
What’s With Sci-Fi’s Fixation on Single-Gendered Planets? - fanf2
https://www.tor.com/2018/07/25/single-gender-planets-in-science-fiction/
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lagadu
Regarding the "what if" novels, not the novels where a gender is entirely
missing for unexplained reasons like discussed at the end:

Because few things have had as strong an influence in our culture as gender,
it's central to both our biology and culture; it's an extremely big avenue for
narrative exploration messing with that. In other words, I'm surprised there
isn't more of a fixation with "single-gender" sci fi considering how important
gender is.

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pjc50
Why is there comparatively little "gender futurist" stuff, then? _Left Hand Of
Darkness_ being the standout example, but I suppose Banks' technologically
mediated gender fluidity also counts.

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neaden
The Imperial Radch Series starting with Ancillary Justice does this a bit. The
main human civilization in the setting, the Radch, don't care about gender or
have a word for it. Given the widespread availability of cloning and other
methods of reproduction they just don't view it as important anymore.

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maire
These are all old books. The modern trend seems to be gender is an
afterthought. The main character in the Ancillary series has difficulty
distinguishing men from women.

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andrewflnr
Except _The Stars Are Legion_ , which was last year.

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gaius
I have been an avid sci-fi reader my entire life and have never come across a
book set on a single gender planet. So “fixation” is a bit of clickbait there.

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zaarn
I think that would be simply a wrong title and not clickbait.

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yoz-y
To me it looks like the author had an idea, then the title and then was not
able to actually find enough data to support the idea. They went with the
title anyways.

I'd pitch two more examples:

In Dune by Frank Herbert the whole Tleilaxu population is male and nobody
knows what happened to their women (this is explained later in the book). It
seems odd to me that this was not mentioned in the article as I assume that
Dune is more known that any of the books the author mentioned. Tleilaxu in the
book have a sort of religious hatred for women.

In the The Risen Empire by Scott Westerfeld the initial antagonist is a race
human women who have "since disposed of the useless gender" and merged with
machines. This is stated as a matter of fact and is not a theme explored by
the book.

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jerf
It's not quite a true single-gender planet, but Frank Herbert also wrote The
White Plague [1], a story about a bioengineered plague that kills only women,
set in more or less the present day on a copy of real Earth.

One of the scarier books I've read. For most science fiction, there's a clear
reason why the events can't really happen, or at the very least, that some
sort of massive breakthrough would be required (FTL, fusion, etc.) for the
story to happen, or it's just so absurd or disconnected from my real day-to-
day experience that it's not a real concern. I've got no such defense for this
story, so even though I've read stories about things that are arguably more
horrifying in the sense that there are more deaths or the deaths are more
horrible or such, this book penetrated my psychological defenses like few
others ever have. There's very little stopping it from happening now, and ever
less every year. Usually the modern focus of the discussion is race-specific
plagues, but (genetic) gender would probably not be that hard to nail either.
Even if such a plague wasn't quite 100% accurate, it wouldn't matter much.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague)

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eesmith
Along those lines, James Tiptree Jr.'s short story
"[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution")
concerns a plague causing males to kill all females.

(Tiptree's "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" was already mentioned in the
linked-to article.)

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imglorp
There are plenty of Earth species that reproduce asexually through
parthenogenisis, fission, budding, etc.

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Jeremy1026
Definitely read "sf" in the title as "San Fransisco", not "Sci-Fi".

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mywacaday
Same here, wonder if it is down to a pre-disposition from reading too much
tech.

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lucideer
Even without that predisposition, I'd imagine San Fransisco would still be the
common expansion. SF is a large city, world-famous for things other than tech,
and I've never heard the already abbreviated Sci-Fi cut down again to SF.

The original article has Sci-Fi.

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irb
'SF' is very commonly used as an abbreviation for science fiction,
particularly within the community, and has been for many decades. It's not a
further abbreviation of sci-fi, it's an alternative.

One of the intentions is to distinguish it from futuristic fiction which is
more about the rip-roaring adventure than the science. For example, Star Wars
would be labelled sci-fi, 2001 would be labelled SF.

If you're thinking it sounds like there's an element of snobbishness in there,
you are definitely right. It's much the same as with those authors who prefer
to say that they write speculative fiction rather than science fiction (SF as
an abbreviation also has the advantage that it works for both of those).

