In May 2024 I joined the Future of Human Reproduction project (FoHR) as a Visiting Collaborator. As followers of this blog and the project will know, FoHR is an interdisciplinary, Wellcome Trust-funded project considering the future of human reproduction from the perspectives of bioethics, speculative design, legal studies, and English Literature among other disciplines, and through interdisciplinary perspectives. My contribution to the project is as a science fiction specialist, working in literary studies and medical humanities. My experiences working on the project invited me to reflect on interdisciplinary practices when discussing reproduction – both in thinking about the possible futures for reproduction, and understanding the way it is currently imagined in society, given the technological possibilities and social structures we currently have.

In thinking about my role in the project I consistently returned to one of my favourite lines from Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the most famous science fiction authors in the canon. Le Guin is perhaps known particularly for her reimagining of gender and reproduction in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), and in its introduction she argues that, ‘science fiction is not predictive, it is descriptive.’ By this she means that the futures imagined in science fiction are written with the intent and result of critiquing contemporary practices and societies, rather than for the express purpose of imagining new societies into being or predicting the future. Reading science fiction this way invites us to ask how our imaginations and assumptions are shaped by the conditions and constraints of contemporary society. In terms of reproduction, such a reading strategy invites us to reflect on the lack of representation of pregnancy and birth in the sf canon, and to critique the dominance of technological solutions over social problems (like caring structures) when reproduction is represented. These are certainly useful approaches to thinking about reproduction and its representations.

However, we can also question Le Guin’s thesis here; if science fiction is not for thinking about the future, then why does it think about the future so much? Why not stick to alternate realities (like Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel Man in the High Castle, which imagines a world ruled by Nazis after their victory in World War Two)? We can read science fiction as critique and satire, but we can also read it as engaged with where our societies will go. Imagining futures extrapolated from present practices invites us to alter current social and technological trajectories, to aim for futures we might consider preferable, or even utopian. This use of science fiction certainly invites us to think about nascent technologies and their consequences (intentional or not).

The Future of Human Reproduction project is interested in cutting-edge technologies, such as in vitro gametogenesis, ectogenesis, and the legal, philosophical and ethical implications of these technologies. This necessarily involves a good deal of future-planning, since these technologies are still mere possibilities, albeit possibilities that are showing promise at the lab stage . At a conference on the “Normative Implications of the Metaphysics of Extra-Corporeal Gestation”, collaborators on the FoHR project from the University of Liverpool, invited myself and Science Fiction Curator Tom Dillon to discuss the history of the idea of ectogenesis. Ectogenesis only has a history thanks to speculative and science-fictional thinking, given that the technology is still in development. We considered JBS Haldane’s Daedalus: Or, Science and the Future (1924) and Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex (1970); both engage in science-fictional thinking to explore the possibilities of ectogenesis. We also invited participants to write their own ‘flash’ science fiction stories, to put science-fictional thinking into conversation with philosophical praxis. In light of the possibly imminent availability of ectogenesis technologies, it was useful to view these science-fictional texts as a kind of futurology, preparing a narrative which we could bring to contemporary debates around reproductive technologies.

But taking science fiction as descriptive was equally valuable. At the conference I organised at Lancaster University last October on Reproduction and Speculative Cultures our first keynote speaker, Dr Heather Latimer, considered the expression of the US’s attack on the right to abortion and the wider context of reproductive politics for indigenous women as an important thematic strand in contemporary feminist reproductive dystopias, identifying the dystopia as a key genre for thinking about the loss of rights and the regulation of bodies. Our other keynote presentation, from Dr Sophie Jones (since published in article form in BMJ Medical Humanities, focused on representations of nausea and vomiting of pregnancy (NVP) and posthuman narratives in speculative fiction. Both keynote talks, and many of the other conference papers, showed that literature (and particularly speculative fictions) can intervene in contemporary discussions around reproductive health and care, contributing to urgent and ongoing reproductive discussions, not just those focusing on technologies still under development.

Sometimes this distinction between the predictive and descriptive in science fiction (and in science fiction studies) feels like a tension, and one that can be read as an ideological one. If science fiction is descriptive and acts as social critique it might be more aligned with a liberal perspective, critical of current capitalist tendencies. On the other hand, if science fiction is predictive it can be harnessed by those very capitalist systems (think about Elon Musk’s references to Iain M Banks’ Culture novels, or science fiction author Neal Stephenson’s work on Jeff Bezos’ space programme). In thinking about science fiction with members of FoHR, I found that both perspectives were valuable. Yes, science fiction offers us a history of ectogenesis before the technology was ever possible, giving us a rich cultural context from which to view its ethical and philosophical considerations. In this sense, it has proved usefully predictive when it comes to reproductive technologies. However, its power to describe the problems of our contemporary societies means it is acting as political commentary on reproductive politics in general. I hope that my contribution to FoHR will be to help others think through this distinction, and perhaps to temper any polarisation between the predictive and descriptive power of science fiction. It’s instructive here to talk about ‘futures’ rather than ‘the future’. When we think of science fiction’s predictive powers it gives us the opportunity to think through multiple futures. When we consider its descriptive powers, it invites us to critique contemporary social practices and work for the future we want, starting in the present moment.

Related Blogs

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  What’s Literature Got to Do with It? How Literature Shapes Our View of Reproductive Technology

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  In Vitro Gametogenesis (IVG) – What Issues Does It Raise? Video recording and transcript

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  Exploring the Normative Implications of the Metaphysics of Extra-Corporeal Gestation

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