The chapter reflects on four approaches to desire present in American science fiction: normalization, displacement, reification, and reimagining. Fanfiction or fanfiction-adjacent novels such as Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (2014) are set in queernormative worlds and as such normalize queer desire. Feminist depictions of separatist women’s communities, such as Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed” (1972), Nicole Griffith’s Ammonite (1993) or Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu (2018), displace queer desire, situating lesbian sex and pleasures in the background of the narrative concerned with the social and political implications of a world without men. In Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah” (1967) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan (2017) desire is reified as it serves as a condition of full humanity. Finally, stories of human/nonhuman encounters seem to lend themselves particularly well to the efforts to reimagine desire. In Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-9) and Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous (2017), alien and robot characters experience desire and pleasure as diffused and independent of binary sex/gender systems.

Situations when people experience a lack of sex or interest in sex and reasons for this, including contribution of relationship status, stress, differences in drive, and mental plus physical health conditions. Hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD). Treatments for these conditions and sources of support.

Evolution by natural selection is not a process by which objects called “species” change over time under selective pressures. There are no such objects. It is a process by which organisms that are related in salient ways, by which they are specific we might say (as opposed to being members of a species), are replaced by others. There is more than one way in which they can be specific. One is related compatibility, which some organisms, the xs, exhibit just when they have common ancestry, when they are reproductively compatible, and when every organism so related to one of the xs is among the xs. Given this way of understanding specificity, we current humans, the Homo sapiens presently inhabiting the planet, could give way to future humans that resemble us only insofar as they are reproductively compatible with us. What is more, our humanity is not essential to us. Neither is our origin, in that we might have originated in a different time and place. So in theory – given technology that is currently out of sight – we could change ourselves into creatures that are very unlike us.