and neuter. Gethenians are neuter most of the time and occasionally one of the other two.
“Manikins” by John Varley finds a single-sex planet where you’d least expect it.
Phyllis Gotlieb’s Birthstones (2007) concerns a world that is functionally if not biologically single-sexed: colonial strip-mining and other environmental exploitation on the planet Shar has created fertility problems in its men and, it seems, entirely mutated sentience out of its women who for generations have been nothing more than mindless lumps of genetically invaluable flesh; the story begins when the young emperor of the Shar determines to go offplanet to ask for help in restoring the other half of his species and a lot of people for one reason or another (misogyny, economics, politics) want to stop him.
There are also societies where one gender is non-sentient. I think Larry Niven developed at least two alien societies that were this way.
@24: Three, I think. The Kzinti, the Grogs, and the Thrints.
I would like to name-check Dr Liz Williams’ ‘Winterstrike’ and ‘Banner of Souls’, largely set on a far future Mars [and Earth] where there are only women – well, females – and offspring is largely by parthenogenisis. It is not a utopian future….
Ha! Winterstrike is near the top of my TBR….
As I recall Banner of Souls, there are still a few males scampering around on Mars. Not that they play a role in the plot.
In John Varley’s Gaia trilogy (Titan, Wizard, Demon), there is a character that comes from a self made one-gender world. Very (very) briefly, lesbians colonized a moon and buy sperm from their home planet. Our character is actually considered deviant because she discovers she likes having sex with men. Well, one man and he’s actually……..it’s a 30 year old trilogy but I don’t want people yelling spoilers, so, go read it.
Speaking of “cerebral” scifi, I’m currently reading Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation”- I’m enjoying it, but I’m about 2/3rds in and except for a passing mention of a dowager in a crowd scene, there has literally not been a SINGLE female character. As far as I know, the 25 million planets of the first galactic empire may be populated entirely by men.
@30: Fortunately, some female characters show up later on (well, one in “Foundation and Empire” and two or three(!) in “Second Foundation”).
If I remember the BBC adaptation, there are … four? Women of significance in the galaxy? A dictator’s confidante whose name I forget, Bayta, her granddaughter Arkady and Lady Callia.
@32: That’s about how I remember it. I think you mean the dictator’s wife (the daughter of an important Imperial General), unless I’m mistaken. The only other women even mentioned (other than “wives and children” of Seldon’s group) are Ducem Barr’s unnamed daughter (off-screen), and Preem Palver’s unnamed wife (referred to as “Mama”). Arkady’s mother is apparently dead and forgotten well before her action takes place (and she doesn’t have any female classmates, either).
Not sure whether Anne Rice’ Queen of the Damned counts as sf, but Akasha’s desire for a society with a 90/10 Female/Male ratio sure made sense to me.
Except of course that she was just using it as rationalization to commit mass murder.
Could we imagine a future group of colonists deliberately setting out to create such a society, using only sexual selection of embryos, and without the mass murder?
The idea is that limiting the number of males not only lessens the consequences of their aggressive tendencies, but also the presence of so many females has a calming effect on the males that remain.
I was going to dispute hotly, as no doubt you intended, your proposal of a “fixation” with sexless planets – why, barely one percent of the SF I read proposes that one or other sex doesn’t exist – till I read on and found that your topic included settings where another sex of persons possibly exists but doesn’t appear in the story. Er, yes. In the old days, anyway… Although, an Edgar Rice Burroughs male character may have a nice girl to rescue. And maybe a naughty girl to get his fingers burned on, figuratively. That’s about it. Tarzan’s adoptive mother is a significant influence, but might be disqualified because she’s a gorilla.
34: It occurs to me I have weekly contact with a possible model for societies with large women: men ratios, which is to say dance troupes. For various reasons boys are generally a tiny minority of dancers. Dance troupe culture may dominate any gender effects. I guess there are not a lot fist fights but the troupes where bullying and petty spitefulness are allowed can be pretty vicious.
@36,
Bullying and petty spitefulness on the part of the males, or the females?
I know nothing about dance troupe culture, but I am definitely of the opinion that compulsory school environments breed this kind of thing. And if the parents of these children are pride driven and insist that their children participate, and shame them for not performing well, then its the same thing.
Not to stray too far from the solution – to – the – battle – of – the – sexes – theme of your article, but so far as I know sf stories haven’t been written that try to imagine healthier educational environments.
Yes, I am an unschooler.
Back to the 90/10 society: maybe the effect would just be to make the females compete for males, and thus to bring out aggressive, ‘male’ qualities in them. If this led to reproductive success, such qualities might even be bred into them, resulting in ‘Female is the new Male.’
I think the ratio unpleasant dance moms/unpleasant dance dads is roughly equal to the ratio dance mom/dance dad.
From my perspective, it’s nothing to with a supposed battle of the sexes but whether competitiveness manifests above or below the company level. To generalize wildly, there’s a huge difference between companies where they are a mutually supportive team and ones where they are a grudging alliance between rivals that will last until the first opportunity for glorious back-stab comes along. The second tends to have more people for whom being pointlessly (or counter-productively) unpleasant to those farther down the food chain because one can be seems to be a life goal. The first sort is an affirmation that there are pleasant people and the second are apparently participating in a musical LARP of Game of Thrones. The important thing is that even though at a distance the two types look similar, the outcomes are very different.
At least where Bujold is concerned, much of her early galactic worldbuilding hinges on exactly who controls the technological means of reproduction (uterine replicators). Barrayar is the tragedy because it had nuclear weapons but not uterine replicators or advanced medicine. On Beta, you can have practically any family structure as long as everyone involved is properly educated. Cetaganda is a eugenicist state run by a caste of women who have apocalyptic biological weapons. On Jackson’s Whole the rich create entire corporations run by their own clone-siblings, or engage in ghoulish forms of immortality. Ethan of Athos was an early experiment along those lines, and probably not one of her best.
And competition over the guys isn’t a factor, either. It’s all about taking trophies home and winning scholarships. And for some, making other people miserable.
@34, Maybe the males will be calm. Not so sure about the females. Anybody who thinks females aren’t aggressive didn’t go to High School. We express it differently that’s all. Much more underhanded and vicious.
Wen Spencer wrote a book about a culture with a massive gender imbalance in favor of women. They are not calm. The few men are rightfully terrified.
There’s also Themyscira, the all-female society from Greek myth that DC used as Wonder Woman’s origin. It’s one of her creator’s little quirks that a heroine meant to embody feminism comes from a place with no interaction between men and women at all. No child-rearing either.
I reread a lot of Christopher Anvil’s output a few years back. IIRC he wrote for something over 10 years before introducing his first female character.
@42/Gareth: Well, DC’s Amazon island of Themyscira is based on Themiscyra, a plain on the southern shore of the Black Sea in what’s now Turkey, which was considered the homeland of the Amazons in Greek myth. Wonder Woman’s home was originally called Paradise Island, but was renamed Themyscira in 1987.
The absence of female characters in certain kinds of novels was hardly limited to genre; it may have reflected assumptions by Marketing that audiences hadn’t changed for the most-of-a-century since Robert Louis Stevenson’s kid asked for an adventure with no women in it.
Ajay wrote: The closest you’d probably get in real life would be the male-only monastic societies of Mount Athos, the planned female-only resort of Supershe in Finland, and the various societies (Saudi Arabia, southern Afghanistan) where women are perforce still around but are kept hidden as far as possible…
I can’t speak for Afghanistan, but going by my friend and cover artist Naziha Zahed’s posts on DeviantArt, your description of Saudi Arabia is somewhat misinformed. Going by her occasional work related posts, SA seems to have developed parallel men and women’s societies, as a consequence of the severe separation policies.She works at an aged care facility where the men and women are separated in the building. So the women need their own female doctors, nurses, orderlies, maintenance personnel…. Much like Athos, their system has developed a lot of workarounds to deal with supposedly immutable policies.
(Also they have had their own Comic Con the past couple of years. Men and women enter by two separate doors, but mingle on the main floor as much as they please.)
Going by her occasional work related posts, SA seems to have developed parallel men and women’s societies, as a consequence of the severe separation policies.She works at an aged care facility where the men and women are separated in the building. So the women need their own female doctors, nurses, orderlies, maintenance personnel…
As I say, kept hidden as far as possible. Those male and female societies are, to use a phrase that may be familiar to you, separate but not equal.
SA has started to loosen up a bit in recent years, admittedly, from the press reports I see, so I may be a few years out of date; it certainly seems to be a little more relaxed now than it was in the days when it was considered better for female children to burn to death than to be seen out in the streets without their robes on. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1874471.stm How long that lasts, who can say.
There are examples of real-world societies with a gender imbalance though nowhere near as severe as those in SF. Prisons, historical warships etc. don’t really count as societies; they’re temporarily isolated parts of a larger society which doesn’t normally have a gender imbalance. Prisoners are released, ships come to port etc.
But you could look at modern China and some areas of modern India for societies with significantly fewer women than men, and at France post WW1 or the USSR post WW2 for societies with significantly fewer men than women – at least in certain age groups. The US isn’t an imbalanced society, but mass incarceration means that there are significantly fewer black men than black women – 83 per 100 – and the effects of this have been well studied, though it’s debatable whether “the black USA” counts as a society in this sense either.
You give very short shrift to Chandler’s Spartan Planet and mischaracterize the nature of the all male society there.
It would have been interesting if the author would have covered the inherent homosexual implications of same gender planets.
@46, Most if not all societies that have strongly divided gender roles also have a feminine sub-culture. Traditional Muslim countries are an extreme example but American suburbs had and have a network and culture of stay at home mothers and homemakers.
Utopias are affectively masculine. They imagine an ideal where the great mother (mother nature, the unknown, chaos) has been completely eliminated and the utopia can satisfy everyone’s needs. Since a utopia is supposed to be perfect, there is no need for the utopia to engage with the unknown, no need for the masculine to engage with the feminine. In practice, this has always led to disaster. It is the union of the masculine and feminine that generates updated adaptive utility. Utopias are doomed to stagnation and death through failure to adapt. Absence of the masculine leads to anarchy. Absence of the feminine leads to tyranny.
I was surprised that Storm Constantine’s WRAETHU wasn’t mentioned.
@@@@@ 34 there was an anime, set in space, in which humanity did that. I forgot its name, though, but society had become 90% female on purpose to counter male aggressiveness.
@56, Assuming that female aggression is totally non-problematic?
David Brin’s Glory Season is really good. One of Brin’s best works. Telling truth by the means of a made up story, which in everyone’s books is good literature.
With the theme of the article there is a nice novel written originally in Spanish by Gabriel Bermudez Castillo: El Hombre Estrella. Worth reading if you can find it.
I do not think I have read the Constantine.
Enjoy!
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/rough-and-tough-and-strong-and-mean
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/a-life-of-danger
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/mystery-dance
I don’t know why I can link sometimes but other times have to drop naked urls in.
Are all the comments on this being moderated before being posted? What did I miss?
52: As I recall, not every book I mentioned had an implied potential gay subtext. My impression of Gilman is she thought all that messy sex stuff would vanish once the men were out of the equation, while the fellows on the Solar Queen may well have reproduced using asexual budding for all they thought about the matter.
Greg Egan’s “Oceanic” features a single gender, which exchange genitalia as they mate. And most of Egan’s post-human stories have no genders, everyone’s an upload or digital intelligence.
In anime, Gall Force starts with an all-female species Solnoid fighting an endless war against blob-like Paranoid aliens. Males are eventually created, but the better Solnoids prefer death to dealing with this.
@54,
Female = Chaos?
while the fellows on the Solar Queen may well have reproduced using asexual budding for all they thought about the matter.
After all, it is the future.
In the anime TV series Saber Marionette J (1996), a disaster during an interstellar colonization mission leaves only six survivors, all male. They resort to cloning. Eventually they create female androids, but they’re generally non-sapient and emotionless. (It’s a harem comedy, so deeper sociological explanation is really not the point.)
(Yes, this sounds like it was inspired by the ST:TNG episode “Up the Long Ladder” (1989), in which a colonization mission was reduced to two women and three men, so they resorted to cloning.)
In the anime TV series Vandread (2000), there’s a males-only planet at cold-war with a females-only planet. Eventually the protagonists learn that both were seeded (along with a range of other worlds) by decadent future-Earth, to produce specific lines of replacement organs. (FWIW, this series has a mood and mindset very much like Trek — getting forced together by immaterial aliens, exploring what it means to be human, encountering locals, using guile to defeat foes. Also, the robot harvester-ships look rather like V’ger.)
It’s often an error to attempt to deduce from someone’s fiction details about the author but if at some point Andre Norton had said she didn’t seem much point in this romance stuff, it would not have been the most surprising revelation from an author. Once the romances did start appearing in her books, they seemed almost pro forma.
Have read a few of the listed books and short stories. Another book missing from the list would be World Without Men (Later titled Alph) Charles Eric Maine (David MacIlwain) which posits an all female Earth in which reproduction is via parthogenic cloning.
That is until the frozen corpse of the last man to die is found in Antartica. He is then (iirc) cloned and the resulting clone Alph sparks all sorts of political and social unrest.
Good article. Someone mentioned Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X up above, but if my recollection serves me, it wasn’t a single sex society, it was a society where people picked their genders, and were surgically modified to fit their choice. I suspect that by today’s standards it was relatively tame, but at the time it was considered very controversial.
@52, Depending on how the world-building goes, homosexual implications may or may not exist in a single-gendered species. I mean if the species reproduce asexually, then the whole “sexual” part of the word becomes meaningless. Take the Trisolarans from the Three-Body Trilogy for instance, two individuals come together to procreate but it’s the somatic material and not the gametes that come together. It’s pretty interesting to think about the social implications of this type of reproduction, but our concepts and customs about companionship with a sexual partner (homo- or hetero-) may not apply to their society — especially since companionship after reproduction is a non-issue as the parents effectively die to create the offspring.
Contrast this with Claude Lalumiere’s short story “The Object of Worship”, where it’s a society of all women living in homosexual relationships, and they reproduce sexually with the help of “gods”, which might or might not be non-sentient males similar to what @24 suggested Niven did (there’s an element of magic or ritual, and it’s not clear how the gods come to be).
I’ve read such a book but don’t recall author or title. The protagonist lands on a planet inhabited only by women, but they’re all replicas of a few, created by a “parthenogenesis machine”. Turns out that a ship had crashed long ago and all the survivors were women.
The women who were medical and science types took control, and they control who gets to reproduce, and how many. Their descendant tribes of identicals run things and have all the surviving technology, while the identical tribes of the other survivors’ descendants live a medieval / barbarous lifestyle.
The tribes on the outside keep plotting to either seize the parthenogenesis machine so they can increase their numbers, or figure that somehow they’ll build their own. Neither is possible since the tribes in control make sure the rest of them are ignorant of technology.
Rumors of mythical ‘men’ have survived and when this odd newcomer appears, all the tribes want him – after he explains he’s not some odd sort of woman they’ve never seen before.
They all want him to ‘demonstrate’ the whole man thing but every time he’s rudely interrupted before anything can get going, usually it’s by getting grabbed by another horde of identical women. The poor guy could get some action if he wasn’t so shy about ‘demonstrating’ in front of a large crowd.
Eventually he does get back to his spacecraft. Along the way he’s pretty much fallen for one particular redhead, but an identical sibling from her batch has also fallen for him. The book ends with the two playing a type of rock paper scissors game “High girl gets him!” The winner will leave on his ship.
@68: Not quite. In Venus Plus X, all the adults are hermaphroditic, but this is achieved via surgery (and by other actions I don’t want to spoil).
70: That’s Poul Anderson’s Virgin Planet.
This was a nice summary article. I’ve often wondered what a “modern” retelling of some of these might look like. Very different I suppose. Even more recent works like Glory Season might read differently in the post #MeToo world. (What do the small number of men in Glory Season feel about their objectification, e.g.? Would concepts like cis- and transgender exist among a clones house? And so on.
Not exactly single-gender, but in the same ballpark, is the excellent Califia’s daughters, by Laurie R. King writing under the name Leigh Richards. On Earth, in the not too distant future, a virus has targeted the Y chromosome. Very few boy babies are born. Females run the society (which is at an Old West level). Males are rare and cherished, and/or seen as bargaining chips. The author creates nuanced male as well as female characters. What a shame she never wrote a sequel.
@74/anewname: That reminds me of a comic book series I’ve heard of called Y: The Last Man, which is pretty self-explanatory.
@anewname, actually that sounds like the deliberately-bad movie Hell Comes to Frogtown. “Rowdy” Roddy Piper as the last fertile man on Earth.
@52:
I’d go further than tkThompson and say that there cannot be inherent homosexual implications on a single sex planet. homosexual implies not heterosexual, and there can’t be any heterosexuality when there is only one sex. There may be no sexuality at all, but not homo- or hetero-sexuality.
And that brings me to another issue. We’re not talking about single-gender planets here, we’re talking about single-sex planets. Gender has come to be used for a construct of the mind–it’s how we identify ourselves, not how others identify us.
What might make for a fascinating story would be an investigation into what would happen with gender in a single-sex society. Would it not exist? Would we replace gender with some other characteristic, like skin color (I suspect that’s highly probable–and highly problematic)? Perhaps we’d have left-breast Amazons and right-breast Amazons?
On Earth, in the not too distant future, a virus has targeted the Y chromosome. Very few boy babies are born. Females run the society (which is at an Old West level). Males are rare and cherished, and/or seen as bargaining chips.
On a related note, there’s “A Brother’s Price” by Wen Spencer.
@77/auspex: “I’d go further than tkThompson and say that there cannot be inherent homosexual implications on a single sex planet. homosexual implies not heterosexual, and there can’t be any heterosexuality when there is only one sex. There may be no sexuality at all, but not homo- or hetero-sexuality.”
I think the intent of the comment was that, even if a society only has one gender, it might still have sexual interactions among its members, of a type that we would therefore perceive as “homosexual” even if the characters in the story did not. So the question is, which stories about single-sex societies gloss over that fact out of homophobia on the part of the authors/editors/audience, and which stories acknowledge and explore it in order to confront/comment on the audience’s preconceptions? For instance, does a story portray an all-female society as entirely chaste and lonely until a man finally comes along to satisfy their urges, like in most ’50s B-movie examples of the trope, or does it use the premise of an all-female society to explore lesbianism, whether as titillation or as social commentary? (You could make a case that William Moulton Marston & H.G. Peter’s Wonder Woman comics did all three. Superficially, the Amazons were portrayed as heterosexual, with Diana instantly falling in love with Steve Trevor when he crashed on Paradise Island; but the Marston-written comics showed the Amazons playing all sorts of BDSM games that were implicitly sexual and were meant both to titillate and to express Marston’s beliefs about gender politics and female superiority. Although once Marston died in 1947, any such hints of unconventional sexuality vanished entirely from the comics.)
@77, Yes, exactly. There is terrible tendency to confuse sex – a biologic fact, with gender which is a socially constructed role. It would be possible, even likely, for a single sex planet to have a rich variety of genders and roles for same.
@80: “Ethan of Athos” toys with that notion. There are many different styles of life among the Athosians: conventional-looking pair-bonding complete with children to raise, child-raising couples who don’t have sex with each other, celibates (and probably more that we don’t see because we see the society through Ethan’s eyes). The same seems to be true in “Houston, Houston, Do you Read?” (if I recall correctly)
For some reason, while the story is not about a single sex world, this article and comments reminded me of Wen Spencer’s A Brother’s Price.
The story “Eon” by Élisabeth Vonarburg (an author mentioned in https://www.tor.com/2018/08/02/fighting-erasure-women-sf-writers-of-the-1970s-part-x/) features an all-male generation ship. Reproduction is by cloning. It was translated into English by the author and your truly, appearing in the collection Blood Out of a Stone (Nanopress, 2009). It has a twist at the end that required some translator’s creativity because of differences between French and English when it comes to grammatical/sexual gender.