The literature of the fantastic is a fruitful place in which to examine gendered questions of power. People have been using it to talk about women’s place in society (and the place of gender in society) pretty much for as long as science fiction has been a recognisable genre. Joanna Russ and Ursula Le Guin are only two of the most instantly recognisable names whose work directly engaged these themes. But for all that, science fiction and fantasy—especially the pulpishly fun kind—is strangely reluctant to acknowledge a challenge to participation in demanding public life (or a physically ass-kicking one) faced primarily (though not only) by women.
Pretty sure you’ve already guessed what it is. But just to be sure—
Pregnancy. And the frequent result, parenting small children.
As I sit down to write this column, my brain is hopping around like a rabbit on steroids. (Metaphorically speaking.) For me, it’s the end of January, and I’ve come home from a flying visit to New York and Philadelphia to attend part of an Irish political party’s national conference as a participating member,* and so politics and the difference between cultures that may have surface similarities are somewhat on my mind. And, too, the social assumptions and contexts that mean women are underrepresented in politics and leadership roles, both in real life and in fiction.
New Zealand’s Labour Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern joined the ranks of history’s handful of female premiers last October, and now she’s only the second democratically-elected premier in modern history to be pregnant and plan on giving birth while in office. That’s a striking number: number two in history.
Science fiction and fantasy is seldom interested in people’s reproductive lives from a social perspective, except when it’s in the context of dystopian social control. Childbearing and child-rearing are central to many people’s life experience, which makes it more than a little odd that I can only think of perhaps two or three SFF novels that, without being entirely focused on it, incorporate pregnancy and reproductive life as a central part of their narrative. Lois McMaster Bujold’s Barrayar is one of them. Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan’s pregnancy (both in her body and in the uterine replicator) and her feelings about children and Barrayar is central to the narrative—which involves, among other things, civil war, and Cordelia herself playing an important role in bringing that civil war to an end. We find reproductive concerns (as well as conspiracies, spies, and the fragile environments of space stations) at the heart of Ethan of Athos, too, where a young man from a planet inhabited only by men** must go out into the wider universe to bring home ovarian tissue cultures so that his people can continue to have children.
And pregnancy, as well as politics, forms a significant part of the first science fiction novels I ever read: Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars: Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command. Heir to the Empire and Dark Force Rising, in fact, stand out for being action novels in which one of the major protagonists—in this case Leia Organa—must deal with being pregnant, how the people around her react to her being pregnant, and the ways in which being pregnant increasingly changes her ability to do things (like participate effectively in fights and chases) which when not pregnant she took for granted. I’ve looked ever since the mid-1990s for other portrayals of pregnant diplomats who can kick ass and take names at need, and found myself surprisingly disappointed.
In real life, we’re pretty terrible about articulating and addressing assumptions about childbearing and child-rearing. We are, in fact, distressingly bad as societies about facilitating the participation of people with primary child-rearing or caregiving responsibilities in all aspects of social, community, and political life: it’s not really surprisingly that our fictions tend, as a rule, to avoid looking closely at the circumstances that make it easy—or conversely, hard—for pregnant people or people with small children to be fully a part of public and community life. What does a world look like if the society doesn’t assume that childbearing and child-rearing work is (a) a private matter for individuals, (b) isn’t assumed to be primarily the responsibility of women, (c) isn’t often outsourced by wealthy women to poorer ones? I don’t know.
I don’t particularly want to read an entire novel about the economics of child-rearing. But I’d like to see more books, more SFF stories, that consider its place in the world and how that affects people in their societies.
Have you read novels like this? Have you any recommendations? Thoughts? Let me know!
*Where I met a reader of this column who turns out to also be related to my girlfriend. Ireland is a small place. *waves to Siobhán*
**There is no social space on that planet for trans women or nonbinary people.
Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, is out now from Aqueduct Press. Find her at her blog, where she’s been known to talk about even more books thanks to her Patreon supporters. Or find her at her Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council and the Abortion Rights Campaign.
Saga, by Brian Vaughan and illustrated by Fiona Staples. Comic, very good. Tiny tiny spoiler (it’s part of the back blurb), two people from opposite sides of a war fall in love and get pregnant. And it has one of my favorite characters of all time, Lying Cat! Just go read it
Honor Harrington has to deal with an unexpected pregnancy in her later books, as well as a complex relationship that evolves into a plural marriage.
Tanya Huff’s Sing the Four Quarters! I remember it because it is so damned rare.
Gini Koch’s Kitty Kat/Alien series?
I’m writing a short story about it now, but can’t think of many others.
Chuck Wendig did revisit Leia’s inner turmoil (and ass-kicking-ness) in his Star Wars Aftermath trilogy, so we have that back in canon at least.
Hrm. I can barely even come up with any books where people use birth control… Erika Johansen’s “The Queen of the Tearling” trilogy at least tackles it, but…
Oh! And Robert Jordan’s Crossroads of Twilight. We really get in Elayne’s head in that one and she’s super pregnant by then.
This is embarrassing. I can think of more stories involving quantum manipulation of enclosed spaces than someone being pregnant.
The pregnacy and childbearing books are with the books where the main character has the flu so the apocalypse happens without her being able to stop it.
Lois McMaster Bujold not only has a pregnancy be an issue twice in Barrayar(with Cordelia and Alys, but I suppose you could count the fetus transfer for three times), the availability of Uterine Replicators is a significant factor in at least 5 of her other books.
Paul O. Williams Pelbar cycle features at least one pregnant protagonist, plus an issue with some of the others.
Julian May’s Pleistocine Epic and Mileu books make pregnancy a serious issue, as well as the clone children of Mental Man. A similar Mental Man also happens in Richard C. Meredith’s Timeliner Trilogy.
Orson Scott Card’s Hart’s Hope has an evil Queen who somehow exploited the magic of pregnancy.
And there’s this comic.
Fantastic thread! Two thoughts:
Kameron Hurley’s The Stars Are Legion deals extensively with pregnancy, albeit in a very sci-fi way.
Kelly Barnhill’s The Girl Who Drank the Moon deals with raising a small (adopted, in a sense) child, and doesn’t shy away from some of the details. Also more broadly centers reproductive and gender politics.
Kameron Hurley’s The Stars Are Legion. It’s got weird biotech, every single character is female (sadly, again, I don’t recall anything about nonbinary or trans folks–it’s one of those mono-genders-to-make-a-point sort of things.
The main character is pregnant through pretty much the entire book, and while it’s a very very different sort of pregnancy, the plot still revolves around her trying to keep it.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29090844-the-stars-are-legion
Other commenters beat me to Saga, Honor & Koch. Gail Carriger’s Soulless series deals with pregnancy. There are bits and pieces in the very late Wheel of Time books. The Kingmaker Chronicles by Bouchet has a pregnancy, this wonders over to the edge between fantasy & romance genres. I think there’s a relatively extensive list of books where pregnancy plays a part (often mystical, often eye-rollingly unrealistic), the list that involves actual child rearing is much much shorter. Saga, Honor, Carriger & Koch touch on it but in both Honor and Koch the the parents are so fabulously wealthy they have entire platoons of people to help take care of the kids while they go off having adventures. Carriger has Alexia pregnant for two (or three depending on if you count the one where she’s pregnant but doesn’t know it yet) books, with a toddler for one then skips the majority of childhood and ages the kid up to be the new teen protagonist in her second series.
The issue (problem is not the right word, I just mean “a thing I think about from time to time”) is, recently when writers introduce pregnancy and childrearing in SFF they often get accused of “babies ever after” tropes and pigeonholing women, which seems to have led to an opposite (if not quite equal) trope of cis women bartering away their uteruses for various types of power, toward which I am extremely unsure of my feelings.
(I specify “not quite equal” to make it abundantly clear that I support the right of writers to write either trope as much as they wish to and am not so disingenuous as to suggest that a little pushback/subversion/exploration harms anybody just because it’s not my personal cup of tea. But I don’t want to see pigeonholing either way. I hope I make sense.)
@7/LordVorless: Good comic, thanks for the link!
SFF novels about mothers and babies… Aleytys, the protagonist of Jo Clayton’s diadem series, gives birth in the first novel and cares for her baby son throughout the second one. My best friend and I were very disappointed when her son was taken away from her at the end of that book.
11, two alternatives are Cuckoo’s Egg by CJ Cherryh and Kif from Futurama.
It’s not just the Barrayar books, but Bujold’s series The Sharing Knife stars a pregnant woman (Fawn), and deals with, well, <spoilers>. Anyway, it’s very good and underrated (afaict).
Peter Brett’s fourth book, The Skull Throne, in his Demon Cycle series has some interesting stuff in Leesha Paper rising to moderate power while hiding from her people that she is pregnant from the leader of the invading army.
I completely agree with this point. I would love to read a book where not only has a character that is pregnant, but that also explores the practices of raising, those are cultural practices and should be included in worldbuilding!
I would like to read a book that explores the practices of two or more cultures in contact.
Cherryh’s Cyteen is (in part) about the raising of one very specific child…
Science fiction and fantasy is seldom interested in people’s reproductive lives from a social perspective, except when it’s in the context of dystopian social control
Wait, WHAT?
I mean, yes, science fiction, probably true in most cases (there are some exceptions which others have already noted), but fantasy? The genre with all those plots about long-lost heirs and dynastic marriages and bastard children and orphans and illicit affairs?
I don’t think I can think of any genre that is more interested in people’s reproductive lives. Even romance tends to stop before the actual reproduction happens. (It’s more concerned with the enjoyable and complex preliminaries.) Detective stories rarely have much interest in reproductive issues (Fargo’s pregnant police chief aside). Thrillers even less. But fantasy, at least mediaeval fantasy, is all about that – because it’s writing about a period when politics was a personal and family business.
Aliette de Bodard’s The House of Binding Thorns has a pregnancy, childbirth, and dealing with newborn as…well, it isn’t even really a subplot, just a fact of life around which some of the significant action takes place.
Years ago, I knew a woman whose friends growing up had all been only children. She said her mother had been the only woman she knew who’d had a baby. When she and her fiance were thinking about having children, she wound up talking to me about what a “weird” thing it was to have children, when you thought about it. There’d be this thing growing inside you till it came fighting and clawing its way out.
Me: “Did you see Aliens on TV last night?”
Her: “Yeah. Why?”
Me: “No reason.”
For what it’s worth, I’m not the first person to compare the Alien movies to dark versions of childbirth and our fears surrounding it..
@18 I think feudalism counts as dystopian social control :P
I think that fantasy is usually more concerned with the results of people’s reproductive lives rather than the lives themselves. It’s the difference between Shards of Honour, where reproductive concerns are frequently discussed and alluded to and Barrayar where Cordelia’s pregnancy is a major part of the book. You can write about heirs and bastards and illicit affair without ever getting near a uterus or people under 30.
Pat Wrede’s 1987 fantasy Caught in Crystal features a woman with two kids in tow going on a quest. To be fair, the heroine is a retired adventurer, so it’s more like going back to work after the kids are in school, without the school.
Don Sakers had a short but cogent essay on the topic of SF vs. domesticity in this preamble to a review of Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161123211302/https://www.analogsf.com/2016_06/reflib.shtml
(If the link works.) He expands the scope to caregiving generally, which I think is correct.
A goodly chunk of SF is about escaping the constraints of family, one way or another, into adult empowerment, certainly the psychological work of adolescence. A good bit of romance is about family formation, work of a later stage of life. One can sense why the two sets of tropes might be at odds with one another, especially for someone with a lot of zero-sum-game thinking stuck in their head.
Ta, L.
@21, Feudalism, like most political and cultural systems developed in response to a specific set of challenges; the disintegration of central government with the Fall of the Western Empire and the subsequent power vacuum with its battling warlords. It is also not a bad model for a decentralized system of government. Ideally the benefits went both ways but as with most systems the upper levels did much better than the lower. Though not being murdered, raped or having your crops burned was considered a win by Medieval peasants who had very low expectations – at first.
Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch got a kick-ass pirate captain/Mom called Zamira Drakasha. Her motherhood isn’t the main focus but an important feature of her character. Another important feature of her character is that she is the Most Awesome.
Does Twilight count? Remesme or something? LOL.
Yes, Bujold is the ne plus ultra in this sphere. Robin Hobb has a bunch in her Elderlings books, with Molly, Malta and several others having interesting SFF pregnancies and births. .
I can think of two fantasy sets with pregnancy or child rearing . Patricia Briggs duology Raven Shadow and Raven Strike. They are a married couple with several children at various ages. No pregnancy or infancy in this set. Another author is Tanya Huff and her Quarters series (4 books). The first book is “Sing the Four Quarters” and Annice is trying to figure out how to deal with the other people involved in her life now that she is pregnant and on the run for treason . All of these are great books and I recommend them.
The protagonist of Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber is pregnant under very distressing circumstances, and Brown Girl in the Ring stars a young mother taking a very new baby into combat with predatory spirits (and predatory politicians, almost as bad). Both young women are fighting for a better world than the one that’s been handed to them.
I recently read Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro; affecting, but you wouldn’t call it SF– I kept wondering where all those organ-donating clones were coming from. Body births- from whom? Uterine replicators– never mentioned. Where did the source DNA come from? And who was raising all those babies until they were old enough for boarding school? Even neglected children need a base minimum of care if they’re going to survive. That book was the anti-“economics of child rearing” novel, not interested in that kind of worldbuilding at all.
Don’t forget Bujold’s Sharing Knife series, for fantasy that is very much aware of pregnancy. Fawn’s unplanned pregnancy and miscarriage early in the story, their “taking turns” birth control when Dag’s groundsense tells them she is fertile, and the way her second pregnancy motivates their decisions in the final volume.
It’s not a story about a woman’s reproductive life, but it is a story where the reproductive lives of women are in the plot in a matter-of-fact way.
While it is rare to see, there are books out there which deal with the subject and book two of the Lady Trent Memoirs: The Tropic of Serpents by Marie Brennan is one of those. Isabella Camherst (the future Lady Trent) makes the decision to leave her two year old son in the care of relatives to go study dragons, her big passion. She’s clear that she does not consider herself to be much of the maternal sort, but, at about midway through the book, joins in a ceremony meant to clear the air between her and her companions, and admits quite fully that she actually resents not only her son, but the society in which children take precedence over a woman’s ability to explore her abilities and desires outside the home (think AU Victorian). The book also deals with women’s issues in strange, new, and exciting locations, like a swamp, how other cultures approach those issues, what the society to which Isabella belongs actually feels about those issues too, and what women who did not want to marry had to do to escape such a fate (Isabella’s companion states on page she has no interest in marriage or what it might entail).
You can’t talk about pregnancy and reproductive issues in sf without talking about Octavia Butler. Bloodchild is a horrifying mpreg story, Wild Seed is about eugenics but also a woman devoted to her descendants and the lilith books are about ethical dilemmas around human/alien reproduction. They’re all nuanced and terrifying and brilliant.
In Calling On Dragons by Patricia Wrede, the pregnant queen goes on a quest. One of the mcs in Dianna Wynne Jones’ A Sudden Wild Magic is a mother who brings her two year old along for adventures. My Real Children shows pregnancy and motherhood but it has that annoying trope of lesbian couple gets pregnant through hetero sex.
Other books/stories with pregnancy:
air, geoff ryman
ammonite, nicola Griffith
Arrival/the story of your life, ted chiang
children of men, pd james
The New Mother, Eugene Fischer
the thread that binds the bones, nina kiriki hoffman
Also Maureen McHugh’s After the Apocalypse has a very unsentimental mom main character
Not SFF, but I just remember that Amelia Peabody books include her son since book 3, only that the son is a mini-adult, so she doesn’t have to deal with usual child’s behavior.
In general, it seems having children is depicted as opposite of doing things/having adventures. Sadly, it seems fiction reflects Real Life’s ideas
@32, Ramses Emerson is a precocious disaster that makes Miles Vorkosigan look good in comparison.
Amelia crawls into a half collapsed pyramid to find Ramses calmly scribbling in his notebook. “Good Evening, Mama. Is Papa with you or have you come alone?”
@22, I remember Caught In Crystal, the two kids are stunned to learn mom is former adventurer.
I poked around in my basement to see what I could find in my own collection, and didn’t come up with much regarding child bearing and raising, not a surprise in a collection dominated more by hard SF. I did find a book called Crystal Memory by Stephen Leigh, which had a mother as a main character, out to avenge the murder of her son. And in H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy, Pappy Jack becomes a surrogate father to a whole family of cute alien beings. There were plenty of juvenile books, but those had mothers seen from the child’s perspective. And when you have multi-generational series’, like Lee and Miller’s Liaden books, or S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse books, you are bound to get some mention of parenting. The topic is definitely one that has not been explored as much as it could have been.
*taking bunches of notes *
I see LMB herself brought up GJATRQ.
There’s also an interesting urban fantasy series, Vampire for Hire by JR Rain, in which the protagonist is is mother focused on retaining her two children, even though she’s now a mother. Not sure if this counts.
happily enough, i saw a bunch of these come out in 2017! i rounded them up, here’s the link if you’re interested: https://bookriot.com/2017/11/13/parenthood-in-science-fiction-fantasy/ hoping to see more in the future as well.
Le Guin’s Always Coming Home: “When I saw her flower c***, I said heya in my heart.”
Patricia Briggs” Raven Shadow” and “Raven Strike” are a fantasy of parents and their kids on a quest. No pregnancies. A fantasy with pregnancy in the main character is “Sing the Four Quarters” by Tanya Huff. Annice must figure out how to deal with pregnancy’s physical issues, and the various people in her life reaction to it while under a treason charge too.
Several of Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books have information about how the different cultures view and rear their children.
Let me add to this list Joe Hill’s The Fireman. The main character’s pregnancy is very present throughout.
Already mentioned, Patricia C Wrede’s pregnant queen and subsequent baby scene.
Orson Scott Card has a lot of reproductive stuff, including pregnancy, in his Shadow series. Also, the magical power of pregnancy in Enchantment.
Tamora Pierce has her shapeshifting character have pregnancy troubles, seen in short scenes in Trickster’s Choice. A short story in her collection Tortall and Other Lands deals exclusively with Aly, Nawat, and the birth of their triplets (who are not eggs!), as well as the early stage of parenthood.
Not SF, but House of Many Ways by Diana Wynne Jones is one of my favorite books and sees Sophie Pendragon trying to help out a friend while dealing with a magic wielding two year old and her manchild husband, Howl.
While child-bearing has no effect on the narrative, child-rearing is a huge part of Kai Ashante Wilson’s second novella A Taste of Honey, which expresses both fatherhood and motherhood in rather non-traditional roles.
Pleased to see Cyteen get a mention. In a similar vein, Ender’s Game revolves around an… interesting approach to child-rearing.
One series that has parents and child rearing starts with The Rowan by Anne McCaffrey. The next book Damia is about her daughter, and the rest in the series are about Damia with her children.
The Liaden series by Sharon Lee and Steven Miller have several parts about planing for babies, and protecting the children, and continuing the family line.
I just thought of more books. Darwin’s Radio and Darwin’s Children by Greg Bear. A virus is attacking pregnant women and deforming their children. But as the story unfolds we learn that it may not be a disease but more like rapid evolution. A virus is attacking pregnant women and deforming their children. But as the story unfolds we learn that it may not be a disease but more like rapid evolution. The first book has woman trying to figure it out before she gives birth. The second book has some of these new human children and their parents as main characters.
Does Game of Thrones count? I distinctly remember at least three pregnancies and any number of children in one state or another.
@1, I agree. Saga by Brian K. Vaughan is one of the best things ever.
Calling on Dragons came to mind for me, too, though the queen’s pregnancy is too new to give her much trouble during the quest.
A Song of Ice and Fire definitely involves pregnancies and births, including at least one by a POV character, and much talk of baby care.
Say, whatever happened to Lyanna Stark anyway…
Pregnancy is mundane. Escapism is the point of fiction.
Great answers from everyone. I was pleased to identify Cordelia right off the bat from the post’s image! And, yes, Honor. And all of Octavia Butler’s books/short stories.
And, Ursula LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness – how’s that for pregnancy? And child-rearing?
Not to mention – and I really thought someone else would – Dark Tower series #5, 6, & 7. Or do y’all not consider that Fantasy? (a genuine question, not really snarky!)
@33, I just about snorted my drink, comparing Ramses & Miles – brilliant!
Zenna Henderson’s novels about The People focus on teachers, parents and children.
S. L. Veihl’s main character, Cherijo has a child and still considers herself a mother after a change in personality.
Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series has several stories of pregnancy, childbirth and children.
One of the main characters of Kate Elliott’s _Black Wolves_ becomes pregnant in the middle of the book and her pregnancy is important to the plot. I wish I *could* spoil how that turns out, but sadly she hasn’t written the sequel yet.
Come to think of it, pregnancies, and later childrearing, are also important in her previous series in the same universe, _Crossroads_ (I think the pregnancy might not start until the second book though).
And one main character’s relationship with her children is a VERY major (and very spoilery) part of Jemisin’s _Fifth Season_, _Obelisk Gate_ and _Stone Sky_. (The children have already been born when the story “begins” but there are numerous flashbacks, I don’t recall how prominent pregnancy is in them.)
Explaining why so many female authors show up in this thread is left as an exercise for the reader.
Laura Resnick’s Silerian trilogy. The pregnancies of two of the main characters play a major role in how things turn out. Also, the cultural attitudes towards pregnancy and mothers are responsible for some very important events in the books (to say more would be spoilers).
Considering how many books have been mentioned within less than 12 hours, I think this topic would have been worth splitting into separate posts on pregnancy and childrearing. Here are my nominations on pregnancy:
Mockingbird by Sean Stewart: The narrator decides to put pregnancy first, marriage later — so she’s trying to date while pregnant, as well as coping with inheriting her late mother’s magic powers. Funny, original, and strongly flavored by Houston, Texas.
Bones of the Moon by Jonathan Carroll: I’m surprised this hasn’t been mentioned already, I thought it was one of the most prominent books narrated by a mother. She’s on a quest in a dreamland along with her little son, who is [spoiler! If you’ve read the book you know the one], and during the story gets pregnant with another child and gives birth. Carroll’s related novels Sleeping in Flame and A Child Across the Sky also have pregnancy as a major element, but are from a man’s point of view.
“The Bellman” by John Varley: A pregnant cop is hunting a serial killer on the moon. How badass is she? She actually gives birth while chasing the killer! And catches him while carrying the infant! (This is one of the stories clawed back from The Last Dangerous Visions.)
Dune: Partially from Jessica’s point of view while pregnant.
Falcon by Emma Bull: The main character is a man and the pregnant character (Kitty) is secondary, but her pregnancy — and its physicality — very much shapes the first half of the novel. And Niki’s mother’s reproductive choices turn out to be not what Niki thought they were.
Elizabeth Bear’s Eternal Sky Trilogy.
Judith Merril, “Like A Mother”. Classic pregnancy, mutant baby atomic anxiety tale from 1948. In the Wesleyan Anthology of SF, the editors include a note that a lot of male authors griped that it was a ‘diaper story’. Obviously SF shouldn’t be about anything so mundane as the painful, dangerous passage on the way to the birth of a new life form.
Sarah Gailey River of Teeth / Taste of Marrow (US alt-history with hippos) have a kickass assassin character who is heavily pregnant, gives birth, and gets mastitis. They’re wonderful.
#57,
Thanks- I remembered the Varley story, but not the title.
There’s two that I can think of off the top of my head that haven’t been mentioned so far (there’s only so many times people can say Saga after all).
There’s Excession by Iain M Banks, which has a main character who has ‘paused’ her pregnancy while she decides if/when to have the child. Also, In one (or possibly several) of Charlie Stross’s Merchant Princes series another main character winds up pregnant, and has to deal with *plot* happening at the same time.
Plus in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque trilogy (historical fantasy counts right?) there’s quite a few pregnancies, including pregnant leaders, although queens in this case, rather than democratically elected leaders.
(I’m trying to be as vague as possible to reduce spoilers).
Plenty of women in history have managed to lead countries whilst being pregnant, although very few of them have been democratically elected.
@53/Positively: Concerning Ursula LeGuin, there’s also the scene where Tenar gives birth in The Dispossessed. It’s portrayed as hard work, but she’s in control, and she isn’t in pain. I would have liked to have a birth like that.
@60/John Holbo: Just a small correction: The title is “That Only a Mother”. As in “… that only a mother can love”.
I’m surprised that no one’s mentioned John Crowley’s Engine Summer yet, since that book turns heavily on issues of birth control.
The two that come to mid for me are Joan Slonczewski’s Daughter of Elysium, where a family from a culture that normally has huge families- to the extent that their martial arts style assumes both fighters will be carrying a small child- moves to a culture of functional immortals, where there are pretty much no other children around; and Stephanie Saulter’s Regeneration, the third of a trilogy about genetically engineered and formerly enslaved people; this volume is the one that goes into how a large population of GM people arose in the first place, how people whose genes have been modified differently for different purposes can have children together, and what it’s like to raise kids when you didn’t have a proper childhood yourself.
Thanks to #34 for reminding me of other books:
Enemy Mine by Barry B. Longyear features an alien reptile like being called a Drac who can reproduce asexually. It’s been years since I read the story, but as I remember, the human in the story ends caring for the infant when the Drac dies from the birth or some other complication.
Stephen Leigh’s two Mictland books deal with a small colony of stranded human survivors and their adaptation to an alien environment which requires them to accept a new way of producing children: Dark Water’s Embrace and Speaking Stones.
In addition to Pierce’s “Nawat”, mentioned by one of the other commenters (a novella that revolves around a new father looking after his babies in a culture different from his own), Pierce also wrote about a subject that’s related, and comes up even less: periods. I can think of three SF/F novels that talk about periods, and two of them are by Pierce.
Thinking more about Bujold’s Sharing Knife, versus Vorkosigan, it’s notable to see the difference between a story in which pregnancy is simply part of life, and therefore should be included rather than mysteriously nonexistent, versus stories where issues around pregnancy become part of the fantasy/science fiction issues at hand.
It would be odd to have a story like the Sharing Knife, which is about a newly married couple with a young wife, in a time and place where birth control is not easy, and not have pregnancy be an issue, even if (as for most of the series) no one is actually pregnant. And when the main character does get pregnant, it isn’t really a crisis, just something that she is both excited about but really saw as inevitable at some point.
Yet a lot of fantasy writing, in particular, has stories with no more medical technology or birth control available than the Sharing Knife, or even less, yet somehow no one ever winds up pregnant unless it is going to be a major plot point.
Jack L. Chalker’s Soul Rider series has a main character pregnancy, as well as a number of non-standard gender situations.
I’m going way back in time but Andre Norton incorporated not only women of power, but the effects of sex AND pregnancy on those women in her Witch World series. That said, it is a topic that rarely rears it’s head and while a pregnancy might be an important plot point, child-rearing is usually ushered out of the room, and the door firmly shut until said child is of age to be useful to the plot once more.
Card has been mentioned disparately several times — but his stories center around childbirth and motherhood a lot, and span species as well.
Greg Bear’s Moving Mars has a fantastic little slice of that as well.
Drew Hayes includes parenthood in his books, and not in a dismissive way. In the Fred the Vampire books, there is an extremely powerful person who is also a loving and dedicated father of a little girl. The Super Powereds series is about a group of college students, but we get to see some POV of their parents facing the challenges of raising them and also flashbacks to when they were younger.
The Broken Earth series by N K Jemisin is largely about motherhood, too, of course.
David Hair’s “The Moontide Quartet” uses pregnancy as a major plot device, and includes the rearing of (some of) the children as well. He also include gay characters in a setting that does not approve of them at all, and was the first author that came to mind when I read the name of the article. If you like epic fantasy that reads like a cross between G R R Martin and Steven Erikson, with more than a dash of historical religious conflicts, but still very much it’s own thing, try it out.
The Liaden books and stories by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller are full of stories about children and how they are raised. They even have a novel “Necessity’s Child” where the primary characters are children.
In Search of Paradise by Benjamin Boswell is about an alien with an infant child, stranded on Earth.
Unquenchable Fire Rachel Pollack.
Elizabeth Bonesteele’s Remnants of Trust includes a very pregnant ship’s captain and her focus on raising her children on her ship, much to another ship captain’s horror from Earth who needs her help to save a colony planet. A miscarriage also forms a central issue.
I’m a little disappointed. Dr. Bourke specifically said:
and the response is a list of books that largely ignore the question, instead listing “oh well someone got pregnant/has children in this book” without talking about the above for even one minute.
Jody Lynn Nye’s Taylor’s Ark series.
There were several main characters in the “Dragon riders of Pern” that were pregnant or has small children during the series. Also along about book 12 in the Kris Longknife series she ends up leading her space navy in the defense of a planet while she is pregnant. Plus there are several short stories which involve her young children.
@79: well, N.K. Jemisin’s “Broken Earth” series was mentioned. It’s true that the personal relationships of the protagonist and her children are important, but it turns out that society’s claim to and treatment of all the orogenes’ children is equally important. Literally earth-shattering, in fact.
For child-stealing on a less earth-shaking scale, there’s Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (whether or not one calls it Science Fiction) where again childbearing is considered a matter for the state (that is, high-ranking men) to control for its own benefit. Does any deviation from privatized reproduction lead to a misogynist dystopia? Can’t we have some collective interest in the raising of healthy children without infringing on women’s autonomy?
And we’ve mentioned The Left Hand of Darkness with its gender issues. But there’s also Le Guin’s “ambiguous utopia” of Anarres in The Dispossessed, where children are raised in collectives by both men and women. Because men and women are considered equally capable, or because men and women are considered so different that the proper anarchic-communist will insist on balancing every kind of labor force with both? And are the children any better off?
Death by childbirth, as a background occurrence, is relatively rare in the fantasy I’ve read. Oh, it very often happens or almost-happens to a central character’s mother or wife/lover, and sometimes to said character. But A Song of Ice and Fire is the only setting which really conveyed to me how common and constant a threat it is, as it happens to a lot of named/mentioned women (at least 21, by my count in a Wiki search), in events both important and relatively unimportant to the major plots. Their saying that “A woman’s war is in the birthing bed” is used by misogynists in opposition to individual female warriors, but setting-wide it’s accurate.
The Gate to Women’s Country by Sheri S Tepper – deals with the right to bodily autonomy, contraception as well as pregnancy & child rearing.
Anne McCaffrey examined these concepts in several different works, I recall a short story in which a succession of young men have been impregnated by an alien woman. In another short story a woman in a plural marriage is in the throes of labour.
I don’t think anyone has mentioned these yet but Daughter, Servant & Mistress of the Empire by Janny Wurts & Raymond E Feist. Mara must have a child to continue on her family name and to a degree it drives part of the plot.
It’s a really interesting post and given me lots of new to me books to add to the to be read list.
Thanks!
The heroine of Marguerite Reed’s debut Archangel is not only a kick-ass planetary guardian, but is also a single mother, and her relationship with her small daughter provides some of the book’s most beautiful moments.
The Eyes of Heisenberg by Frank Herbert is all about pregnancy, although no one has any babies that I recall.
Holly Lisle’s Arhel trilogy deals with a pregnant protagonist who actually has the child and adventures with it, IIRC.
Melanie Rawn’s Dragon Prince/Dragon Star series big on bloodlines, the getting and having of children along with other politicking.
Phillis Ann Karr’s Frostflower and Thorn duology is all about pregnancy and actually gets into details about the pregnancy and lactation, then later the having of the child.
Off the top of my head, I can also think of:
Kate Elliott’s Crossroads series (Mai)
Glenda Larke’s Waterlords series (Ryka), Isles of Glory series (Flame) and Mirage Makers series (Ligea)
Fiona McIntosh’s Percheron series (Ana)
@79 With all we can imagine in SF, some things are hard for us to imagine, and more’s the pity.
Pregnancy, birth, miscarriage, parenting from infancy on up: the Saga comics. Let me add that these important events are depicted from both parents’ points of view. Saga is one of the greatest contemporary sci fi works around. Check it out. You’ll love it. Oh yes, the narrator is the baby in question. So cool.
The Kris Longknife book, Unrelenting, by Mark Shephard, has a very amusing look at the problem of 72 women, who are active space navy, get pregnant do to sabotage to their birth control devices.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capitol series has a major male protagonist who does most of the child-rearing. This forms a substantial part of the plot.
Something older is Richard Cowper’s Twilight of Briareus, which is one of those books about everybody becoming sterile, and in the end someone does get pregnant.
Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamourist Histories; the main character and her husband deal with her pregnancy in the fifth and final book.
Don’t forget the memorable scene in Star Trek: The Next Generation where Lieutenant Worf midwifed the birth of Keiko
[Worf is assisting Keiko in the delivery of her baby]
Lieutenant Worf: I must urge you gently but firmly to push harder.
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Lieutenant Worf: Congratulations. You are fully dilated to ten centimeters. You may now give birth.
Keiko O’Brien: [groans] That’s what I’ve been doing.
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Lieutenant Worf: My computer simulation was not like this. That delivery was very orderly.
Keiko O’Brien: Well, I’m sorry!
Definitely dealt with in one of the later books of Elizabeth Haydon’s The Symphony of Ages. Hadn’t thought about that series in awhile, might be a time for a re-read.
I read Tamora Pierce early and assumed therefore that it was a standard trope to have magical amulets as reliable birth control. (I was genuinely surprised to discover that gamers I shared an RPG with did not consider this a standard trope, and that the idea of reliable birth control was actually threatening/confusing enough that they felt it broke reality.
(this was, I might mention, a Harry Potter RPG, not one set in the Middle Ages. You will not be surprised to learn that JK Rowling said nothing about birth control.
I would add Glenda Larke’s magnificent Watergivers trilogy here, which features a woman giving birth and then joining a battle afterwards, something I would not have considered realistic after my first childbirth, but COMPLETELY PLAUSIBLE after my second. (Experiences vary)
I remember appreciating that Star Trek DS9 included an ongoing storyline concerning childcare affecting career and duty, and how this affected O’Brien and Keiko VERY differently. It was often dealt with in frustrating ways (Keiko being turned into a school teacher because it was convenient to the plot) but that frustration was ultimately voiced and addressed by characters in the show.
@30 It’s really odd to describe Patricia in My Real Children as lesbian. Even if she hadn’t chosen to have sex with a man in the grimmer future, the equal realness of all her potentials is an important point.
@5: Contraception is mentioned several times in the Liavek stories (1980’s); the blue flower even appears in a title (Ford’s “A Cup of Worrynot Tea”). One of the collective (according to what they told me decades later) had insisted during the worldbuilding phase that there be a contraceptive. Ford’s unfinished last novel carried this further: most girls are taught contraceptive magic by the time it’s relevant. (This is not a major plot point, just his way of answering why there’s heterosex with no consequences.)
The main character in Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil is pregnant through most of the book, but not (ISTM) particularly realistically — RAH had no children, which may have contributed to unrealism.
Speaking of RAH, in Podkayne of Mars he goes into some detail about the Marsmen’s method of family creation. It involves applying to a Population, Ecology and Genetics board for the desired number of children and cryogenically keeping the babies on ice until it’s convenient to raise them.
Son of the Shadows by Juliet Marillier contains a pregnancy and subsequent child-rearing. It is historical fantasy so there is an expectation that the child is primarily raised by his mother. However, she bucks some expectations by raising the child herself rather than outsourcing his care and has assistance from her “village” including the men.
The Witches of Eileanan series by Kate Forsyth features another character who bucks societal expectations. She leaves her children in the care of others while she is off fighting a war and later takes them with her and her husband on campaign.
In Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett, Magrat takes her newborn (and a sufficient quantity of diapers) along on a quest.
Does Urban Fantasy count? If so, several of JR Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood books — particularly later on in the series — revolve around pregnancy and parenthood.
I will confess the extent of this comment thread is fairly daunting, so I hope you will excuse me if I leave you to talk among yourselves. (I wasn’t around the internet the day this column went live, and I returned to 70+ comments, and, well. Meep.)
@96 – Given that Hogwarts is a school full of adolescents, living with minimal supervision, I assumed that there must be something in the water to provide birth control, or that the girls learned the appropriate spells, which we don’t see because we’re caught in Harry’s POV. Because there is a lot of unsupervised dating, and absolutely no teenage pregnancies that we know of. I don’t see how the presence of birth control would change the story at all, but the absence would lead to a very, very different story.
If so, though it’s more PNR than Urban Fantasy, then Nalini Singh’s excellent Psy-Changling series treats children as a pack matter – everyone is involved in taking care of and guarding the kids, including the alpha. And her depiction of childhood is pretty spot on too, especially toddlers.
I was mulling this over yesterday, and it finally occurred to me that the only books that I can think of that do this with any regularity are middle grade sff. Which still isn’t really what you mean, because the perspective being given is of the child, and pregnancy is rarely discussed.
But because the protagonists are children, these books are much more likely to discuss the logistics of how children are raised.
There are, of course, the dystopian novels like The Giver, which discuss it in terms of social control yes. But middle grade dystopias like The Giver also delve into the topic in much more detail – it IS the story, rather than merely a feature of it, like in A Brave New World.
as for non-dystopian novels though, while most do assume a standard similar to what children are familiar with, the children in the stories are much more likely to be thrust into situations where they aren’t being cared for by two opposite gendered parents. From James and the Giant Peach to The School for Good and Evil, children are often being cared for by a wider variety of people, and this fact has a profound effect on the story.
what’s missing though, since these are from the point of view of older children, is the reasoning behind adults’ choices, the toll those choices and work takes in them, and usually any real acknowledgement of early childhood and pregnancy.
to ajay waaay back at 18:
<I>I mean, yes, science fiction, probably true in most cases (there are some exceptions which others have already noted), but fantasy? The genre with all those plots about long-lost heirs and dynastic marriages and bastard children and orphans and illicit affairs?</I>
Lots of plots about having had kids, very few about what child-rearing actually means. It’s actually disturbing to me, and was even before I had kids, how many of those stories are about “this child was given away and raised by strangers/fairies/etc., we’ve never held them or dealt with them as infants or children at all, but now they’re here saying they’re ours”. Or we see the kids as they’re being raised by their parents only in the very last stages before their adulthood. For a genre where the future children are dynastically important, pregnancy and child-rearing is virtually never explored except to skip over it and say “Well, it happened.” (Which sometimes is fine. Sometimes the story does start later. But sometimes feels like the result of writers who never had to worry about pregnancy in themselves, (due to gender or birth control), and/or don’t have/want kids themselves at least at time of writing, and/or are men who lived in a time when the bulk of child-rearing was done by the mother.
(Worse when we’re supposed to assume the parents *love* this child they’ve never seen and might not have even known about, as per Sleepy Hollow. In Sleepy Hollow “Family trumps everything” is used as a trope when neither parent touched the infant past childbirth and for 200 odd years.)
@@@@@ Ursula 104:
My favourite Harry Potter fanfic had two teachers get married and have to consider the logistics of how to get pregnant, and whether it would be an issue, because the castle itself was essentially permeated with the magic that stopped pregnancy, rather than it being entirely a focused spell kids would have to learn and use. (A building able to produce something like the Room of Requirement and staircases that differentiate by gender could definitely have such an effect.)
Phyllis Gotlieb’s last novel Birthstones (2007) is space opera concerning an intelligent species who suffer, thanks to destructive colonial exploitation of their planet’s mineral and fossil resources, from a terrible sexual dimorphism that gives them fertility problems but more importantly has all but mutated sentience out of the female half of their species. Not all of Gotlieb’s aliens are two-sexed, or even sexed at all, but for relatively obvious narrative reasons the Shar are. Their society has reorganized itself to be violently misogynist, mythologically centered around the othering and demonizing of women—including of other species—even while much of their economy is devoted to the maintenance of these mindless lumps of genetically valuable flesh. Breaking with generations of tradition, the young emperor of the Shar determines to go offplanet, to ask for help (if he can find allies without being further exploited) and attempt a rapprochement with the Meshar (a cousin species with sentient women, potentally interfertile), and of course a lot of men on his world want to stop him, the Meshar are not thrilled about being viewed first and foremost as breeding stock, and it’s not so clear that it would benefit the Galactic Federation to have a planet full of stable, egalitarian Shar rather than their current state of easily manipulable misery. It’s a short novel and I would have to re-read it to be sure that it has all its implications lined up right, but it does a lot of explicit linking of misogyny with colonialism and capitalism; the lost Edenic state to which Aesh dreams of returning his people is a very old painting he saw once of mothers and fathers together caring for their children, playing and nurturing under a sun not yet smogged out of the sky. It’s also important to me that if Aesh is a kind of fisher king of his wounded world, his healing involves not just learning to recognize women as individuals and people rather than some confused ideal of motherhood, but accepting love—from another man who loves him and wants to raise a child with him. The danger of a novel so focused on reproduction is that it will be totally, unthinkingly straight; Birthstones isn’t.
Irissa, the female main character in my Sword and Circlet fantasy series, becomes pregnant in the third of five books, Keepers of Edanvant, and that fact goes on to provide the roiling plot of Heir of Rengarth, published in 1987 and 1988. I’d never seen a pregnant magic-wielding action heroine in the fantasy fiction I’d read. The pregnancy effects her use of magic and threatens certain characters. The last book, Seven of Swords (1989) deals with Kendric and Irissa’s daughter and son as children with, and without, a magical heritage as they go on their own family quest .
In my 2007-11 Delilah Street Urban Fantasy series, young women’s coming into fertility, menstruation and pain and how that can be used and abused by society to control women is a key factor in the action heroine’s past. Some female reviewers commented that it was “icky”.
@52 — Then again, there are people who can’t have any and consider a nice having kids plot to *be* escapism.
I’m surprised no one has referenced Sheri Tepper. Her Mavin the Manyshaped novels talk about pregnancy (both Mavin’s sister’s and her own). The Jinian books talk about intent, adoption, and motherhood. Jinian’s affection for her love is restrained by her need not to create problems with spell-casting during pregnancy. Her Marianne character is pregnant in the third book of that series. Also, Gate to Women’s Country is all about genetic selection and selective parenting. And I’m sure I’m missing other Tepper references.
I come to SF because I’m interested in the wider world and the wider universe. I don’t do kids, and my world doesn’t revolve around them.
That’s why I’ve always loved SF. There I can find child-free women who are presidents, chief engineers, starship captains. These are the sort of women I want to read about. Give me Ky Vatta any day.
Unless I missed something, we missed one of the most obvious examples of books fitting the theme: Donaldson’s Gap Series. The whole series centers around the unplanned and tragic pregnancy of the main character and the highly unconventional circumstances of the ensuing birth. Powerful, painful stuff.
Judith Tarr’s Hound & Falcon series has the main female character dealing with pregnancy, childbirth & newborns in the last book. One of the major points during the pregnancy was that the mother, a shape shifter, couldn’t shift without risking the fetuses.
Another of Tarr’s series set in the same world (Alamut) had both pregnancy and dealing with the physical and mental aftermaths of childbirth as a strong theme for the main human character.
Jay Lake’s trilogy that starts with the novel “Green” has a protagonist who has babies through the course of her story. I will admit that I wasn’t fond enough of the first book to proceed with the second and third volumes, but we talked about them as he wrote them so I know that babies are there.
I think one poster mentioned it in passing, but Robert Jordan’s ‘Wheel of Time series.
You have Elayne getting pregnant and has to deal with trying to rule a fractured country and deal with the end of the world, while having all these women try to tell her what she should and shouldn’t be doing and what she can and can’t eat.
I love how all these powerful women are trying to impose all the pregnancy advice on her and then she gets a real midwife who’s like, that’s ridiculous. You need to walk around and eat different foods, just no caffenie or going into battle. Which I think is pretty standard advice from even a modern day doctor. It’s great, but she has to deal wtih a lot of issues because of her pregnancy.
I’m surprised as big of a series as that is, that no has mentioned it before now.
No one has mentioned Operation Chaos (1971) and it’s sequel Operation Luna (1999) by Paul Anderson, which feature a witch and a werewolf who eventually get married and have a child. The witch has to retrain in her magic as she will no longer be a virgin, they have to arrange care for the baby when workin, and face other problems related to pregnancy, birth, and child rearing that include a literal trip to Hell. By the second book, they have three children. Older but a great read.
Pamela Dean’s “The Dubious Hills” has a pregnant secondary character and the book as a whole focuses on what child rearing, both in individual family units and the wider community, looks like in a magical setting.
Robin Mckinley has a couple books where babies play a role(mainly her fairy tale retellings) : “Spindles End” where the baby grows into the main character. Even afterwards babies remain a central theme throughout the book as various family members and neighbours become pregnant. It has a particularly amusing twist on what the terrible twos look like when the two year old in question has magic.
Pregnancy and babies are also present in “Beauty” and on a darker note “Deerskin”.
The Green Series by Jay Lake. Not the first book so much but the next two are all about the main character becoming a mother and all the fears and strangeness that comes with that. There is some short shrift when comes to the actual raising of the children for a mixture of plot reasons and the unfortunate decline of the authors health.
Someone else mentioned Tanya Huff’s Sing the Four Quarters which was one of the first time this area of storytelling was brought t my attention really. I’d always known adventures could happen to pregnant people but it never occurred to me someone might write about it.
Funnily enough I think Catlyen Stark doesn’t get enough credit, even if she makes poor choices all she cared about was her kids. Being a mum is tough in any world, especially one where your kid becomes a king and everyone wants to kill him.
Saga is wonderful.
I’ve found myself writing what is swiftly becoming a novel length piece of writing, if maybe not a novel, about a woman in a fantasy setting who ends up becoming a mother of twins and really finds her whole world turned over. She just kind of walked into my head one day while playing D&D and then all of a sudden her life fell apart and she had these kids and the story seems to be about her figuring out how to remain herself, while also being a parent. Something that is hard enough in our world let alone one where you might be a sword wielding hero type. I have no idea why I started writing it and I don’t know if it will actually become anything of worth but I can’t seem to stop working on it. If I finish it and it’s any good, maybe there will be one more fantasy story about motherhood and child rearing out there.
Interestingly enough, pregnancy and child-rearing are very common themes in fan fictions, many of which are based off science fiction or fantasy works.
This seems to be particularly true in regards to “male-pregnancy” stories. Maybe it’s due to how many ladies like to imagine (whether writing or reading) how the “stronger” sex would cope with the minutia of child bearing and rearing, as well as a reversal of an expected sex role as one male takes a “submissive” position. I know I often get a kick out of the good ones I come across, I can just imagine how much more an extremely pregnant woman or overworked and frustrated mother might enjoy them. (Imagine Severus Snape, coping with a small child or *Merlin forbid* pregnant – doesn’t the whole idea make you want to laugh?
) Not sure how the male half of the population views them
Perhaps writers and publishers should take note of this trend as it does seem to indicate that a viable audience exists for works that incorporate these themes more realistically (or unrealistically, as the case may be).
It’s a popular trope in M/M fiction too, unfortunately.
No one has mentioned Jay Lake’s Green trilogy–as I recall the heroine gets pregnant, has children, and travels with them.
@113 I don’t think anyone here has any intention of taking that away from you? It’s nice to have a variety of things for a variety of tastes, and venues in which to discuss them. :)
It seems this isn’t something exclusive to SFF
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/feb/22/why-does-literature-ignore-pregnancy
I completely blitzed Dune Messiah in which Chani is pregnant with the twins and how she has to keep consuming more and more spice to keep them healthy against Irulan’s poisons.
@108,
A building that acted as a birth control device would be very useful in a coed boarding school. Considering that student-teacher sex is in a problem in coed muggle boarding schools, the birth control effect would certainly extend to teachers ;)
@13,
Biology does lock men out of childbirth and pregnancy, but not child rearing. How men cope with the latter varies from, essentially, being nothing but sperm donors to being primary care givers. I’ve known men at both ends of the spectrum.
@128
You would think that speculative fiction would find that the easiest thing to overcome. A pregnant (cis) man ought to be easier to achieve in fiction than space elevators, teleporters, reactionless drives, antigravity, and quantum space sodomisers, yet we managed all the others in SFF works quite regularly. Where are the stories about pregnant men, sharing and equalising the child rearing roles? Not even Star Trek has managed that (outside of my Bashir/Everyone fanfic folder), and it is supposed to be super progressive. Hell, the state of science right now pitches the prospect within the next 20 years; that is closer even than the possibility of a permanent Mars settlement.
There are stories, using genetic engineering, of people transforming to suit extraterrestrial environments, gene therapy for cosmetic reasons, and all sorts of other things. If all that can be achieved, why does biology lock (cis) men out of the loop, why should it? Other than the fear male authors might have of the prospect, of course.
@129,
One would also think that a pregnant male or female would not be going on any voluntary adventures and since most non-dystopian sf gives humans more autonomy in when they become pregnant, one would expect the pregnant humans would be at home or in nice, safe office jobs, not off looking for adventure.
A couple of sf/f stories have had major characters who were refugees or civilians in a war zone. I believe Lois McMaster Bujold had at least one of her Barrayar/vorKosigan books in that category, and I think Charlie Stross also had a couple.
I suspect that, for cultural reasons, few Americans would think of writing stories where the main characters are at the wrong end of collateral damage. This is one of many reasons that we need more diverse voices in sf/f; somebody from one of those target areas would have a very different perspective than somebody for whom war is something that happens over there to people that don’t look like them.
@130 This is where we need Speculative Fiction, to give pregnant people more autonomy WHILST pregnant. We think of reducing autonomy DURING pregnancy as being normal, to confine to bedroom or office the pregnany.
There’s a difference between embarking on a dangerous mission or quest while pregnant, undesirable but sometimes unavoidable, and normal activity and exercise no?
Other than the fact that cis men don’t have the equipment to actually carry children, there is a whole genre which actually features such men in those roles. It is, however, in such a niche market that it gets overlooked – it’s not just slash fanfiction, but part of the larger M/M market:
Mpreg Romance
M/M Romance with Mpreg Plot
I don’t read it because for me there is a level of ick involved, but it does exist in a market that actually isn’t affraid to push the more traditional boundaries that seems to encompass SF/F, especially when it comes to traditional publishers and what they think will actually sell.
@131,
“More autonomy” implies choices. While there are people who go and do potentially dangerous things while pregnant, like field scientists, most are doing so because they don’t have a choice. I suspect many readers who ran across a protagonist who deliberately and voluntarily embarked on a dangerous adventure would say “what they hell was he/she thinking?” Of course, the writer could show that there was no real choice, even if at first glance there seemed to be one.
@134
Well, see that is one of the midsets SFF ought to be challenging. That pregnant people must suddenly become like glass, a vessel only to protect the foetus. That stripping of autonomy and reducing a person to the status of womb only. “What were they thinking”, no, what are you thinking (reader)?
@135,
I’m thinking that you and I have different definitions of “autonomy.” I know that pregnant women aren’t made of glass; my wife was an ICU nurse, pushing beds full of 600 lb patients being readied for baryatric surgery. She did not have the autonomy to refuse, even though there was a real, and significant, risk of injury, including miscarriage. The pregnant women I’ve known would not have gone on an inconvenient, risky adventure unless forced to do so. Maybe if my social circle still included people with highly dangerous jobs, the women in those fields may have told me a different story.
In non-dystopian societies, people have more autonomy, including while they are pregnant, than they do in many contemporary societies; indeed, in some of the more civilized contemporary societies, long periods of maternal and paternal leave are given to permit that autonomy.
Most of the main characters of sf/f novels and stories have considerable autonomy: they’re gentry, or high-ranking military officers, or wealthy. Those people can chose the timing for their adventures.
@135, I think it’s safe to assume most pregnant people want to keep their pregnancy. How delicate they are varies according to age, health, etc. Some women have to be very, very careful. Others don’t.
@136/swampyankee: A pregnant person could still go on a journey or have an adventure that’s supposed to be reasonably safe and then (because it’s a story) unexpectedly becomes dangerous.
@137/Roxana: In the future, they probably have to be less careful on average due to technological advances in healthcare.
@138,
But going on a routine trip that goes south wouldn’t really be voluntary. It isn’t an unprecedented trope, even for male protagonists, but one can use it to make a great story. Witness Ishmael (although early 19th Century whaling may have been more dangerous than, say, serving in the US Army, so he shouldn’t have been too surprised that there would be fellow crew members dying)
The Accidental Turn series by J.M. Frey is a meta-fantasy narrative, with characters that know that they are in a work of fiction but as the series progresses it also explores what it looks like to have a family with a small child and still go on adventures and be active members of society!
have you ready any of jmfrey.net ?! Her Accidtental Turn series is about just that
Juliette Wade’s “The persistence of blood“ novella just came out recently. It deals with some topics surrounding motherhood and family and the price paid for healthy offspring. Her Varin world encompasses gay, trans and other types of relationships.
Heinlein’s Friday: Her need for family drives the plot. Her pregnancy drives the end-plot.
Asimov’s The Ugly Little Boy
Bujold’s Ethan of Athos: On woman-free Athos, child care is paid labor. “No economy can afford that much child care for that many children!”
Aral Vorkosigan spent an hour a day with Miles. Pitor taught him to ride.
Meanwhile, in the backcountry, mothers slit their mutant-children’s throats.
And on a similar note: The Grimm Brother’s Hansel and Gretel. That stuff really happened.
In his day Marie Antoine Carême was a celebrity chief for the stars. He got his start when he was twelve. There wasn’t enough food to feed the family. So Pappa drove him into Paris—with the French Revolution raging—wished him luck, and left.
@143/Fernhunter- I was reading all the comments, thinking “surely *somone* will mention Friday” and there it is in the last comment. :)
Someone’s already mentioned it, but if you want an example of how child rearing *could* be: Brave New World.
A very traditional example, though it actually deals with pregnancy instead of just referring to it, is in Eddings’ Mallerean sequence. The first book deals with the challenges of getting pregnant, as well as some of the trials (for both husband and wife) once you manage to combine DNA.
Serena Butler and her infant son in The Butlerian Jihad.
Not the best writing, but underneath a pretty good story, in this particular volume at any rate.
@143, @144,
Robert Heinlein’s Friday has my vote for the best opening sentence ever.
@148/Keleborn- It’s a good opening line, but it only works as well as it does because of the third sentence. :)
@149/WillMayBeWise,
I hope I’m not misremembering the 3rd sentence as being the 1st sentence. I considered quoting it but decided that in this case even giving the first sentence (or as it seems now, the third sentence) of this novel would be a spoiler.
Well, we’ve probably got other people at least a bit intrigued by now. I think I myself am going to have to head for the library to find a copy.
@150/Keleborn – good luck!
I’m late to the party, but I have a few enthusiastic recommendations.
Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
One of my favorite aspects of this delightful series is the revelation of the varied child bearing / rearing and family structures across alien species. Some presume mammalian-analogs and some avian-analogs with very different results.
Woman at the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy – discovered in the Women’s Center at college, the first feminist science fiction I ever read, rocked my world. Envisions alternative universes; one dystopian one utopian. The utopia included mandatory usage of external germination and uterine replicator. The traveller from our world grieved at the loss of her concept of motherhood, but was assured that this was a lynchpin of gender equity. Child rearing was done in small multigenerational parental groups that were not defined by romantic pairings. Caregivers outnumbered kids in a family unit so that each parent could take turns getting time for themselves and their own interests and relationships.
A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski
The is a sweeping 4 book series that spans centuries and planets but is remarkably cohesive. Philosophies on genetic engineering /conception and child rearing across different offshoots of human culture are intertwined with each society’s view of their place in the ecosystem.
Planetfall by Emma Newman
The 3 books in this series so far include several different perspectives on the separation of mother from child in space exploration. It acknowledges the harsh judgment of society when this separation is voluntary on behalf of a female explorer.
While thinking about this, I’ve had another novel in mind. This was written by (I think) Asimov or Clarke. It features a father and daughter separated by a long-haul mission to another star system. The book switches back and forth between two storylines, one over decades (the long haul mission) and the other over a couple of years (the invention of FTL and the attempt to catch up with the long haul mission). One followed the daughter and the other followed the father, but I can’t remember which was which.
The point of this is that I’d like to read it again, as I can’t remember what the relationship with the mother was in this. Can anyone help?
I’m writing a fantasy novel, and a big part of it is the relationship between the MC a young exiled prince and a girl, though only just meeting, their relationship deepens after a fertility festival in a local village where they sleep together. It’s later discovered that she is pregnant. While a great deal of the series is about the ascension to the throne for the MC its also about family with court intrigue and assassination attempts etc…
Liadan is pregnant for much of Son of the Shadows by Juliet Marillier. It’s a key part of the plot.