LOVE WILL SAVE US ALL
Science fiction is often about humankind’s struggles with the results of our own success. Progress leads to unexpected punishment and sometimes irrevocable disaster. The one thing that can save the human race in the darkest of times is love. The best and most memorable art shows us pushing to the brink until we remember what got us as far as we have, and we reconstitute our understanding of ourselves.
The Terminator is one of the cornerstones of sci-fi cinema; it’s a story about a future world where humanoid robots had broken the shackles placed there by their human masters and have taken over the world. The only hope humanity has is in a man named John Connor whose tenacity, wit and tactical intelligence are enough to rally humanity from the brink and to push back the hordes of machines, restoring the Earth into human hands. The story hinges on a single resistance fighter named Kyle Reese who is sent back in time to intercept a robotic assassin whose goal is to eliminate John Connor’s mother, Sarah, effectively removing him from the timeline.
**SPOILERS**
What Kyle Reese doesn’t know is that in going back in time to protect Sarah, his presence will be the catalyzing event that leads to John Connor’s birth. As the story unfolds, Kyle and Sarah’s relationship becomes a romance. In a scene taking place in a hotel room—as they hide from a relentless killing machine from the future—they find solace in each other’s arms. The subsequent love scene is not exploitative or crude or even explicit; the love-making is tied to the function and foundation of the plot itself. The sex is a necessary part of the story and required for it to move forward.
Richard K. Morgan’s conspiracy-weaving novel, Altered Carbon, places a war-weary detective in a sleeve (temporary body) as he’s hired by a resurrected centenarian aristocrat to solve the mystery of who killed him. The story establishes a lewd affair between the detective and the aristocrat’s wife in several scenes that are quite graphic. The unfolding mystery justifies their lurid, physical interludes as more than mere sex. In Altered Carbon, everyone is a spider and the detective is a fly.
In Fritz Lang’s magnum opus, Metropolis—released in 1927—the villainous robot Maria used her feminine wiles to seduce the titular city’s men in pursuit of a hostile takeover.
Cannon Films’ guilty pleasure production of Lifeforce depicted a future Earth attacked by alien energy vampires who use sex as a means to attract prey.
And in 1997’s The Fifth Element, a futuristic cabbie played by Bruce Willis protects a strange and beautiful young woman played by Milla Jovovich in her attempt to stop a cosmic force from destroying Earth. As it turns out, the Fifth Element is love and the brief expression of this force between Willis and Jovovich is what saves the day.
The final frame of Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame is of time-traveling super-soldier Steve Rogers kissing the girl of his dreams, Peggy Carter, a woman he needed to defeat Death—in the form of villain Thanos—to be reunited with. This was the icing on the cake for a series of films that took over a decade to conclude its story.
The Matrix, in its mind-bending tale of a future resistance against squid-like machines that use humans as juice boxes, offered an ending where Carrie-Anne Moss’s Trinity “wakes up” a seemingly dead Keanu Reeves’ Neo with a kiss, which empowers him to take down the bad guys and win the day.
The entire goal of Marty McFly in 1985’s Back to the Future was to go back in time to the year 1955 to ensure that his high schooler parents would get together, ensuring that his “present” timeline in 1985 wouldn’t be erased.
So often, the coupling of men and women is literally what saves humanity. It’s our striving for love that indicates a desire to invest in our futures that buries a seed of hope.
PROGRESS HAS ITS PRICE
Regardless of how astoundingly advanced technologically our species becomes in the next few centuries, it’s doubtful that our ingrained software will adapt quickly enough to balance societal changes with basic human urges. Even in 2026, the need for human contact in a post-social media era has resulted in a loneliness epidemic that affects males and females, regardless of national or personal economic strength. The more advanced we’ve become, the more the deprivation of that which feeds our primal needs has lessened our appreciation for improvements in other areas.
Every survey conducted in the last twenty years has shown a marked decline in overall quality of life in first-world nations. Depression and loneliness are up as tech giants grow larger. Human beings need human connection and sex is the most necessary function as it leads to the proliferation of our species as well as concretizing interpersonal bonds.
SEX AS REVERENCE OF LIFE AND NOT FLESH
Oftentimes, sex in media can be portrayed boorishly and with little respect for the sanctity of human agency. It’s depicted as something people do to reject social norms and embrace selfish bodily satisfaction at the cost of everything else. However, as previous examples showed, this doesn’t have to be the case.
Blade Runner’s Rick Deckard has a fascinating infatuation with a woman named Rachel. The problem is that Rachel is actually a machine called a replicant made in the image of a woman, even down to DNA replication. Despite the complications, their love is real. That’s what matters. The illicit sexual tension in the film boils over and Rick and Rachel indulge their desires as a signal of choice in a world where autonomy itself is questioned.
We’re talking humans and robots, but in the worst ways, sex between humans is often portrayed as a mechanical exercise devoid of deep, human longing when it should be the result of it.
REDEFINING THE FUTURE
In my upcoming book, Mad Malitia, I deal with the concept of a robotics revolution quite a bit differently than many other stories. In the book, robots don’t usher in a post-human apocalypse but rather are a crucial part of a post-abundance utopia where the labor of billions of artificially-intelligent machines provides the human race all it needs to sustain itself and more.
But in all science fiction, a story doesn’t exist without drama, and the conflict in the book arises when a strange, emergent phenomena called “the Spark” begins to give robots sentience. An anti-human resistance force comprised entirely of post-spark machines arises. They don’t want revenge; they want humans to be reminded just how precious consciousness is and they’re willing to commit acts of domestic terrorism to achieve their goals.
“Mad” Malitia Kane and her heroic partner and lover, Jackson “Jax” Harlan, express their love through sex multiple times in the book. However, rather than being a crude ploy to titillate the imagination, these moments are portrayed to show the power of love as something humans choose in a world where the spark of autonomy itself is a point of debate. For them, it’s a ritual of pair bonding and primal joy contained in self-discipline.
We’re certainly not perfect and science fiction rarely depicts us as such. In fact, we’re repeatedly shown as failing—as we have throughout history—before recalling the best of our instincts and intentions to stave off disaster. That often involves love and remembering how it got us this far. Going from huddling naked in caves millennia ago to populating megalopolises and manufacturing machines in our image is quite the success story.
No journey is without bumps, but the importance of our destination precludes us from giving up. We won’t arrive without scars, but I believe we will get there together; love will be a big reason why.
What do you think? Is sex is too crude to be included in fiction regardless of the circumstances, or can it actually elevate a story? Let me know in the comments below.
SARJ OUT