"Open Earth," a sci-fi graphic novel about polyamory in space

I discovered this on AL.com, a mainstream newspaper site for the state of Alabama. Not quite what I expected there, though Alabama does have Huntsville, home of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.

Open Earth was written by Sarah Mirk of Portland, author of Sex from Scratch: Making Your Own Relationship Rules. The artists, Eva Cabrera and Claudia Aguirre, also draw Kim & Kim, a "science fiction adventure comic about two young queer women working as dimension-hopping interplanetary bounty hunters."

Here's the AL.com article, including a long interview with Mirk. Excerpts:

The 'sweet' and 'sexy' guide to polyamory in space

By Will Nevin

If our ability to travel and survive for extended periods in space gets better, but our will to curb greenhouse gasses and global warming stays about the same, what might happen?

What would life be like if we just abandoned Earth?

What would we take with us? Stuff would be limited. ... But our morals, our philosophical views, our outlook on life and love and relationships wouldn’t have to fit in an overhead bin.

And yet, would we leave them behind anyway?

Last September, Limerence Press — an Oni imprint that focuses on sex education and erotica comics — published “Open Earth,” [which] imagines life above a ruined Earth to be very different from the one most of us know now, in that the next generation — one born in space — might view monogamous relationships as a thing best left on the dead planet below.

“Open Earth” is warm and funny and (being on an adult line) just a little spicy. It was also one of the most revolutionary things published last year. I chatted with Mirk via email on how the book came together, about love and diversity and what the future might hold for the world she has created.

Q: How would you summarize "Open Earth," and how would you describe Rigo, the main protagonist?

The author

Sarah Mirk “Open Earth” is an upbeat, erotic sci-fi story set on a space station after the climate collapse of Earth. It chronicles a day in the life of the people growing up on the station, who have intertwining friendships and sexual relationships. Rigo is part of the first generation of people born in space. At 20 years old, the space station California is all she knows, so she’s skeptical of her parents’ interest in Earth traditions like monogamy and ruminating on the past. ...

Science fiction, collectivist philosophy and an exploration of polyamory might otherwise be taken up in separate works, but here, they're interwoven themes. How do these subjects speak to one another, and ultimately, how does "self" figure into all of them?

...In my mind, the generation of space-born young people see themselves as individuals, but because they’re living in very tight quarters and with extremely limited resources, they don’t have the same concepts around property, ownership and jealousy that we do today. The biggest difference, from a relationship standpoint, is that people are free to be intimate with whoever they want — there is not an expectation of monogamy, because that would lead to tension and resentment. Instead, the norm is that you can have sex with whoever you want, but you’ve got to be honest and open about it. No secrets! No one has a private room on the ship, everyone has at least one roommate and hogging space to yourself is discouraged. But they’re not collectivist zombies. I think humans will always be interested in having privacy, which is the core of having a self. On the California, the most precious commodity is privacy. Every conversation is subject to eavesdropping, everyone knows who is hooking up with who — even if they’d rather not. ...

The parents’ generation is much more tied into how history shapes identity — they named their kids after heroes on Earth and are trying to keep those stories and traditions alive. But the younger generation doesn’t see themselves that way, they see identity as more fluid, ever-shifting and not rooted in history at all. ...

Read the whole piece (Feb. 13, 2019)


A review in Mirk's hometown Portland Mercury: Polyamorous Sci-Fi Graphic Novel Open Earth Feels Lost in Space (Oct. 11, 2018)

By Andrew Jankowski

“Honesty keeps us alive” is a recurring phrase in Open Earth, the debut graphic novel penned by comics writer, author, and (full disclosure!) former Portland Mercury reporter Sarah Mirk. The motto refers not only to the practice of sharing the small quarters of an Earth-orbiting space station, but to its citizens — especially a polyamorous generation that has only ever lived in space.

...Open Earth presents a day-in-the-life look at life aboard the space station California... . Rigo narrates in the California’s official language, Spanglish, and it’s obvious that racism and body shaming are deader than monoculture and capitalism. The book’s main conflict, Rigo’s desire to move out of her parents’ quarters and into those of a partner, is only a problem because she doesn’t know how to tell anyone involved — her parents, her partner, or her other partners. Rigo’s life is a no-frills utopia or, depending on how you feel about non-monogamy drama, a cheery dystopia.

...Open Earth succeeds as an easy, low-stakes read about navigating multiple romantic relationships and having sex in space. But it’s disappointing that the book lacks out-of-this-world situations, especially since the medium of comics is constrained only by a budget of imagination. The space station Rigo lives on ends up looking like a utility closet much of the time, and despite a diverse cast, no one except Rigo has much personality. Furthermore, considering the explicitness of the book’s sex scenes, the space sex is unforgivably tame. ...

...Open Earth has potential as a series, especially if it goes on to explore the other characters and expand its plotline about this new generation taking the station’s cultural reins. As a standalone, though, Open Earth feels more interested in education than story.

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While we're on graphic novels, there's the sweet queer poly Sugartown by Hazel Newlevant. Publisher's description: "A bisexual, polyamorous love story for the modern era. Hazel is already in a happy relationship when she meets Argent, a woman who works as a dominatrix, but is sweet and tender outside the bedroom. How will she negotiate this new romance with her boyfriend back home? And what about his other girlfriend?"

Two pages from it:

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‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ TV series being developed at Syfy

The first edition, hardcover

The polyamory movement wouldn't be what it is today had it not been for Robert Heinlein's science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, published in 1961. It laid out a vision of polyamorous group relationship with a purity like nothing readers of the time had ever seen. It has been called one of the books that made the 1960's happen. It changed countless lives, including mine. As late as the 2000's, when you asked any group of poly activists what got them started, some always cited Stranger. In fact, Stranger's most important early apostle and his life partner created the word polyamory itself (during a kitchen-table brainstorming in about 1988; see the 2015 updates to that link).

You can read more in my 2010 piece, Polyamory, Robert Heinlein, and his definitive new biography.

Few who come into the poly movement today have heard of Stranger, and the book itself has not aged well. It's casually sexist and homophobic, its science-fiction projections of the future (the story is set around 2000) were ridiculously naive, it has structural problems (its first two thirds and crucial last third were written a few years apart, with somewhat different thrusts) — and as a guide for real life it's useless: everything rests on magic psychic superpowers learned from Martians, via Heinlein's infatuation with the long-forgotten metaphysics of General Semantics.

But it's still a heck of a thought-provoker, not to mention adventure story, and those who love it always will, dearly.

Various projects to make a movie of Stranger have foundered during the last 55 years. Now, at long last, it looks like it will come to the screen, as a TV series.

Don't you dare screw this up, Syfy, or I will COME AND GET YOU!

From Variety:

‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ Being Developed at Syfy

By Daniel Holloway

Universal Cable Productions and Paramount Television are teaming to develop a series adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s 1961 science-fiction novel “Stranger in a Strange Land” for Syfy.

A piece of the American science fiction canon, “Stranger in a Strange Land” tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human born on Mars who comes to earth in early adulthood and eventually transforms its culture. The television adaptation will be executive produced by Brad Fischer, James Vanderbilt and William Sherak of Mythology Entertainment; Scott Rudin, Garrett Basch and Eli Bush of Scott Rudin Productions; and Joe Vecchio of Vecchio Entertainment. Mythology’s Julia Gunn will be co-executive producer.

“Paramount TV is excited to have the opportunity to adapt Robert Heinlein’s seminal work of science fiction,” said Paramount TV president Amy Powell. “This novel has resonated with me since college and there’s a reason it has continued to find new fans for over forty years. Syfy’s understanding of imaginative and futuristic programming is unmatched, making them an ideal partner for this series.”...

The whole item, written from a press release (November 15, 2016).


Forbes article:

...Although Stranger in a Strange Land began as a cult favorite when it was published in 1961, its cult status didn’t last long. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1962, one of four of Heinlein’ s books to win the coveted prize. (The others were Double Star, Starship Troopers, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.) Stranger was the first science fiction novel to make the New York Times bestseller list, and the US Library of Congress included it in an exhibition called The Books That Shaped America.

Writing in the New York Times, Michael Dirda characterized The Books That Shaped America as an exhibition that

puts on display what one might call the classics of upset and troublemaking. When first published, these books shocked people, made them angry, shook up their deepest beliefs. They shamed readers with accounts of racism, greed, corruption, Puritanism and provincial narrow-mindedness.

Stranger did all of that. It’s about a human raised by Martians named Valentine Michael Smith who is discovered on Mars and returned to Earth. Smith is baffled by human culture and society, and he proceeds to found the Church of All Worlds that promotes communal living and uninhibited sexuality. Some have seen Stranger as foreseeing aspects of the mid-to-late ’60s counterculture that the media labeled as “free love” and “hippies” (we didn’t called ourselves that).

Heinlein was not happy with the version of Stranger that became famous.¹ His original manuscript ran to something like 220,000 words but his publisher, Putnam, insisted it be cut to approximately 160,000. In 1991 Heinlein’s widow, Virginia Heinlein, renewed the book’s copyright and had the original manuscript published in its entirety.

Whether or not SyFy’s version will please the book’s many fans remains to be seen. SyFy did a good job adapting the first book in James A. Corey’s Expanse series, but the prominent role played by sexuality in Stranger in a Strange Land may be too much for the network to handle. Given what’s on display (so to speak) in Westworld, HBO might have been a better option.

...Cast, directors, scriptwriters and broadcast dates have not yet been announced.

The whole article (November 16, 2016).

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1. Actually, he was happy with it. In a letter to Oberon Zell (appended to this article as comment number 11), Heinlein said he thought the slimmed, speeded-up version of Stranger was the better one.

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F&SF "books about loving everybody"

Nisi Shawl writes fantasy and science fiction. On the website of her current publisher Tor Books, she offers some recommends for good poly tales:

Five Books about Loving Everybody 

Words are powerful magic. Finding a word — polyamory — to describe my romantic and sexual relationships made it possible to tell people what I was doing: my friends, my family, my lovers, and most importantly, myself. I was a college dropout when I first encountered the term polyamory, which we’ll define here as the conscious romantic and/or sexual involvement of three or more consenting adults.

The comic book which introduced me to the name of this concept, and which I read so eagerly, has gotten lost somewhere in my forty-plus years of raggle-taggle relocations. Its main character was named Polly,^[1] and I think the front cover was mostly black…. At any rate, it left me longing for further literary examples of this newly validated category of human behavior: stories about kissing and hugging and making love with everybody, without guilt or shame. Which I both wrote and found....

Her five choices, with a paragraph or two for each, are:

● Tales of Nevèryon by Samuel R. Delany (1979)

● Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler (2005)

● “«Légendaire»”, short story by Kai Ashante Wilson (2013)

● The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (2015)

● Black Wine by Candas Jane Dorsey (1997)

None of these recommendations are “about” polyamory. More accurately, these stories are around polyamory: loving everybody figures into what they’re about in different ways — as an exception, as a cultural marker for travelers in time and space, as a signifier of civility and sophistication, and so on. I’m sure that a thorough search would provide at least as many examples of ways of portraying polyamory in SFF as there are of practicing it.

Take my suggestions. Read them. Read my work as well, for you’ll find that, as I noted earlier, I’ve definitely written polyamory into several of the worlds I’ve imagined.

Her whole article (August 29, 2016).

And read the comments! They're by intelligent people offering many more examples, and not just Heinlein. Many of these books and stories I'd never heard of. Go add your own favorites.

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Update: The very same day, queer-fantasy author Shira Glassman gave her recommendations for poly fiction, with good descriptions, on LGBTQ Reads. They're all quite recent:

● She Whom I Love by Tess Bowery (2015)

● Kneel, Mr. President by Lauren Gallagher (2015)

● Chameleon Moon by RoAnna Sylver (2014)

● Midnight at the Orpheus by Alyssa Linn Palmer (2015)

● Ascension by Jacqueline Koyanagi (2013)

● The Fierce Family anthology (2014)

Her whole article: Recommendations for Polyamory in Fiction, by Shira Glassman (Aug. 29).


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1. That can only be Polly Morfus of Far Out West comix! The Kerista commune in San Francisco published them as as part of its prolific poly and hippie-consciousness outreach literature in the 1970s and 80s. "Even Eve" Furchgott, one of Kerista's most articulate spokespeople, wrote and drew the comix. Example. Actual paper copies are historic collector's items.

But I'm pretty sure Nisi Shawl is mistaken about encountering the word polyamory there. I suspect she is misremembering polyfidelity, the term invented and promoted by the Keristans. I have never been able to find the word polyamory used prior to its invention in the late 1980s and its first publications in 1990-1992. If you know otherwise, please write me!

–Alan M.
  alan7388 (AT) gmail.com

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Laurell K. Hamilton explains poly, as she lives it, to her readers

Speaking of poly conventional wisdom, fantasy writer Laurell K. Hamilton answers some of her readers' questions about polyamory as it's portrayed in her many books (the Anita Blake series, the Merry Gentry series and others), and as she lives it herself. Which she told about on her blog a while ago. Her quad has been living together since last fall. She just posted this on her blog:

What Polyamory is, and What Polyamory isn’t

"The joined hands of our foursome:
Jonathon, Genevieve, Spike, and me."

Since I came out as polyamorous I have been getting a lot of questions, so here’s an attempt to answer some of them.

What exactly is polyamory?

Ans: It means to love more; to love more people at the same time. The only rule that all poly people agree on is this: you tell the truth to everyone involved. That means that everyone involved in the relationship, or relationships, knows about everyone else. I’ve negotiated with several wives about relationship parameters with their husbands before certain boundaries were crossed because to do any less than be totally upfront beforehand isn’t poly, it’s cheating, and true poly doesn’t cheat. If anyone is telling you they’re poly but they’re sneaking around behind someone’s back, then it’s not polyamory....

How do you bring up the topic of poly to your spouse or special person?

Ans: I’ve never had to do this, so I honestly don’t know. I can tell you how Jonathon and I brought up the topic to each other. Jonathon and I married with the idea that we would not be monogamous as a married couple. Since we’re celebrating our fifteenth wedding anniversary this year, it’s worked for us. We’ve managed to raise a great kid who’s now in college. Our empty nest turned into a decidedly full one when our girlfriend of four & a half years moved in with us and brought her husband along, so that our couple became a fourple. Again, it’s working for the four of us but your mileage may vary. Here’s a little bit of how we got to this happy multiple arrangement.

More than fifteen years ago when Jonathon and I realized we wanted to marry each other, we both had reservations; not about our love for each other, but what the next step was in that love. He’d never been married before and I’d just gotten out of a sixteen year marriage....

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...One thing I do know is that polyamory isn’t a fix for a marriage that is already in trouble. If you’re relationship is in trouble, go to a marriage counselor, or to your local clergy. Go to someone that can help you work on your issues both as individuals and as a couple, because what I’ve found is that a couple’s issues are usually a mix of individual issues that have never been addressed and problems within the couple itself. This holds true whether it’s two, four, or more, involved in the relationship.

Poly is not a cure all for failing marriages, in fact, if the base relationship isn’t strong enough, poly can be the death knell because often the couple isn’t poly at all, they’re just unhappy....

I’m being so adamant in the above because I get far too many people asking me about poly as a “cure” for a marriage that isn’t working. People say, they’re bored and want to bring up poly to their spouse so they can add spice to their marriage. Poly isn’t about adding spice to your relationship, poly is a lifestyle choice. It is a way of dating, forming a domestic partnership, making a family....

Read her whole piece (April 1, 2015).

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Poly themes in Spike Jonze's movie "Her"

(Warning, contains spoilers.)

Love may be limitless but poly time and attention are not, as that economist noted on NPR last week. He observed that a caller who espoused the abundance model of love had only three committed partners and not, say, five billion. Which made geeky me think "For those numbers you need a computer," remembering certain dear software people in science fiction (hi Dora, Minerva, Athene and Gay!)

So the movie Her has polywebs buzzing. It's been out for more than a month. Samantha, a self-evolving operating system, becomes conscious, and she and her user fall into an unusually rich kind of love. Official movie website. Trailer:



Among Samantha's abilities, she is transhumanly poly: able to carry on deep, committed relationships with hundreds of intimate partners at once. From an essay at Suggestivetongue.com:

HER: Exploring sexuality and polyamory

This past weekend I got the opportunity to see the movie “Her” starring Joaquin Phoenix and (the voice of) Scarlett Johansson.... It is sad, sweet, touching, telling, and funny on top of it all....

Johansson makes her character (an operating system) come to life. Her greatest credit is how she forces the viewer to explore different aspects of love.

Though the film focuses on Phoenix and his struggles with women and romance, there is also a strong undertone of what it’s like to love differently than others. Johansson’s character doesn’t have a body. She is often at odds with this idea, frustrated that she cannot physically be with Phoenix. Despite this, we see the characters connect more joyfully than other couples in the movie. They are able to talk, laugh, share, trust, support, and even have sex. [See teledildonics.]

I thought this was particularly beautiful, because it emphasized how sex doesn’t have to be about PIV penetration to be satisfying....

Near the end of the film we also catch very clear messages of polyamory. The operating system has grown, evolved, and developed beyond the simple capacities of human understanding.

...I thought it was incredibly interesting that polyamory was portrayed as the natural evolutionary point for a system of higher intelligence....

Theodore: Are you in love with anybody else?

Samantha: Why do you ask that?

Theodore: I do not know. Are you?

Samantha: I’ve been thinking about how to talk to you about this.

Theodore: How many others?

Samantha: 641.

It is a sweet moment, one that the woman behind me, flustered, thought was “slutty.” I do think it helps package and bundle the idea of polyamory and various types of sexuality for people who have no other experience with them....

Read the whole article (Jan. 27, 2014).

Writes a poster at Connecticut Polys (quoted by permission):

I saw a lot of poly themes:

1) 'Coming out' to self and others, with a loving style that one considers to be inferior to the usual style of loving.

2) When one partner has the such a large capacity for caring that nonmonogamy is inevitable, but the other partner is fully satisfied with exclusivity.

3) Is a body necessary to be a satisfying lover? Is physical touch necessary? What is actually necessary?

Fun movie! It earns its R rating so be careful who you bring.

Review at TechCrunch.

Also, interesting discussion on reddit/r/polymory.

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"Non-monogamy and nerdiness in BC Poly Camp"

Xtra

The Vancouver edition of Xtra, "Canada's Gay & Lesbian News," reports on PolyCamp Vancouver Island, the smaller (and over-18-only) of the annual rural outings for the Victoria-Vancouver poly community.

Wish I was there.

Non-monogamy and nerdiness in BC Poly Camp

POLYAMORY / Why are these poly people drawn to sci-fi?

By Niko Bell

“Comic book heroes have origin stories,” Esha says. “So what is your origin story? What is” — she looks up and smiles — “your radioactive spider?”

At Poly Camp, on the windy northern tip of Salt Spring Island, talking about superheroes is normal. By “radioactive spider,” Esha means the moment when a polyamorous person realizes his or her or their own identity. She’s also revealing a curious fact about polyamorous culture: non-monogamy, fantasy and science fiction often go hand in hand. That’s what brought Esha to polyamory herself.

“Mine is science-fiction and fantasy books,” Esha continues.

Esha is sitting by the muddy-green pond in the orchard of Neptune Farm. Fourteen polyamorous people are sitting around her in the shade of the tent or the long grass, or tucked into the dragonfly-infested bulrushes.

...Esha is drawing on her legs in glaring orange highlighter as she goes on.

“Science fiction and fantasy books brought me up, largely. Maybe people want to write about alternative relationships... And if you put it in a setting that’s odd and weird, it’s non-threatening.”

An English graduate student from Victoria chips in: “That’s how Star Trek got away with dealing with a lot of topics in the sixties.”

“Give it a couple of light years removed and we’re all good,” laughs Eli, one of Esha’s boyfriends.

These poly people came from Victoria, Duncan, Vancouver and Seattle to camp for a weekend under the apple and pear trees, branches hanging heavy in the late summer. There are men and women, some still in school and some already retired, a scientist and a graphic designer. But as they talk, it becomes clear that Esha is far from the only one influenced by science fiction novels.

One poly woman from Victoria mentions sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein, who described polyamorous relationships in his novels. A chorus of warm assent bursts from the circle. No fewer than five people credit Heinlein with drawing them to polyamory....

Count me in. When I was 17, Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and some of its followers inspired me into what's now called poly. Changed my life forever. Though I've always had a love-hate relationship with Heinlein. For more see my Polyamory, Robert Heinlein, and His Definitive New Biography.

...But why do poly and science fiction overlap? Why are the people at Poly Camp, regardless of age or nationality, so comfortable discussing the latest Joss Whedon series or the evolution of superhero comics?

“Poly people are nerds,” Scott Campbell answers simply.

Campbell is as far out of the closet as a poly person can be. He’s been in a polyamorous relationship for 15 years, and he and his partner have been mentioned in the Seattle Times and Newsweek, and are the inspiration for the web series “Family.” Campbell notices that the poly community collects an odd number of software engineers and fantasy fiction fans. The Society for Creative Anachronism is full of poly relationships, he says. Fantasy and sci-fi conventions have polyamory panel discussions.

And sure enough, look around Poly Camp and the nerd culture is unmistakable. Two of the camp organizers — one naked and one clothed — play Magic: The Gathering while their mutual girlfriend lazes in the shade and keeps score. Josh and Scott admire another man’s intricate homemade chainmail kilt. Another sings songs from Dr Horrible, accompanying himself on the mandolin....

...Following Esha, everyone tells a radioactive spider story. A husband and wife with a crush on a mutual friend. Falling for a college roommate’s girlfriend. Waking up the morning after and making breakfast for three. The circle nods and smiles and laughs knowingly, conspiratorially, as if they share the best hobby on earth.

A 1976 study by psychologist Jacquelyn Knapp found that polyamorous people do indeed have character traits in common. They tend to be individualistic, academic, nonconformist and stimulated by complexity. They like endless communication. They enjoy picking over every subject in dizzying detail. Polyamorous people are the nerds of love.

Sitting by the pond, the poly circle is trying to describe what poly people are like. “Alternative.” “Critical.” “We love discussion.” “We don’t take things for granted.” “We like grey areas.”

Most of all, they want to reject the old and commonplace and look for the new and uncharted. They try not to mind what other people think. They feel just a little bit superior. They see themselves as the ultimate outsiders — boldly going where no relationship has gone before.

Read the complete article (Sept. 12, 2012).

One big beef: I don't know how people use the English language out there in western Canada, grump grump, but those are not nerds, they're geeks! Come on people! "Nerds" are socially inept loners unable to connect. "Geeks" club together according to intricate brainy passions that may have no practical use (see Magic: The Gathering). And, ahem, a key geek trait is intense concern with proper classifications! Where was that woman's editor?!

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The Girl Who Normalized Non-Monogamy: Incidental polyamory in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy

Based on the fantastically popular book, the Hollywood version of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" opens in movie theaters this Wednesday, December 21st.

"Around 27 million [other sources say more than 65 million] copies of the books comprising Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy have been sold worldwide to date," writes Ludi, an organizer of the U.K.'s OpenCon, in a timely essay at Polytical ("Ethical non-monogamy in the UK"). "People everywhere have been reading and absorbing [the books'] themes of systematic violence against women, financial corruption, social exclusion… and ethical non-monogamy."

Larsson, who died in 2004 at age 50, was a Swedish anti-fascist political activist and crime novelist whose three thrillers were published in English as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest. He was reportedly the world's second-best-selling author in 2008. From Ludi's essay:

...A summary: Journalist Mikael Blomkvist works for Millennium magazine, edited by Erika Berger. [Although Berger is not the central character or plot element], they are lifelong friends and long-established lovers. Berger is also married, to Greger Beckman, who works elsewhere. Everyone is fully knowledgeable and consenting: we hear about their history, and we see them negotiate, divide up holidays and successfully use hierarchy....

A long-established triad

Non-monogamy is introduced in the first book (Dragon), but the history is not explained until the second book (Fire). Here, we discover that Berger and Blomkvist have been falling into bed with each other on a regular basis, regardless of their relationship status elsewhere, for around twenty years. When she marries, they hold back for several months, but eventually sleep together again. The next day, Beckman invites Blomkvist for a walk and a conversation: he is understanding, and they establish they can co-exist as metamours....

...We see Blomkvist explaining matters to new lovers, reassuring them where needed; generally, other people are presented as having not heard of the possibility of non-monogamy before...

...Berger, Blomkvist and Beckman embarked on non-monogamy as a practical solution to an immediate issue: namely, that Berger wanted to have both a husband and a lover. The books do not mention the word ‘polyamory’ or even ‘non-monogamy’, and the triad are presented as unusual in their social circles. It’s unknown whether any of them are aware of the existence of polyamory as a lifestyle, or of other poly people....

Regrettably, the polyamory was completely omitted from the Swedish films of the books.... The first Hollywood remake launches this month, and I’ll look forward to seeing whether they present it there....

Read Ludi's article (Dec. 12, 2011).

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While we're at it, here's another Polytical review of a genre-fiction poly classic: the Honor Harrington series.

The Honor Harrington series is a space opera currently spanning over 10 books.... The series follows the title character, Honor Harrington, through her naval career, starting as a Commander on her first faster-then-light command, and most recently as an Admiral in two different navies....

[David] Weber has openly said that the story was inspired by the Napoleonic wars, with Harrington standing in for the Duke of Wellington. Throughout the story, Weber introduces multiple fully developed societies and worlds. In the tradition of Isaac Asimov, he uses these societies to explore questions of what makes a society work....

In his second book, he introduces the world of Grayson, a theocracy... where polygyny is the only expected form of relationship.... Weber shows intimate details of how even in a patriarchal society, polygyny can be a healthy and welcome family style, with sister wives who support and care for each other, and husbands who cherish all of their large families.

...And, slowly, over the course of several books, he brings it home. To the main society of his series, Honor Harrington’s home, the Star Kingdom of Manticore, loosely based on England of the 18th and 19th centuries. Here, there are several suggestions throughout the series that monogamy is not the only option... but this is behind the scenes, and only suggested.

Until, that is, Honor falls in love.... The two star-crossed lovers spend a few books fighting their attraction to each other, until the man’s wife invites Honor over, and tells both of them to stop being idiots. Ultimately this leads to a very satisfactory relationship, two children, and a (legal) marriage....

...I started reading [the series] before I knew what polyamory was, and this series has a lot to do with why I was able to accept the idea so easily! But expect great characters, fascinating worlds, epic space battles, duels, politics, culture clash and everything anyone could possibly want from a well done space opera....

Read the whole article (June 28, 2011), by the Jessica known for her Polyamory Practically blog.

Are such works of fiction important? I'd say that depends way more on their inspiration power than on their sales figures. Still, if Steig Larsson has sold 65+ million copies in six years, that's maybe ten times what Stranger in a Strange Land has sold in fifty (though Stranger's sales numbers are hard to come by). That one was a crucial work of fiction, inspiring and motivating many of the people who went on to create the modern polyamory movement. I'm rather proud of my article about this, by the way: Polyamory, Robert Heinlein, and his new definitive biography.

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AND, while we're at it, here are twelve books about polyamory itself that have come out since the flood began in 2008. It's not too late to order for Christmas! The titles below link to my own reviews of nine of them. I'll eventually get to the rest.

In reverse date order:

● The Art and Etiquette of Polyamory: A Hands-on Guide to Open Sexual Relationships, by Françoise Simpère (Skyhorse Publishing, February 2011).

Simpère is a widely published and quoted open-relationship advocate in France. This is a translation of her Aimer Plusieurs Hommes.

● Love in Abundance: A Counselor's Guide to Open Relationships, by Kathy Labriola (Greenery Press, October 2010).

Labriola is a nurse and counselor in the San Francisco Bay Area who has professionally advised many hundreds of poly groups and observed the poly scene for more than 20 years. Here she offers distilled practical advice from this experience.

● What Does Polyamory Look Like? Polydiverse Patterns of Loving and Living in Modern Polyamorous Relationships, by Mim Chapman (iUniverse, August 2010).

When someone says "I'm poly," it can mean very different things. A guide to navigating among five major styles of polyamory widely practiced in the community today.

● Love Unlimited: The Joys and Challenges of Open Relationships, by Leonie Linssen and Stephan Wik (Findhorn Press, August 2010).

A relationship coach in the Netherlands who specializes in multi-partner situations describes the commonest recurring patterns and problems among her clients, and means to their resolution.

● Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy with Multiple Partners, by Deborah Anapol (Rowman & Littlefield, July 2010). Now also in paperback.

One of the founding mothers of the modern polyamory movement in the 1980s and 1990s takes a careful, sociologist's look at the current state of the movement she helped to create.

● Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá (HarperCollins, June 2010). Now in paperback with the subtitle How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships.

This groundbreaking, mythbusting New York Times bestseller makes the case, from anthropology and physiology, that humans are evolved to be naturally, easily nonmonogamous, a fact that has been suppressed by civilization to our detriment. See also my post Sex at Dawn and the Future of the Polyamory Movement.

● Swinging in America: Love, Sex, and Marriage in the 21st Century, by Curtis R. Bergstrand and Jennifer Blevins Sinski (Praeger, November 2009).

The first 40% of this book an a study of the swinger subculture and the people in it. The second 60% is a critique of monogamous ideology in Western society, and this Bergstrand considers to be the most important part of the book.

● Gaia and the New Politics of Love: Notes for a Poly Planet, by Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio (North Atlantic Books, September 2009).

This ethereal, philosophical polemic for multiple love as an opening to saving the world spends much of its time floundering in embarrassing New Age HIV denialism.

● The Ethical Slut, Second Edition; A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures, by Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy (Ten Speed Press, March 2009).

Expanded by 30% and now aiming for a wider audience, this new edition of the 1997 word-of-mouth cult classic is still the most popular guide to the networked or "free agent" model of poly — though it now includes an added chapter on opening an existing relationship.

● Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships, by Tristan Taormino (Cleis Press, May 2008).

If The Ethical Slut is the bible of free-agent "single" poly, Opening Up has become the top choice for couples looking to open an existing committed relationship — of whatever sort. Tristan Taormino, a brassy star among America's sexerati, did exhaustive work interviewing in depth more than 100 people and couples in a dizzying variety of open and poly arrangements successful and not. Learn from them.

● Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage, by Jenny Block (Seal Press, May 2008).

With a husband, daughter, and long-term girlfriend, Dallas writer Jenny Block has fearlessly put herself out as an exemplar of successful open marriage and bold Texas feminism.

● The Polyamory Handbook: A User's Guide by Peter J. Benson (AuthorHouse, March 2008).

A longtime poly-community stalwart and activist compiles a big, workmanlike guide to every Poly 101 and 201 issue you can think of.

More books are in the pipeline. Franklin Veaux says he is working on his More Than Two. Jay Wiseman is said be to working on a book about poly and kink. And I bet there are more.

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Polyamory, Robert Heinlein, and his definitive new biography

Today's polyamory movement, in 2010, would not exist in anything like its present form had it not been for Robert A. Heinlein's science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, published in 1961.¹

Bear with me, please.

The first edition, hardcover

Love it or scorn it, Stranger was one of the books that made the Sixties happen. It thunderstruck countless people — including me — with a Road-to-Damascus revelation about the possibilities of genuine multi-love. This was a couple of decades before the word polyamory came into being. (In fact the word was co-invented by the life partner of one of Stranger's most important early disciples².) In my case, it wasn't just the book that did it but real, live waterbrothers who introduced me to the book and then invited me in.

The book's ripples continue to spread. Even today, ask any group of poly activists what originally got them going, and some are likely to mention Stranger and/or other books by Heinlein. Many others in turn discovered poly because of these people's work and influence, two or three or six times removed. For an early, important, and very typical story of Stranger-discovery, see footnote 5.

Other poly folks say the book... well... stinks.

They kinda have a point. It's dated, sexist, the characters are rather cartoonish — and although it works well as a fast-paced adventure story and brilliantly as a thought-provoking social satire, it's useless as a guide for real life, what with its characters' complete reliance on magic psychic superpowers learned from Martians. Life is too easy when you can make air cars full of raiding policemen vanish into the fourth dimension with a flick of the mind.

Stranger was a surprise break from Heinlein's first 22 years of science fiction. Up to then he had written with a very commercial eye for the pulp and juvenile markets and showed practically no trace of what we would call the counterculture. [But see biographer William H. Patterson's remarks about how Heinlein tried to sneak liberal ideas about sex into his early stories, in the comments below.] Heinlein cultivated his persona as a crusty, gallant military man — he was an Annapolis graduate (1929) who got dumped from the Navy for tuberculosis in 1934 and, it's pretty clear, never got over the loss. By the Fifties, under the influence of his third wife Virginia — who was poles apart politically from his second³ — he had become an outspoken cold warrior, championing military values with a contempt for non-militarists that, to many, amounted to fascism. At a time when the FBI was digging into the lives of almost all science fiction writers for evidence of subversion (FBI director J. Edgar Hoover is reported to have called science fiction the most dangerous literature in America), Heinlein apparently got a free pass from the federal snoops.

If so, the joke was on Hoover. Stranger became the most subversive science fiction book in America. It helped inspire a generation of straight, serious, all-American teenagers, such as me, to become free-love radicals, utopians, and visionaries. It became part of the Sixties' rush to unloose all kinds of revolutionary color onto beige America. [Update: In 2012 the Library of Congress included Stranger in an exhibition of 88 "Books That Shaped America."] Stranger remains the best known, best selling, and most influential of Heinlein's half century of work.

Hidden History

And yet, Heinlein was always reticent about how he came by Stranger's extremely liberal ideas. He refused to expound on the book, other than to say that he wrote it to earn a living and to entertain the paying customers. He certainly didn't "believe in it" the way many of its followers did. In one of his few public remarks about Stranger, he famously wrote to a fan: "I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers.... It is an invitation to think — not to believe."

[UPDATE: The fan in question, Oberon Zell, has saved his correspondence with Heinlein. In the comments below, Zell posts a more extensive letter that he received from Heinlein about writing Stranger.]

At times Heinlein, in his reticence, almost seemed to be embarrassed by the book. Nevertheless, from then on he made capable, dynamic polyamorous families a staple of his far-future tales for the next 36 years. Some of these too had wide poly influence, notably The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, 1966, and Time Enough for Love, 1973.

Heinlein died in 1988. And now we should be getting more of the backstory.

Today is the publication date for the first volume of William H. Patterson Jr.'s massive authorized biography, Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century. Volume One, titled "Learning Curve," covers the years from his birth (1907) to 1948, the year before his third wife Virginia suggested the basic plot idea for Stranger to him.

His private radical ideas on sex and marriage, however, were formed well before then. Some of them appear in a book-length manuscript titled For Us, the Living that he wrote in 1938, the year before he sold his very first science fiction story. The protagonist is knocked unconscious and wakes up in 2086, where he proceeds to learn about the better world that people have created in the interim. Later Heinlein — and significantly, Virginia — rounded up what they thought were all copies of For Us, The Living and burned them. They also burned almost all other letters and documentation of his early life and thoughts.

But after his death a surviving copy of the manuscript, annotated in Heinlein's handwriting, was tracked down in a storage carton in a student-of-a-friend's garage. It was published in 2003 as a mass-market paperback. There, plain to see, are poly and anti-jealousy ideals that would later become key to Stranger. Near the end, for instance, is a scene — treated not at all salaciously — of the protagonist waking up comfortably in bed with two brainy, informative women. These themes reflected formative experiences that Heinlein had in the 1930s with the approval of both his first and second wives.

And on that cliffhanger, I'll call a halt. I ordered the new biography today and haven't seen it yet! The above is from earlier sources. I hope I'll have more to tell after I read it.

UPDATE: Okay, I've now finished the book. Short version: it's a massive, masterful piece of scholarship, finally filling in huge amounts of the first half of Heinlein's life and revealing many early influences that would later show up in his books and fictional characters. Highly recommended, and I can't wait for Volume 2. [Update July 2014: Volume 2 has just been published.]

There are no great new revelations regarding the genesis of Stranger, beyond what's already been out there for those who go looking for it. It was, however, news to me that Heinlein happily spent the summer of 1930 in the free-love and genderqueer bohemia of Greenwich Village (an environment he never returned to), or that he and his lifelong Navy friend Cal Laning took women "double dating in bed" in the 1930s. Or that Heinlein met and married Leslyn when Laning, her boyfriend who was thinking of proposing to her, basically herded Heinlein into befriending and bedding her to get his opinion on how she might be as a life mate. Laning seemed more bemused than upset by Heinlein marrying Leslyn out from under him, and they all remained good friends.

It was also news to me that Heinlein, Leslyn, and Virginia not only were friends together for a few years during and after World War II, but apparently lived in a sexual menage a trois in California toward the end, at a time when Leslyn was descending into alcoholism and mental illness.

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Meanwhile, to get back to polyamory in the news, here are some reviews of the biography.

By Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing:

Heinlein memoir: Learning Curve — the secret history of science fiction

...It's the first authorized biography of the sf writer who popularized at least three important motifs of the 20st century (polyamory, private space travel, and libertarianism) and redefined the field of science fiction with a series of novels, stories and essays that are usually brilliant but sometimes self-indulgent, sometimes offensive in their treatment of race and gender, and always provocative and generally sneaky....

Read the whole article (Aug 13, 2010).

By Michael Dirda in the Washington Post:

...Patterson even asserts — and will presumably discuss more fully in Vol. 2 — that Heinlein "galvanized not one, but four social movements of his century: science fiction and its stepchild the policy think tank, the counterculture, the libertarian movement, and the commercial space movement."

...Throughout their unconventional life together, the Heinleins [Robert and his second wife Leslyn, to whom he was married from 1932 to 1947] practiced an open marriage, regularly attended nudist colonies and were periodically drawn to suspect schemes for societal improvement, including new theories of taxation (Social Credit) and new ways of interacting with the world (General Semantics)....

...During the war years, the Heinleins both worked at the Aeronautical Materials Lab in Philadelphia, where colleagues included two young sf writers, Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp (whose wife, Catherine, was once photographed nude by Heinlein)....

Sometimes fascinating, frequently over-detailed, Patterson's worshipful biography is no match in literary quality for Julie Philips's superb James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (2006), a superb study of an equally unconventional sf writer. While Patterson admires his hero without serious reservation, some readers may find Heinlein the man just a little creepy at times, not surprising given the controversial militarism he later revealed in Starship Troopers (1959) or the polyamory and sexual obsessions of the sprawling books after The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966)....

Read the whole article (Aug. 12, 2010).

On a site called Necromancy Never Pays:

Reading about Heinlein's high school classmate Sally Rand goes a long way towards explaining the character of Patricia in [Stranger], and finding out that a 1927 book entitled Companionate Marriage [by the progressive Judge Benjamin Barr Lindsey, who lost his judgeship because of the book's radicalism for the time] might have influenced his liberal views on marriage enlarges my picture of the man and the kinds of marriages he dreamed up in his fiction.

Read the whole article (July 21, 2010). A bit of history here: Judge Ben Lindsey was a nationally famous reformer who created America's juvenile justice system. After he was run out of Colorado for his book advocating legal contraception and trial marriage, he was elected to a judgeship in Los Angeles — around the same time Heinlein was living in Los Angeles and deeply involved in the political campaigns of the progressive Upton Sinclair wing of the Democratic Party. Could Heinlein have been influenced not just by Ben Lindsey's book, but later by personal contact with him during his campaign?

Here is an unflattering review of the Heinlein biography on the Tor Books site by SF writer Jo Walton.

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A couple more notes, while we're at it:

● The only version of Stranger that the world knew for nearly 30 years was the choppy, fast-paced edition that came out in 1961. Heinlein's publisher had insisted that he shorten his original manuscript by 60,000 words, and over the years there were many rumors about what the full version contained. In 1990 Heinlein's widow Virginia brought it out as The Original Uncut Stranger in a Strange Land.

Soon afterward I put the two books side by side on a table and, over the course of a month, made a line-by-line comparison from start to finish. My conclusion: little was lost in the cutting. Want details? See footnote 4.

UPDATE: Oberon Zell writes in with a letter that he has from Heinlein talking about how and why he did the cutting. Heinlein says here that he thinks the cut version is the better version. See the comments below.

● Cherie L. Ve Ard has written an essay titled The Influence of the Science Fiction Writings of Robert A. Heinlein on Polyamory.

● Update December 2017: Sometimes the sexism and misogyny in an old piece of art doesn't mist over with age but just looks worse. Following this season of #MeToo, Sophie Kleeman writes in The Outline The misogyny of ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ takes on new shame. "A beloved sci-fi vision of the future has no empathy for women," it's subtitled. Kleeman begins by quoting an example from Jill Boardman, Stranger's lead female character:

"Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it’s partly her fault." That was supposed to be a cute throwaway showing how worldly and free Jill is about discussing something sexual. "Spoken by a woman, written by a man," notes Kleeman. "Why should it be a surprise that such bumbling misogyny is hidden in plain sight in one of the most popular science fiction books of the 20th century?"


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Footnotes:

¹ Plot summary for the uninitiated (spoiler alert!): The first human expedition to Mars ends in murder and catastrophe, due to the captain's in-flight affair with another man's wife. Born of that affair is the mission's sole survivor and the hero of the novel: a baby who is raised on Mars by unisex Martians. The Martians possess vast but utterly unhuman wisdom and powers. Our hero is brought to Earth in young adulthood (around 2000 or so, when the sky is full of air cars, a world government rules the U.S., and a new pop religion is replacing Christianity). He discovers human male-female love, rejects jealousy and sexual possession, founds a polyamorous society of Martian-speaking initiates to be the next stage of human evolution, and finally goes to a Christ-like martyrdom to spread the group's message of love unbounded.

² That would be Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart, life partner of Oberon Zell-Ravenheart (born Tim Zell) who became one of Stranger's first important apostles in 1962. Zell gathered waterbrothers and founded the Church of All Worlds, which became influential in the formation of the Neo-Pagan religious movement. He and Morning Glory are still alive (he's writing his memoirs), and the Church of All Worlds continues today following several schisms and re-creations. Morning Glory's 1990 essay "A Bouquet of Lovers" first introduced the word polyamorous. Here's more on the word's origin.

³ What happened to Heinlein? Writes J. Bradford DeLong:

Heinlein in the 1940s, when he leaves left-wing populist politics and becomes a writer, seems, much more than I had thought, to have launched himself on a trajectory to spend the rest of his life as the center of a group whose raison d'etre was to try to live in the early days of a better future, to look sanely and humanely and in a reality-based way at humanity's lurching progress, and to try to help make us become who our best selves are — to be the heir of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.

But by the early 1960s he has aged mightily in mind: the best days are no longer in our future but instead in the pre-Great Depression midwest, Dwight D. Eisenhower is soft on communism, and his reaction to living in America's Martin Luther King years is to write Farnham's Freehold, of all things.

What happened?

DeLong then quotes the explanation from Isaac Asimov, Heinlein's friend and fellow science fiction writer, in his memoir I, Asimov:

There had to be a certain circumspection in [my] friendship [with] Heinlein, however. Heinlein was not the easygoing fellow... did not believe in doing his own thing and letting you do your thing. He had a definite feeling that he knew better and to lecture you into agreeing with him.... [While] Campbell always remained serenely indifferent if you ended up disagreeing with him... Heinlein would, under those circumstances, grow hostile.

I do not take well to people who are convinced they know better than I do, and who badger me for that reason, so I began to avoid him.

Furthermore, although a flaming liberal during the war, Heinlein became a rock-ribbed far-right conservative immediately afterward... at just the time he changed wives from a liberal woman, Leslyn, to a rock-ribbed far-right conservative woman, Virginia.

Ronald Reagan did the same when he switched wives from the liberal Jane Wyman to the ultraconservative Nancy, but Ronald Reagan I have always viewed as a brainless fellow.... I can't explain Heinlein in that way at all, for I cannot believe he would follow his wives' opinions blindly. I used to brood about it in puzzlement.... I did come to one conclusion. I would never marry anyone who did not generally agree with my political, social, and philosophical view of life.... I would certainly not change my own views just for the sake of peace in the households, and I would not want a woman so feeble in her opinions that she would do so....

⁴ Heinlein did the shortening that his publisher demanded mostly by relentlessly condensing nearly every sentence, a word or two at a time. The result was a faster-paced, faster-reading story with no significant scenes or ideas removed. I thought that about 1/4 of the cuts were clear editorial improvements, another 1/2 neither improved nor weakened the story on balance but did speed it up, and about 1/4 of the cuts resulted in genuine loss of depth and nuance. But not by much.

For instance: In the uncut version, Dr. Mahmoud (a minor character) comes across rather more fully as a serious person and a thoughtful Muslim. In the cut version he's rough-sketched and cartoonish.

The famous "too shocking" scene that the publisher is said to have demanded be changed is when Ben finally finds Mike and Jill in the Nest in St. Petersburg, and they sit Ben down with them, hug him, and vanish their clothes. In the uncut version, Mike and Jill are already having sex when Ben walks in. Big whoop. The meaning of the scene is identical each way, and I actually liked the "toned down" version a little better for its touching innocence and what this says about Ben's horrified reaction.

There were some cuts I was genuinely sorry to see, such as the loss of some scene-setting in the section where Mike and Jill have hit the road working for a carnival. The cut part is sweet, and it gets us inside Jill's head a little more than usual — and without it, the section starts off rather joltingly and confusingly. If Heinlein was going to cut in chunks, I'd have much preferred he removed the embarrassingly homophobic paragraph about "in-betweeners" (which is irrelevant to the story). Yet in his editing he plowed right on through that part, relentlessly removing a few words per sentence like everywhere else.

When my kids were old enough, it was an easy choice to give them the shorter version of Stranger for their birthdays. For most readers, I think it's slightly the better book.

P.S.: Here's a different opinion.



⁵ Oberon and Morning Glory Zell, legendary advocates for Stranger and leading figures in Neo-Paganism, are writing their autobiography, The Witch and the Wizard. [Update April 2014: They finished it, and it was published by Llewellyn in winter 2014.] In the preliminary text below, Oberon (OZ) and his lifelong friend Lance Christie (1944–2010) tell how they discovered Stranger in their freshman year of college, setting them on their life path:

OZ: That fall [1961] the October selection of the Science Fiction Book Club was a new book by Robert Heinlein called Stranger in a Strange Land. Lance was a subscriber and he got the book. He took it home and read it over Christmas vacation. When he got back he handed it to me and said, “You have got to read this!” So I did. There was an incredible sense of recognition — here was someone who understood us and was talking to us. And the ideas that he was putting forth were all ones that we resonated with on so many levels.

...Having been an avid reader of Heinlein’s juveniles all through high school, I was really ready for SISL. As the protagonists in his previous works had all been my age progressively, so it was with the newest one: Valentine Michael Smith… with his Martian-trained mental abilities and alien cultural perspective. A perspective uncannily like that of Lance and myself.

...Heinlein’s SISL introduced us to the ideas of immanent divinity (“thou art God”), pantheism (“all that groks is god”), sacraments (water sharing), priestesses, social and ritual nakedness, intimate extended families as a basis for community; and, of course, open, loving relationships without jealousy, and joyous expression of sexuality as divine union. By defining love as “that condition wherein another person’s happiness is essential to your own,” SISL changed forever the parameters of our relationships with each other—especially in the sexual arena. And all this in the context of a legal religious organization — a “church” — which could have all the rights and privileges granted to the mighty Church of Rome! This was heady stuff, and we drank it up.

LANCE: We talked a lot about the possibilities that were available to human beings to take a different path, in respect to the way society was put together and the premises on which it was founded. That’s where Stranger had such a powerful affect. Heinlein constellated the idea of trying to work out and install a different set of cultural premises, to develop an alternative human civilization based on more enlightened concepts about human beings, their relationships to each other, their relationships to the natural world, and the purpose and conduct of life, what constitutes right livelihood, what constitutes right action and so on.

We didn’t have those terms at the time. OZ and I were very early in receiving this impulse from the collective unconscious, and we were more cognitively differentiated and sensitive to it than the other people around us at the time. It doesn’t mean that we were superior in some sort of cosmic sense. We were just able to receive the signal at an earlier time than a large number of other people who have since started to receive the signal and recognize it.

OZ: In Stranger, sharing water, and saying “Water shared is life shared,” is the fundamental ritual of the book. So on April 7, 1962, Lance and I sat down in a field, shared water, and dedicated ourselves to creating a life that would be based on the principles that were in this book — and to trying to actualize them and manifest them into reality. We became water brothers. That is essentially the founding date of what eventually became the Church of All Worlds — as well as the Foundation for the Tree of Life.

When our girlfriends (and future wives), Martha and Penny, returned from Spring Break, we turned them on to SISL and shared water with them, too. That was on May 25. And so it began....

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Group marriage in "Caprica"

Syfy Channel


The new science-fiction series "Caprica", which debuted on the SyFy Channel on January 22nd, presents group marriage as part of its far-future world (a prequel to the "Battlestar Galactica" world). Commentators are noticing. For example:

1. From the SF site io9 (slogan: "We come from the future"), by Annalee Newitz:

Is Caprica the Big Love of science fiction?

Friday's episode of Caprica, "Gravedancing," began with secret monotheist terrorist Clarice waking up with her wife and two husbands all snuggled in bed [see picture]. And this SF soap has more than just polyamory in common with HBO's Big Love.

Caprica's great experiment has been to wed the naturalist melodrama of nighttime soap opera with the posthuman preoccupations of contemporary science fiction. Which is why you have odd mashup plots featuring, for example, the mafia from another planet, and a dissolute rich family whose daughter turns into a cyborg. Ratings for Caprica so far have been low, so it's possible television audiences don't want to see Big Love in space....

SF elements: Clarice's pagan group marriage; monotheistic terrorists.

Soap elements: The Tauron family melodrama is pure Sopranos or Big Love....

...No matter how deftly the show hybridizes these two genres, however, I think Caprica may fail to garner a big audience for a simple reason. By combining science fiction with soap opera, you wind up with an otherworldy setting and a weird set of social relationships. After all, SF specializes in strange worlds, while soap operas specialize in strange people. Perhaps it's all too much strangeness, even for Syfy watchers?...

Read her whole review (Feb. 22, 2010).

2. From a Los Angeles Times interview with "Caprica" co-creator Ron Moore:

Q: I'd asked Magda Apanowicz about the "Big Love" storyline with Sister Clarice. How did that come about?

A: It was a sort of a notion that kicked around in the "Battlestar" offices that there were different societal norms in colonial civilizations, and one of them was a group marriage. In terms of polygamy, here it's usually framed in a "Big Love" context -- it's one man with many wives. I thought there was something even more intriguing about a true group marriage where all of the partners were married to one another. They have this much bigger definition of what a marriage was and I thought it was a fascinating cultural idea and I thought it would be very surprising if Sister Clarice was in a group marriage like that....

Read the whole article (Feb. 6, 2010).

3. From the movie news site Film School Rejects:

...Speaking of unconventional relationships, one of the first images presented to us during this episode [Feb. 12, 2010] was Sister Clarice in bed with (at least) three other people — presumably the husbands and wives that were introduced earlier this season. I can’t decide if this polyamory is meant to be progressive or just shocking, maybe it’s a little of both.

Read the whole review.

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Poly and "the Uncomfortable Reality of Sex in Space"

Wired magazine online

Regina Lynn, the "Sex Drive" columnist for the geek-chic magazine Wired, takes an unusually clear look at what NASA faces in addressing sex and romance in space — now that long-duration moon bases and Mars flights are on the drawing boards. Polyamory needs to be out on the table, Lynn suggests. Because sealing a group of people into a small can for years is likely to put it front and center.

...The space agency is almost 50 years old, and while it likes to think it's a leader in exploring new frontiers, it has yet to shake off the fetters of its childhood when it comes to sex, romance and relationships.

..."We will have to address crew compatibility, sexuality issues, whether there is a necessity for sexual activity," says David Steitz, NASA senior public affairs officer.

He had the grace to laugh when I interrupted with a "Hell, yeah!"

But I was serious, too. We cannot expect astronauts to spend three years in a spacecraft and not have sex — of some kind. Probably with each other, and likely in more than one combination.

...It's [not the biology but] the touchy-feely bit that the agency will need to consider seriously. Blindly applying Earth-bound standards that astronauts cannot follow under space-voyage conditions will only lead to guilt and shame.... How do you handle love, sex, romance, heartbreak, jealousy, hurt, unrequited longing, crushes, loneliness and twitterpation when you're 18 months away from Earth and perhaps unsure whether you'll make it back?

You cope with it the way you do everything else in space. You rely on your intelligence, your commitment to the common good and your training.

If NASA invites me to take part in discussions about sexual standards in space — it could happen — I will suggest sending all candidates into the adult internet for a year.... They should participate in different types of adult communities until they become comfortable with the wide range of human sexual relationships.... They can observe and experiment with sex without possession, partnership without monogamy, sexual pleasure without expectation of roses or breakfast.

They can discover group love, bond with a special someone, or both. They can try letting go of jealousy and fear, figure out how to protect themselves from other people's drama, and develop healthy ways to cope with desire, love and rejection.

Some astronauts might discover they are comfortable with polyamory or bisexuality while others might reaffirm their commitment to monogamy. The important thing is that they practice living and working respectfully with others regardless of who is sleeping with whom.

We need to acknowledge that humans will bring our sexuality with us into space and that includes all the complexities of relationships as well as the relatively simple matter of bodies. NASA cannot avoid confronting those complexities, especially now that the public knows even astronauts sometimes confuse obsession with love.

"How long can humans go without sex?" is not the right question.

I don't care if you have a same-sex crew of great-grandparents who have never had a flicker of sexual desire in their entire lives. Lock a group of humans into a ship, sail them through space and time, and it won't take long for that deep, ancient need for touch and intimacy to surface.

Read the whole article (May 18, 2007).

The issue of how to handle love and sex on a long Mars flight will strike many polys with deja vu. A seminal book that helped to launch the polyamory movement was Robert Heinlein's novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961).¹ It begins, "The first human expedition to Mars was selected on the theory that the greatest danger to man was man himself." A fictional space agency decides that four married couples would be the stablest crew configuration. But the mission ends in murder and catastrophe due to the captain's in-flight affair with another man's wife. Born of that affair is the hero of the novel: a baby who is raised by unisex Martians, returns to Earth in adulthood, discovers human male-female love, rejects jealousy and possession, founds a polyamorous society of Martian-speaking initiates to be the next stage of human evolution, and goes to a Christ-like martyrdom to spread the group's message of love unbounded.

My own view, after thinking about it for decades, is that sealing a group of people into a small can for years will require either (1) complete voluntary celibacy, perhaps by choosing the crew from the few percent of the population who are genuinely asexual, or (2) the crew being ready to adapt to all romantic and sexual developments in very close quarters. In other words, being good at handling poly. This takes knowledge and training — and frankly, we're the experts. NASA, take note.

NASA is not yet acting like grownups; the fairly serious book Sex in Space (2006), by space-program journalist Laura S. Woodmansee, apparently threw NASA authorities into a moral panic. With long-duration International Space Station stays now routine, and with rumors of couples who've tried it in zero-g, NASA remains scared of the issue. But as a National Academy of Sciences committee report warned in 2005/06:

"Whereas the committee recognizes the task-oriented nature of both the crew and the mission, it concludes that ignoring the potential consequences of human sexuality is not appropriate when considering extended-duration missions. Areas of concern for the 30-month Mars mission include the potential psychological and physiological consequences of sexual activity, consequences that could endanger life, crew cohesion, performance, and mission success."

Lastly: remember Jean-Paul Sartre's play No Exit? A man and two women, one a lesbian, arrive in Hell, where they get sealed up in a hotel room together forever. The play's classic line: "Hell is other people."

Sartre, and his partner Simone de Beauvoir, had a lot of experience with MFF threesomes. The play seems (to me) to say that the characters' only chance at redemption is to make this sealed-up hell a heaven, by grace of doing what none did in life: truly loving one another. (Here's my essay on No Exit as a poly fable.) Maybe there are lessons here about what people will face being sealed together in a can for long durations.

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¹ Nearly a half century after Stranger was published, and even a little after the years in which the story takes place, Josh Wimmer has written (on io9.com) a thoughtful examination of its continuing place in science fiction and the wider culture (Jan. 31, 2010).

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