In the early years of the genre, sex and science fiction were viewed as oil and water – the two could not and should not mix. In a literature for engineers, sex was often perceived as contaminating—something that was absolutely irrelevant to stories about science and technologies, and that transformed those stories into something else if it was explored in too great a depth.

As the genre began to open up, with more depth and variety in the stories being told and more women writing, sex began to creep into science fiction. With several sex and science fiction "firsts" occurring in the 1950s, such as Anne McCaffrey’s short story "Freedom of the Race" introducing sex as a weapon, and Phillip José Farmer’s novel The Lovers introducing the first human-alien sex act (explicit giant insect sex, no less), the stage was set for more developments to occur in the field.

With the rise of New Wave science fiction in the 1960s, sex became a more common plot device, used with greater sophistication than early stories which used sex in stereotypical ways. In the 1960s and 70s, science fiction pushed a variety of social boundaries, including sexual ones. Sex was also used as a plot device to illustrate other social constraints, such as in the science fiction feminist works The Female Man by Joanna Russ and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Sex in science fiction is typically used to explore issues of control – between individuals, between genders, between species. In Farmer’s The Lovers, the issue of control is one of species and of cultures. In Russ’ The Female Man, the issue is between genders. n Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, the issue is within an individual as he struggles to deal with the absence of one gender controlling another.

Today, some science fiction novels are still written by men who seem socially inept and only interested in writing about sex for the titillation of teenage boys. However, due to the progress of the past half-century, science fiction has more to offer than ever before, and works are common which reflect the changes that have occurred. Sex is frequently relied on for social commentary in the works of modern science fiction authors such as Paul DiFilippo, Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler, and many others. The growth and development in this arena indicate that the relationship between sex and science fiction is only beginning, and that while it may have gotten off to a shaky start, things are definitely heating up.