But the term “sex” is a slippery one, and it encompasses many separate ideas. For the purpose of this article, I use “sex” to refer to biological sex, the actual genetic and/or physical differences between male, female, and the potential alien “other.” “Gender” refers to one’s internal sense of sexual identity, regardless of biology. Finally, “sexual orientation” is used to describe any preference regarding the sex and gender of one’s partner(s).
Anthony’s experiments begin about a third of the way through the novel, when Flint actually begins to transfer into alien hosts. From the beginning, Anthony seems to throw traditional conceptions of sexuality to the wind by rejecting a two-sex model and the binary opposition that goes with it. This is a powerful move, since the two-sex model has been a basic foundation of belief for several hundred years. Thomas Laqueur describes the evolution from a one-sex model, in which male and female were considered to be biologically similar, to a two-sex model, in which “there are two stable, incommensurable, opposite sexes and … the lives of men and women, their gender roles, are somehow based on these ‘facts’”. Anthony breaks away from these models and creates a three-sex system that includes, rather than men and women, Impacts, Sibilants, and Undulants.
As an Impact member of this oceanic race, Flint swims along, proceeding on his mission, and accidentally crosses a boundary zone designed to keep the three sexes from intermingling. The reason for this soon becomes clear. For this species, sex is not a voluntary act. The presence of all three sexes causes an overpowering biological urge that culminates in sex. “It was sex—with three sexes … [t]he three entities were penetrating each other—but not as a man penetrated a woman. Not even as a two-man/one-woman trio. They were interpenetrating.”
Even more alien is Flint’s discovery that for this species, the sexual act automatically results in reproduction. The actual gender roles played by each sex vary depending on the circumstances. Whoever initiates the sexual act (in this case, Flint) becomes the catalyst. The other two become the sire and the parent, the latter of which actually creates the offspring. (Anthony never makes it clear how the remaining two participants become parent or sire.) As a result, someone who was a parent could easily become a catalyst in another union. As befitting the watery environment, gender identity is truly fluid. Sex only serves to create three possible roles, not to assign an individual irrevocably to any one of those roles.
Even as Anthony begins to explore this sexual system, he has already begun to undermine it as well. One of his primary assumptions about the technology that allows Flint’s aura to transfer into other beings is that “the potential host [has] to be sapient and of the same sex.” If this is the case, then how can Flint, a traditionally virile male, transfer into a member of this three-sex species? The underlying implication is that the Impacts are, despite the three-sex system, fundamentally male.
The complications become even more apparent when an enemy agent transfers in to follow Flint. This agent is female, and she takes over the body of Llyana, an Undulant. Once again, little mention is made of the apparent sexual disparity that should, according to Anthony’s rules, prevent a two-sex species from transferring into the bodies of these aliens. Llyana must, according to the rules, be the alien equivalent of a female. Because nobody ever transfers into a Sibilant host, this third sex is relegated to the background and tends to be ignored.
Later, Anthony’s system continues to disintegrate. Flint, having already experienced the involuntary alien triple-sex, uses his knowledge as a weapon to trap Llyana. He lures her into a forbidden area where he knows they will encounter a member of the third sex, which will again initiate the mating process—and reproduction. This time, because Flint and Llyana arrive together, the third entity—the outsider—becomes the catalyst.
They drew together until the three were a tight, rock-hard ball, with only small portions remaining discrete, and there was appalling pressure. The urgency of completion was so great it seemed that their very substance would sunder.
And it did…. There was an instant of exquisite pain as a gross chunk of flesh was ripped out of his body; then Flint was rushing through the water, incomplete yet completed….
[H]e swam around to follow Llyana. It was a risk, but a necessary one. He had to be sure he had nullified her.
He found her, undulating along with an infant of her kind.
The one factor that Anthony never explains is why Llyana was the one to assume the parental role. Why did she, rather than Flint, end up with the child? Both Flint and Llyana contributed part of their flesh to the creation of the child, but it is Llyana who ends up in the role of the mother.
The implication is that Llyana became the mother because she is female. While gender is fluid for the aliens, the host is still a female, just as Flint remains a male. With no other explanation, the audience is left with the impression that Flint must be the father, the one to contribute to the creation of the child without the burden of commitment, whereas Llyana, being female, would naturally be the one to actually give birth and, in the process, be saddled with the responsibility of raising the child.
The aura-transfer technology thus provides a workable metaphor to describe why Anthony’s experiment is a failure. In transferring the aura, one’s spirit remains the same even as it animates radically different forms. Likewise, while the outer appearance of this alien sexuality seems startlingly different and novel, at heart, it is still a traditional two-sex system.
Anthony’s failure becomes even more pronounced when the reader realizes that it was most likely accidental. Nowhere does Anthony address the basic assumptions that underlie Llyana’s relegation to the role of mother. Llyana is simply assumed to be feminine, and throughout the book, she is described in feminine terms. At one point, Flint compares her to his fiancé, Honeybloom—a beautiful and idealistic woman from back home. “Llyana was to Undulants as Honeybloom was to woman.”
In Cluster, Anthony has experimented with the surface appearance of sexuality, but he has fallen prey to the same traditional assumptions that Laqueur describes as being centuries old. Ours is a two-sex system, and even when Anthony breaks away from that system, he swiftly returns to it. In the process, he reinforces the idea that sex is binary, for while the description of the alien interaction involves three sexes, the underlying dynamics depend on a two-sex system.
Perhaps the problem was that Anthony tried too hard. In creating an alien system, it is easy to go to extremes, and in the process to overlook more subtle elements. Anthony created a three-sex system, but ignored the basic binary assumptions that formed the basis of that system. In that case, we might find more success in a novel that works, not with aliens, but with humans.
Friday
Friday, named after the protagonist of the book, is one of many examples in which Robert Heinlein explores, not an alien system of sexuality, but instead an exaggerated human one. His thought-experiments tend to take the form of prediction and projection. He is famous for his well-planned, carefully described near-future predictions. In discussing sex, he tends to break traditional rules, particularly when it comes to sexual orientation, and creates idyllic, free sexual spaces.
Friday’s character serves as a way for Heinlein to explore (and violate) the “rules” of sex in greater detail. In the tradition of science fiction, Friday is a character on the outside looking in; she is an artificial person, a genetically designed human being who was grown and raised in a laboratory. As a result, her views on sex tend to be more practical, objective, and in the end, more mechanical than those of normal human beings.
Heinlein carefully avoids labeling Friday’s sexual orientation. While she sleeps with both men and women, she is never identified as bisexual. Indeed, the word does not appear once in the entire novel. At one point, when Friday realizes that she has fallen in love with a woman, she turns to her boss and mentor for guidance. Her boss, with typical Heinlein-ian subtlety, replies, “Geniuses and supergeniuses always make their own rules on sex as on everything else; they do not accept the monkey customs of their lessers.”
Those monkey customs seem remarkably similar to Gayle Rubin’s “charmed circle” of traditionally accepted sexuality which restricts “good” sex to that which is monogamous, relationship-oriented, married, procreative, and heterosexual. Friday, on the other hand, begins the book as a member of an S-group, an extended family with multiple husbands and wives. In fact, she has three of each, and only a few pages after she returns home, she has already had sex with two of those three husbands.
While this approach still seems to incorporate the marriage relationship, that is the only connection to Rubin’s circle (and it should be noted that this marriage is far from traditional). Friday also has sex with her wives, and as an artificial person, she is incapable of having children. Furthermore, when her identity as a genetically enhanced human is discovered, she is kicked out of the S-group.