by PAMELA HAAG
I’m not a big science fiction reader, but I admire how the genre has just enough of a toehold in reality that it feels plausibly weird. It stakes out the space of the uncanny: familiar, but disorienting.
Here are marital sci fi ideas that seem like they might come true. I’m choosing things that we already have marital “prototypes” for today, albeit in some cases on the edgy frontiers of that strange world known as Planet Relationship.
SERIAL MARRIAGE BY DESIGN
What if you lived for 300 years? Would “’til death do us part” still apply? In John Wyndham’s Trouble with Lichen, Diana is a smart, sexy scientist who’s isolated the secret to living hundreds of years (plot spoiler: it’s moss). “How is marriage going to mesh with the new order,” a character asks her. “Fixed term marriages, with options, as in leases, perhaps?” Or maybe “companionship” appeal, rather than sex appeal, would become the primary consideration if we extended marriage from 50 to 250 years?
Marital term limits already have been proposed in some countries, and serial monogamy is a common marital practice, since many Americans marry, divorce, and re-marry. Maybe the practice will shift from normal to ideal in the 21st century. Forever’s only getting longer. Fifty is already the “new 30.”
OPEN NON-MONOGAMY
One of the most popular sci fi relationship ideas is non-monogamy. Samuel Delany’s protagonist in Dhalgren is in a polyamorous relationship, and Robert Rimmer’s Harrad Experiment (1966) explores open marriage. Sci fi writer Robert Heinlein was a noted advocate of sexual liberation and free love.
Ethical non-monogamy’s already here. An estimated five percent of marriages today are “open,” and that may well be an under-count.
REPRODUCTION BELONGS IN THE LAB, NOT MARRIAGE
Sperm banks, egg donors, birth control and surrogate motherhood have already shattered the ironclad marital premise of “biology as destiny” and the bond between marriage, sex and reproduction. Medical technologies can replicate an in utero environment to keep extremely premature babies alive.