10 Spacer

The last piece in the Dangerous Visions collection of disturbing prophecies is Aye, and Gommorah by Samuel R. Delaney, which has been hailed as the best fiction written by a homosexual male in the 1960s. It follows a spacer who, to protect their gametes from space radiation, has undergone an advanced type of surgery that essentially makes them agender. People on Earth have formed a subculture known as Frelks who have developed a sexual obsession with these individuals.

The heroine works as a prostitute for financial gain and emotional fulfilment, despite the fact that she is asexual. When the woman wants to sleep with them but refuses to pay, tensions develop. Spacers have a strong sexual attraction to her, but she finds it impossible to develop feelings for them because they are primarily prostitutes on Earth. They get into an argument since our heroine realises they can’t have a sexual encounter with anyone until they receive some kind of payment, no matter how little. One of the most foretelling theories of all time, Aye, and Gomorrah is a profoundly affecting tale about the development of sex labour.[1]

9 Coordinator of Layout

Future pharmacology was a major topic in Philip K. Dick’s writings.Faith of our Fathers’ protagonist takes a medication called Death, which opens his eyes to the reality of an alien invasion. A Scanner Darkly follows an undercover agent studying this substance.Perhaps Palmer Eldritch’s trippiest piece of literature is The Three Stigmata. Though he deals in drugs beyond space, the protagonist works for a firm that makes “layouts.” Together, these tangible aids and the pharmaceuticals of the future allow colonists to forget about the harsh realities of living on distant moons and planets.

The oddest part about these accessories is that they all centre on a cheerleader named Perky Pat. On the other hand, pseudo-religious cults flourish when players share the same virtual world. Although he wasn’t totally critical of religion, Dick frequently utilised virtual realities to examine it. His tacky Christ parody, Perky Pat, stands for the true spiritual decay he foresaw.[2]

8 Mechador

The protagonist of Roger Zelazny’s Auto-da-Fé is a mechador, a horse equivalent to a matador. But instead of bulls, they use robotic minds to engage charging autos. Even though Zelazny’s story seems to be about a pun, it actually has far-reaching consequences for humanity’s destiny. Modern medicine has made it feasible to bring the dead back to life in Auto-da-Fé. The outcome is that entertainment goes in all sorts of strange directions.

Repeatedly humiliated in front of an equally callous mob, our hero has lost all empathy for violence. Because of his profession, he is ensnared in a never-ending cycle of dying and reborn, and he views his own mortality as nothing more than a minor annoyance. In works such as The Lord of Light, Zelazny delves into themes of reincarnation and Eastern religions; Auto-da-Fé is his macabre reinterpretation of these themes.the third

7 Alien Interpreter

From the ancient Minoan script, Linear A, to the Middle Eastern symbols of Proto-Elamite, which date back almost 5,000 years, there are hundreds of languages that have yet to be translated. Think about how challenging it would be to decipher a language spoken on a different planet—archaeologists and linguists are still trying to make sense of them. In Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, this is the problem that Dr. Louise Banks faces when heptapods, creatures with seven legs, approach Earth’s orbit.

In order to interact with humans, they set up odd mirrors called gazing glasses. Their disjointed phrase structure further perplexes Dr. Banks, who is already perplexed by the lack of coherence between their written and spoken words. After distinguishing between Heptapod A and Heptapod B, she embarks on the even more peculiar endeavour of deciphering the ways in which their vernacular mirrors their cosmic perspective.[4]

6 Explorers

The intergalactic civilisation depicted in Dune, written by Frank Herbert, stood out from the vast majority of previous science fiction because it relied less on computers. Setting the stage on Arrakis, the most significant planet in the cosmos due to its supply of the drug Melange, which enables interplanetary travel, the plot unfolds. It helps navigators navigate between star systems by giving them prescience, a type of precognition.

The Holtzman effect adds an extra layer of strangeness to their work. As a result of this occurrence, spacecraft in the Dune Universe can surpass the speed of light. Even though Herbert didn’t go into much detail, he does mention ideas like folded space. As a result, navigators face unfathomable dimensions and develop a dependency on the spice Melange.[5]

5 Child Trader

Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, a landmark piece of 1970s feminist science fiction, follows four female protagonists, each hailing from a different parallel planet. Joanna resides in a world similar to Earth, Jeannine in an eternal gloom where the feminist movement never achieved its second wave, Janet in a world where men were eradicated, and Jael in the most peculiar of all. Because the sexes have formed separate groups and are perpetually at odds with one another, the world is divided into Womanland and Manland.

Nonetheless, the Womanlanders continue to depend on commerce; specifically, they transfer male progeny for resources while retaining females. Selling boys for as little as possible is the kid trader’s speciality. The fact that the males of Manland perform operations on their children in order to produce female substitutes is what makes this so unsettling, as they lack female companionship.[6]

4 Observer

Soviet Russia’s two most prominent authors, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, collaborated on the novel Hard to be a God, which details an undercover mission on a planet that has never advanced beyond the Middle Ages. Since the aliens seem human and use identifiable feudal institutions, our hero and other observers go under the guise of Don Rumata so that they can blend in.

Coming from a progressive and utopian planet, he must fight the impulse to step in and fix things, making this an unusual job indeed. The constant scapegoating of the educated for the kingdom’s ills eventually gets to him. As he sees it, their tyranny is on par with, if not worse than, that of comparable mediaeval societies, so he launches an offensive against them. A discussion follows regarding the ethics of interfering with another culture’s progress and the potential impact on their own historical understanding of the planet they explored.[7]

3 Ancillary

In Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, a starship is controlled by an artificial intelligence (AI) that uses human corpses as warriors. One of the protagonists, Breq, is the sole surviving ensign of a ship named The Justice of Toren. The Radch were its rulers, and their culture does not differentiate between the sexes (everyone uses the word she). Therefore, Breq has to deal with being unable to differentiate between the sexes on top of being part of a fragmented awareness. (To let the reader feel her bewilderment, Leckie uses the pronoun she to refer to everyone.)

Intercut with Breq’s mission to exact revenge for the loss of her ship are flashbacks to a time when she was a part of a greater awareness, further complicating the plot. An odd aspect of an ancillary’s work is that, unlike regular soldiers, they don’t have a sense of purpose that ties them to a greater power. The betrayal of this connection has enraged Breq to the point that she plots vengeance on a whole empire.[8]

2 “Illyrion Miner”

The most precious material in the cosmos is illyrion, according to Samuel R. Delany’s Nova. A spacecraft might be propelled by just a few grammes of this superheavy material. In order to reach the most plentiful source of a dying star, a group of outcast cyborgs must navigate their way through its core as it goes nova. They feel compelled to end an economic battle between the galaxy’s two most powerful families, even though doing so could kill them or ruin their minds.

Magic leads Nova’s heroes on quests, much like in The Lord of the Rings when they seek down the Holy Grail or Jason when he pursues the golden fleece. They use tarot cards to foretell stakes and mission outcomes. The fact that their ship can survive a nova’s intense heat also suggests that the story takes place in a universe where the laws of physics are more fluid, like in ancient stories.[9]

1 Ship Pilot for Voids

The Void Captain’s Tale, written by Norman Spinrad, is one of the most bizarre science fiction novels ever written. It tracks the space voyage of a pleasure ship captain in an eroticism-horror hybrid. Dominique Alia Wu is his pilot; she uses her own mind to fuel the interplanetary drive, which she propels via orgasm. The pilot experiences a kind of quasi-religious rapture as they reach jump speed in Spinrad’s story, giving space travel a sensual flavour.

The fact that she has sexual influence over the ship has an impact on the crew, as if her work weren’t bizarre enough. The captain loses her position and becomes completely subservient to her will as a result of her obsession, even though she is expected to keep her distance from the other crew members. Delusions of grandeur accompany her experience of travelling at lightspeed solely on her libido. With the help of the captain, she tries to fuse consciousness with Spinrad’s conception of God.

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