To me sexual relationships have always had this weirdly science-fictional aspect about them. During my teenage years in the 1970's, I read science fiction novels which depicted sexual situations - notably Brave New World and Stranger in a Strange Land, along with novels like Asimov's The Gods Themselves and Clarke's Imperial Earth. I also saw the science fiction film Logan’s Run when it came out in theaters, with its depiction of a sexual utopia, including a hooking up technology which combines features of Tinder and Star Trek-like transporters.

Like it does for most teenage boys, to me sex sounded like an incredibly cool thing to try to experience as soon as possible, especially given how the novels I read and how at least one movie I saw portrayed it in "futuristic" settings. But because I had no access to sexual opportunities at the time, I had to postpone sex to some indefinite date in the future. Sex for me eventually turned into a vague science-fictional aspiration like, oh, visiting Mars or something.

Science fiction writers tend to know their readership – mainly nerdy boys like me who don’t attract girls – so I wonder if some of them portray sex as an implicitly futuristic experience on purpose. I ran across an example a couple years ago in A. Bertram Chandler’s novel, The Road to the Rim, originally published in 1967. I could have read this novel as a teen, I suppose, but it escaped my notice at the time. Chandler in this work introduces a recurring character named John Grimes, an interstellar explorer whom I have seen described as “Horatio Hornblower in space.” Baen has recently republished all of Chandler’s Grimes novels in several omnibus editions.

Anyway, the first novel shows Grimes as a young recruit into the Federation Survey Service going on his first interstellar voyage. The plot involves another officer on the starship named Jane Pentecost. The following happens between these two characters:

Suddenly she bent down to kiss him. It was intended to be no more than a light brushing of the lips, but Grimes was suddenly aware, with his entire body, of the closeness of her, of the warmth and the scent of her, and almost without volition his arms went around her, drawing her closer still to him. She tried to break away, but it was only a halfhearted effort. . .

Somehow the buttons of her uniform shirt had come undone, and her nipples were taut against Grimes’ bare chest. Somehow her shorts had been peeled away from her hips – unzippered by whom? and how? – and somehow Grimes’ own garments were no longer the last barrier between them.

He was familiar enough with female nudity; he was one of the great majority who frequented the naked beaches in preference to those upon which bathing costumes were compulsory. He knew what a naked woman looked like – but this was different. It was not the first time that he had kissed a woman – but it was the first time that he had kissed, and been kissed by, an unclothed one. It was the first time that he had been alone with one.

What was happening he had read about often enough – and, like most young men, he had seen his share of pornographic films. But this was different. This was happening to him.

And for the first time.

Keep in mind that Chandler published this in 1967. I find it interesting that Chandler postulated in his imaginary future that porn would become plentiful and socially acceptable – a shrewd prophecy on his part, given the emergence and pervasiveness of internet porn in the early 21st Century. This passage shows a kind of male adolescent fantasy-fulfillment, and I think Chandler wrote it that way deliberately to appeal to the young nerds he knew would read this novel.

If I had read this story back as a teenager, it would have fit into the pattern of the other science fiction I read in those years about sex as a “futuristic” experience, and not as a real, ordinary possibility in the here-and-now, grounded in biological reality. I might have thought that if I couldn’t have my “first time” with my unrequited high school crush Shelley Conrad in the back seat of my parents’ Ford Maverick, I would have to wait until I became a space colonist in my 20’s, or later, where I would meet some Jane Pentecost-like woman on a space ship or orbital colony who would obligingly initiate me into an adult sex life.

Forty years later, my Jane Pentecost and I still haven’t crossed paths that I know of.