Lack

By Maxwell Colin Robertson

As Earth’s biome crumbles, humanity fails to develop the technologies necessary to stop an impending climate disaster. Faced with widespread starvation and environmental ruin, a radical faction seeks to preserve a segment of humankind by unleashing a deadly virus, targeting the vast heterosexual majority in a drastic attempt to reduce the population and save the planet.

However, this extreme measure falls short of halting the escalating environmental catastrophe. With the planet deteriorating rapidly, the remnants of humanity embark on a daring exodus. They set off on a 6,000-year journey to the nearest habitable planet outside our solar system. This epic voyage, devoid of star or warp drive, demands a completely self-sustaining environment, where everything, including the colonists themselves, must be recycled.

Amidst this backdrop, one man finds himself an outsider on this formidable journey, constrained by strict rules governing all aspects of life, including reproduction, which is meticulously controlled to preserve the colony’s genetic health. Defying these regulations, he forms a clandestine relationship, leading to the conception of an unauthorized child. This grave breach of protocol poses a moral dilemma for the crew: how should they deal with this infraction, and what consequences will their decision have for the future of their fragile society? This narrative explores the complexities of survival, ethics, and human relationships in the face of a daunting interstellar challenge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Apr 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9781035843015

Maxwell Colin Robertson

The author has studied and tutored English and writing while earning a more prosaic living until recent decades. Recent incarnations have included tutoring Effective Writing, Critical Reading, and Reading and Writing the Short Story at James Cook University Cairns Campus in North Queensland. A longtime love of science fiction, the author’s homosexuality and the developing climate crisis have coalesced into a parable of possibility revealing the strength inherent in human variability.

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About the Author

The author has studied and tutored English and writing while earning a more prosaic living until recent decades. Recent incarnations have included tutoring Effective Writing, Critical Reading, and Reading and Writing the Short Story at James Cook University Cairns Campus in North Queensland. A longtime love of science fiction, the author’s homosexuality and the developing climate crisis have coalesced into a parable of possibility revealing the strength inherent in human variability.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Samantha Morgan, who is probably the only person I could travel to another star system with.

Copyright Information ©

Maxwell Colin Robertson 2024

The right of Maxwell Colin Robertson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781035842988 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781035843015 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2024

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

I have many people to acknowledge in getting to this point. I am not ranking them (you know who you are), nor am I proffering titles. I list them here in alphabetical order.

Kathleen Burns

Julie and Brendan Dooley

Deb Fisher

Jennifer Francis

Suzanne Gibson

Kristi Gisellson

Louise Henry

Richard and Angela Lansdown

Gillian Long

Emma Maguire

Renae and Angelo Marano

Dosha Reichardt

Elizabeth Smyth

Elaine Spicer

Stephen Torre

Preface

When I was a small child, I remember peeking through the slit in the barely open swing door, through the legs of the kitchen table and chairs to the grainy black-and-white TV as the swirling and iconic Dr Who title sequence heralded the start of another episode of this long-running series. I didn’t know why the Daleks were so bad.

Indeed, from an aesthetic point of view, they were really bad, with a drain plunger as a weapon of mass destruction and a bass drone from a set of bagpipes as their means of sensing the world around them. They showed hopeless agility and a single-minded focus on extermination that leaves them as one of the most cartoonish, silly and one-dimensional baddies of all time. I forgot to mention enduring.

I was lucky to live through the live unrolling of the Tom Baker years, during which the series experienced its halcyon days, both in terms of characterisation and storytelling. It was the first time I came across the idea that humankind was not everything I had been led to believe and was both more – and less.

The 1975 story, The Ark in Space, was released four years before the movie Alien, yet the idea of humankind as the host for an insectoidal larval young was compelling, despite the smaller special effects budget, if not more so because of precedence. The story is set 10,000 years in the future with humankind on a spaceship on their way to a distant colonising destination. Upon discovering the humans on board in suspended animation, The Doctor outstretches his arms, looks up and seriously intones:

‘Homo Sapiens – what an inventive, invincible species? It’s only a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learnt to walk. Puny, defenceless bipeds – they survive flood, famine and plague, they survive cosmic wars and holocausts. Now, here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life – ready to out-sit eternity. They’re indomitable – indomitable.’ (Hinchcliffe)

The imagery is powerful and evocative – the Doctor not being one of us, but a native of another planet and not human at all, can see us as we really are. This was my first glimpse of a view of humanity from outside itself and was to have a profound impact on the way I see the world and my subsequent focus on storytelling. The view from inside is rarely other than self-serving – either to build up or tear down the fabric of our fallacies. To truly see ourselves and our place in the universe, we must be able to first imagine ourselves far away from the here and now and far away from ourselves.

Introduction

Homosexuality has been written about in space since the beginning of space exploration and travel. Much of the relevant literature in the 20thC maintains the social and cultural superiority of heterosexuality and encourages dismissive and antagonistic attitudes toward homosexuality even while some titles simultaneously purport to support it.

This duality of messaging in the stories which are nominally supportive reveals the persistently perceived superiority of heterosexuality, socially, culturally and physically. Homosexuality was widely and imaginatively discussed in the stories detailed below from the 20th Century, but the impact of these stories comes, in some instances, in spite of the words they employ, rather than because of them. The contemporaneous language used can be deeply homophobic, as in The World Well Lost, such was the subtlety required when dealing sensitively and positively with this subject.

Recognised as an early deliberately pro-homosexual story, although well disguised, The World Well Lost (Sturgeon) by Theodore Sturgeon was written and published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1953. This story captures the fear and self-loathing common with the realisation of sexual otherness, to the point of considering murder to escape detection.

The story is credited in the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction 2003, with being the first story to, ‘transition to positive representations of homosexuality, if not of challenges to heteronormativity itself (153).’ Such was the shock of its content at the time that the first science fiction editor that Sturgeon approached to publish the story, ‘not only rejected the story, but called up every other magazine editor in the field to tell them not to accept the story either (xx; Garber and Paleo).’

While transporting aliens from the planet Dirbanu back to their own planet, Grunty, the first mate, realises that the aliens are homosexual (too) and lets them leave in an escape pod. The assertion from the Captain that he would have killed the ‘fluffs – pansies – queens – fruit – fairies (15,16),’ had he known that was what they were, is unprotested by the characters or the narrative.

The implied violence with which homosexuals should be treated is positively sanctioned by the society the spacefarers exist in, yet the very virulence of the Captain’s hatred seems overdone and gradually the reason why becomes clear. The implication is of a repressed deep regard between the two spacemen – each one for the other, not admitted by either, revealing a tragic and desperate love affair, probably never to be actualised.

As a representation of hidden homosexual desire, even love, from afar, this story manages to tread a fine line between the internal and external personas. It is an oppressive reading in the damning messages it overtly portrays towards homosexuals and homosexuality, but the story then exposes, with closer study, a more sympathetic understanding and even deference to the idea of homosexuality.

The hidden nature of the spacefarers’ regard for one another is poignant in their unknown requited feeling, not revealed to one another because of society’s opprobrium. What is clear is the overwhelming expectation of and for a homosexual character from this period, as expressed by King George V in 1931. While this was attributed to the king 22 years previous to the publication of A World Well Lost, ‘I thought people like that always shot themselves,’ (Heritage) was an unhelpful and ignorant comment and gives context to Sturgeon’s bravery and subsequently, Ursula LeGuin’s insight.

The World Well Lost honestly portrays the situation for homosexual people in the 50s and largely contrasts to the present day, due to a sliding scale of increasing acceptability over time. Like many other stories on the same theme of positive portrayals of homosexuality, this story highlights the obverse view, while surreptitiously revealing the love and tenderness between the two spacemen. The presentation of this opposite violent external view privileges the internal tenderness of the protagonists which successfully drives the narrative.

The Left Hand of Darkness written by Ursula LeGuin in 1969 (LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness) details a planet upon which a race lives whose sex, sexuality and gender are changeable and fully functional to either of the two heterosexual binaries in the time of kemmer, akin to the time when some animals on Earth are in heat or must. The rest of the time, they are non-gendered or sexed beings. On a trek across the Gobrin Ice sheet, Genly Ai and Estraven are forced to spend months tied together during the day and share a small tent at night.

On the trip, Estraven goes into kemmer which, because of the sexual binary imperative, results in him exhibiting female sensibilities and physicality in response to Genly Ai’s persistent masculinity. The character of Estraven fulfils the role of a homosexual (revealed by Genly Ai’s use of pronouns) in the story and sexual congress is forestalled.

Sadly, for Estraven, a fate of sudden and violent death awaits him at the end of their journey. This violence attended upon the homosexual is a standard literary device in this period and still presents itself today as the shadow of a trope of the death-of-the-homosexual (Benshoff). Whether it was a convenient narrative device to rid the author of a problem or a deliberate message of violence as an expected outcome for such a character as Estraven is unclear. In any event, Estraven dies with ‘his chest half shot away (LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness, 239).’

Described as unnerving, in Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, 2003 (129), one of James Tiptree Jnr’s (Actually Alice Sheldon) most famous stories, Houston, Houston, do you read? (1976) is utopian/dystopian, depending on the context of the reader, as an almost perfect world of women and details the return of a group of male astronauts from a trip around the sun.

Humankind has, through natural disaster and pandemic, learnt to live without men when they get back and 300 years have inexplicably elapsed. The surviving humans have a fully functioning society peopled exclusively by women – procreation occurring through a process of parthenogenesis. Men in this story are shocking in the raw and unflattering depiction made of them and it is easy to see that Tiptree’s unstated premise – that women could well be happier and more cohesive as a society without men, has merit in the story she has constructed.

The final lines, as the male doctor is presented with a fait accompli in the form of a beaker containing an unknown liquid, shock and invite the reader to consider their own stance in such a position: ‘Just tell me,’ he [the male doctor] says to Lady Blue – ‘What do you call yourselves? Women’s World? Liberation? Amazonia?’

‘Why, we call ourselves human beings.’ Her eyes twinkle absently at him – ‘Humanity, mankind.’ She shrugs. ‘The human race.’

‘The drink tastes cool going down, something like peace and freedom,’ he thinks. ‘Or death.’ (Tiptree, 44)

The story indulges in male attitudes of superiority to women when such views were still current but beginning to be challenged. The society of women has evolved after 300 years into a homosexual society but the men are the products of a male-dominated heteronormative world and have remained in that mindset. Cleverly using the reader’s own presumptions against their understanding of the narrative raises this story above others in the field and indicates a level of clear thinking on the subject of heteronormativity and cultural creation which is unusual, then and now.

This story uses the