At the 2023 Eurocon, in the summer heat of Sweden, I joined some really smart folks on a panel about families of the future. When Alex was putting together the line up of writers for the first year of this journal, she asked me if I wanted to elaborate on the topic in a written format. And yes, I absolutely did because it feels like all the fiction that I write somehow always comes back to that; family and all the forms that it takes. Even if it's not central to what I write, to me, fundamentally what makes us human is the other people around us. And part of that is also who we choose to keep around us and who we want to call family.
In this essay I want to explore family in science fiction through the lenses of Octavia Butler, Charlie Jane Anders, Starhawk, John Scalzi, and Martha Wells. Be forewarned that there are spoilers for the following books: the Xenogenesis series by Octavia Butler, Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders, The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk, The Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi (specifically, Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades, The Sagan Diary, The Last Colony, and Zoe’s Tale), and the Murderbot series by Martha Wells. These books all have a very different view as to what family means and also, in some ways, a really similar one.
Scalzi's Old Man's War series presents a somewhat conventional view of a family; a man, a woman, and their offspring. Said offspring is adopted from a dead man, and the woman is the clone of the man’s dead first wife, but it still looks very much like what is currently thought of as a conventional family. All that’s missing is the second child and a golden retriever.
Octavia Butler and Starhawk, on the other hand, explore what families might look like with multiple adults and their offspring. In Butler’s Xenogenesis, families always consist of two humans (female and male), and three Oankali aliens – a female, a male, and an ooloi, a third gender and necessary part of the Oankali reproductive cycle, which the humans are also forced into. Starhawk, on the other hand, abandons all structures, and imagines an interesting utopian/dystopian future where in some places, the people live mostly in happy, hippy polycules [1] of their own choosing, and some places are still dealing with authoritarian nightmares and the associated forced monogamy.
Lest we forget the found families, we have Charlie Jane Anders, whose Victories Greater Than Death sees a group of human teenagers recruited onto an alien spaceship, where they promptly band together against some terrifying villains and become family for each other, having abandoned the families they’ve left behind on Earth. And last, but definitely not least, Martha Wells’ Murderbot series follows a technically malfunctioning Sec Unit forming itself a family out of humans that treat it like a person due to their own biases, those humans’ own families, as well as a ship that it’s not ready to admit it loves. (It’s all very complicated and full of human emotions and sometimes, one may feel the need to go stare at a wall for a while to deal with all of the things that need to be dealt with. Or to push them to the side. Either works.)
Obviously, this is hardly a comprehensive list of books or authors that have dealt in families, and for example, sibling relationships are entirely missing from this exploration, but these are books that had an effect on my thinking about family in science fiction. And where better to start than with the trope of found families?
The blood of the covenant
One of my bigger pet peeves is sayings that are being used to suggest the complete opposite of their actual meaning. Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is impossible by definition. I'm sure more or less everyone's heard "Blood is thicker than water", but how many know that the full saying is "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb"?[2] There's something to say for the people that you choose to have in your life, the people who choose you with all your quirks and issues to be in their lives. Certainly science fiction writers from Robert A. Heinlein to Octavia Butler to Starhawk to Charlie Jane Anders have spilled a lot of ink over the various aspects of chosen family. And for good reason. Making our own families is part of the process of growing up, and unsurprisingly there's a significant amount of literature of all kinds dedicated to that experience, whatever age it happens in.
The most common type of chosen family in most fiction is the romantic partner type, with optional kids. The most common of those, of course, being a one man and one woman type of relationship, like in Old Man's War. It's so common that it's almost considered a plot twist if that doesn't happen. Often there's extra plot points involved in trying to get there. In Scalzi's Old Man's War, the very existence of Jane Sagan is a plot point all to itself. John Perry, the protagonist, said goodbye to his wife, Kathy Perry, years earlier, when she died before her tour of duty with the Colonial Union could ever begin. So when, in the moment of his almost-death, he sees a green version of her, he is deservedly confused, but also certain that his dead wife has come to take him to the Great Beyond. Turns out, Kathy Perry provided her likeness and a significant chunk of her DNA to Jane Sagan, a Special Forces soldier, who is all of six years old when the two of them meet. Technically, the two of them have two meet-cutes; one where Perry is almost dead, and the other where Jane beats the snot out of him. But for all that, theirs is a very conventional romance. I could almost replace it with mine and my partner’s; met at work, had a little difficulty getting started, but eventually became close and lived happily ever after. Me and my partner have yet to overthrow a borderline-fascistic system, but we’re still young.
Moving on to the less conventional romances, Starhawk's family structures in The Fifth Sacred Thing are interesting because they are chaotic. There are the happy polycules containing multiple genders, with and without kids. Men-only and women-only families, sometimes families with one couple and their kids. There's also one woman and her hareem of men. And all of the families are built upon everyone's consent to stay in that situation, to some extent including the children. This is in stark contrast to the dystopian Stewards and their society of strict rules enforced on everyone, regardless of their consent. There's a certain familiarity, at least to me, in Starhawk's imagined future. That could be because there are so many polyamorists in my circle, as well as a lot of people who find consent really important. Starhawk's imagined future is also one that I, personally, find really plausible for humanity. Having multiple adults in a household, whether that be multiple generations or many adults of the same age has, after all, been the primary mode of humanity for millennia. The ‘two adults and two and a half kids and a picket fence’ is super recent as a way of living, and especially since the pandemic, it doesn't seem like it's working for anyone. In this economy, who can even afford it?
Butler's Xenogenesis goes another way entirely. Pretty much the entirety of Butler's body of work is about examining hierarchies, and a significant point of the Xenogenesis series is about examining the ways that hierarchical thinking has led and is leading to the downfall of the human race. The interesting thing is that the Oankali, the aliens that come to save the dregs of humanity from a nuclear winter, fall into some of the same traps of hierarchical thinking by deciding that they know better than humans what humans need. And they take decades to discover that they are wrong. Over the course of decades, spanning the entire Xenogenesis series, the Oankali discover the ways that they have been wrong when the human-Oankali hybrids reach maturity, and manage to convince the Akjai[3] Oankali to allow an Akjai human colony on Mars. And while the Oankali treat their children with kindness, they are nevertheless treated as lesser beings who cannot yet fully advocate for themselves, let alone other people. That, to me, is an interesting contrast to Starhawk's consent-based situation. And thoughts around hierarchies are an interesting way to explore a family unit. In a way, Butler's Oankali wind up recreating a family hierarchy, just instead of the top-down view that might look familiar to current humans, it's more of a wheel-and-spoke model, with the ooloi in the middle of two pairs of different species people. The ooloi is also a necessity to make a child in Oankali society, and that includes the human-hybrid portions of Oankali society. A significant chunk of humans rescued from the blighted Earth refuse this situation, and thus form their own societies on the restored Earth. Butler winds up exploring both models of family in some very interesting ways.
While the romantic relationships many of us form are important in so many ways, there's another way that our chosen families shape us in science fiction, and that is by helping us form the people we become.
Fashioned creatures, half made up
While the Xenogenesis series explores whether we stay human when we mix with aliens, Charlie Jane Anders' Victories Greater Than Death explores the ways that drawing together keeps us human. We are, after all, a social species, and we need others around us to feel fully human. This is very much something that every single author I read for this essay seems to agree upon. In Victories Greater Than Death (and wow that is a long title when you start writing it out over and over) Tina gets called to leave Earth, as she always knew she would be, but what she did not expect was that her best friend, Rachel, would be drawn along with her – and multiple other Earth teenagers as well. Tina naturally feels protective of them, and they form their own little Earthling clique, because this is, after all, a YA novel. And ultimately, they become a little chosen family. They're all close with the alien crew they work with, but they're close with them like they would be with good colleagues. With each other, they form family bonds.
The same goes for Martha Wells' Murderbot. It is adamant about not being a human. It does not want to admit that its human parts need connection, but connections do happen, through soap operas and actual relationships with humans and other intelligent beings. Wells does a wonderful job of showing that Murderbot is deeply in need of connection with other sentient beings, that it feels like some are more sentient than others, and that it wants and needs the company of some over others. Even as the narrator itself is literally insisting that it neither wants nor needs anything of the sort, and in fact, wants and needs the complete opposite. Nowhere is this as evident as in System Collapse, which is the latest book in the series. Dr Mensa's child is on an expedition with Murderbot, and she makes sure that both Murderbot and ART, a sentient ship Murderbot met in an earlier book, talk things through in order to come to some form of resolution to an argument they're having. It's honestly kind of cute, even. But the point is that without really knowing it, Murderbot is using its chosen family as a way to explore what it means to be a person, even though it is adamantly not a human.
And, really, that brings us back to Xenogenesis. The human and the Oankali come together to make the construct children, who try to explore both sides of their heritage; the human side tends to be explored more, given that they are on Earth to make sure that the human race survives as part of the Oankali and move into the future. The very first woman to start forming the human race into their future form, Lilith, becomes the mother of the protagonists of the next books and she herself thinks about the future of humanity a lot as well as her own place and responsibility for it. She has conflicting feelings about both: she winds up going with the Oankali plan and also being mad about it. And she's not entirely alone in that. Beyond the previously mentioned resisters, Lilith’s children also have significant issues with the arrangement. Not least when the first male child born to a human gets kidnapped by the resisters, and spends a significant chunk of his first years with them, permanently losing his connection to the Oankali society in a way that leaves him cut off from his family. It is no surprise, then, that he winds up being the one to argue for the human race to have a chance on their own, without the Oankali. His book is also the one that I found myself identifying most with. The Oankali do some terrible things to the humans, because they cannot find it in themselves to see some of the harm they're doing while they're also helping. To me, personally, as someone who has never even wanted kids, the most terrifying part of the pairing with the Ooloi is that it leaves the romantic partners unable to touch each other except through the Ooloi, even non-romantically. I'm very touchy-feely with the people I love, and never being able to so much as hug someone I love without an intermediary between us sounds entirely unbearable.
As I was reading Dawn, I found myself thinking about the Romanian orphans under Ceauşescu. Without getting into the actual abuse, after abortion was banned in Romania in 1966, there was such an influx of abandoned infants that orphanage staff couldn't handle it. So even the children whose needs for sustenance and basic safety were met were hardly ever held by another human. As a result, they developed a lot of self-soothing mechanisms that were more often than not diagnosed as various forms of mental illness. Even in adult humans, touch starvation can lead to anxiety, stress, and depression. While the humans who've mated with an Ooloi can still touch the Ooloi and their children, they can't touch another adult who has mated with an Ooloi. And since the entire adult Oankali society is mated with an Ooloi, they can't touch any adult but their Ooloi. That sounds awful to me. It's an aspect that is not explored in the books beyond the initial shock, but it is the one I find myself returning to a few weeks after my last reread. Also on that note, Murderbot is obviously a person. And yet, it doesn't like to touch others unless absolutely necessary. So obviously being able to touch others is not necessary for personhood or being a member of a family. Heck, I definitely know people who are touch-averse and no less persons for it. But even so, in all of the examples that I reread for this essay, there is something in their respective families that helps the protagonists ground themselves as human. Even John Perry, when he has a meltdown because he doesn't feel human anymore, talks about being married as having an anchor, knowing where he belongs.
Tell my wife I love her very much, she knows
Science fiction is and always has been primarily a window to the present. Sure, there’s always a bunch of cool things that we don’t have now, but we could. The communicators from Star Trek providing the idea for cell phones is one of my favorite examples of that. Families in science fiction, I think, are both a window into today but also an imagining of what could be. Personally, I think that the actual likelihood is that as we move into the future, it's going to be more common for multiple generations to live together for many, many reasons, among which are both the changing economy and the scarcity of livable real-estate, especially as we start moving permanently off Earth. Forming a common purpose can be another reason for us to draw together. Also, in order to keep having children while both parents are working, we're going to need someone to be able to watch the children[4].
In the end, I think that family, as a concept, is in the process of changing right now. The abandoned queer people are coming together, single mothers tired of their husbands weaponizing incompetence forming families with their friends, and elder members of the family are moving in because elder care is getting so expensive. At this point, it seems, at least to me, pretty safe to say that the one man, one woman, and 2,5 kids and a golden retriever model of family is on its way out. We can find inspiration from fiction for what's to come or we can figure out something else, something entirely different. And I, for one, look forward to seeing both the actual future as well as the science fiction that comes out of the changes that the future brings.
Notes
[1] A group of non-monogamous people closely connected through romantic relationships ranging from simple (A is consensually dating both B and C who are not dating each other) to very complex (A is dating B and C, B is married to D, and also dating A and E, D is married to B and also dating C.)
ETA: [2] Thanks to a commenter, I checked this again and could not find evidence that this was actually the original phrasing. Wikipedia is the most concise source that I could find, but all the sources that mention that there is no actual evidence for this being the original framing do seem to agree that the two men mentioned by Wikipedia are the source of this claim. From Wikipedia: "Writing in the 1990s and 2000s, author Albert Jack[18] and Messianic Rabbi Richard Pustelniak, claim that the original meaning of the expression was that the ties between people who have made a blood covenant (or have shed blood together in battle) were stronger than ties formed by "the water of the womb", thus "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb". Neither of the authors cite any sources to support their claim." Again, thanks to the commenter who pointed out my mistake.
[3] The Oankali are a species of people who travel all of space in generationships, and when they meet other species, they persuade some of that species to grow a new ship with them and become a hybrid species that is still called Oankali. The Oankali call this trade. Usually some portion of both species is left out of the trade, and that portion is called Akjai. The Akjai Oankali from each trade go away on the ship they arrived in to find new trade elsewhere, once the trade is complete, and the new Oankali go away on the new ship they’ve grown together with the new hybrid species.
[4] And speaking of children, the other thing that I had a hard time finding in science fiction was siblings. Lots of siblings in fantasy, with the Tensorate series coming to mind first. But that is another essay. There are mentions in science fiction of siblings existing, there are parental relationships. Could not think of any sibling relationships that I wanted to return to or even get recommendations to read for the first time. That is definitely something we as writers of science fiction should fix.
Nina Niskanen writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror. She lives in Helsinki, Finland, with her partner, and her dog where she works as a computer programmer. She is passionate about space, language, textile arts, and creepy crawlies. She’s a graduate of Viable Paradise and Clarion UCSD. More at ninaniskanen.com.