Women’s Celibacy and the Propagation Imperative in Irish Science Fiction

Abstract

This article considers the literary exploration of women’s celibacy through the prism of science fiction, beginning with an overview of the genre’s often-retrograde engagements with the subjects of marriage, reproduction and heteronormative ideology. Alongside this genre context, a 19th-century Irish historical context is outlined, juxtaposing genre history with the ‘matrimonial’ rhetoric that arose following the 1801 Act of Union, which framed the merging of Ireland into the United Kingdom as a ‘marriage’ between Ireland and Great Britain, with Ireland represented as the bride. In the overlap between these two contexts, this article identifies several future-set Irish novels that address this rhetoric directly, while also tracing its (perhaps unconscious) impact in other texts, before moving on to consider one novel in particular: Mercia, the Astronomer Royal (1895) by Amelia Garland Mears. The article concludes by arguing that science fiction’s past missteps with regard to marriage and sex can be explained by the fact that traditional, patriarchal marriage is in fact fundamentally unsuited to a genre primarily concerned with the future, resulting in reactionary overcompensation.

1. Introduction

In this article, I will provide an overview of feminist (and anti-feminist) science fiction texts from the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particular focus on Irish authors, to explore how women’s celibacy, and utopian separatism, has been placed in conversation with the patriarchal norms encoded in much of the genre’s conventions regarding sex and reproduction. In the context of this Special Issue on Celibacy in Irish Women’s Writing, my purpose is to identify a pattern of themes in feminist science fiction that can be connected to feminist and queer celibate politics (e.g., an expression of anti-marriage and anti-natalist positions or a basis for imagining different forms of female kinship) as a foundation for future work in the field. I demonstrate how these contexts and themes can be applied to Irish women’s writing through an exemplary close reading of Amelia Garland Mears’ Mercia, the Astronomer Royal (Mears 1895). In conclusion, I reflect on the ways in which a reconsideration of women’s political celibacy can reframe how we read the place of heteronormativity in science-fictional futures, in both genre-wide and specifically Irish contexts.

The science fiction genre has almost as many definitions as it has theorists. The most frequently cited definition, formulated by the critic Darko Suvin, is that science fiction is the literature of “cognitive estrangement,” meaning that the reader is dropped into a highly estranged narrative world, which nonetheless behaves according to the established laws of science; the reader is then encouraged to ‘decode’ the text with reference to her prior knowledge of how the known physical universe operates (Suvin [1977] 2010, pp. 74–76). One of the most oft-cited examples of “cognitive estrangement” is the sentence “The King was pregnant,” from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin [1969] 1976, p. 100). Taken on its own, this line appears not to make any sense, but in a science-fictional context where it can be assumed to be a bald statement of fact, it prompts several potential hypotheses about the narrative world: the reader may conclude that the phrase reflects a society in which ‘biologically male’ individuals can give birth, similar to seahorses, and thus that the King in question belongs to a different species than ours; she might also assume that this is a fictional society in which gender identity is not coterminous with an individual’s observed sex at birth, and that the King is a transgender man who has chosen to carry a child; equally, she might conclude that in the depicted culture, ‘King’ is a gender-neutral term for a ruler, or else that a gender-neutral term has been mistranslated due to the narrator’s unconscious sexist biases. To varying degrees, all of these conclusions are correct: the novel is set on a planet where the inhabitants, distantly related to homo sapiens, are neuter for most of their lives, only assuming sexual characteristics (seemingly at random) when they come into ‘heat.’

As this example indicates, gender, sexuality and reproduction have been recurring topics of discussion in science fiction since, arguably, its inception: the most commonly cited ‘progenitor text’ for the genre, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), is about a scientist attempting to create new life without the participation of a woman, and is suffused with Shelley’s own experiences of never having known her own mother, and the stillbirth of her own first child, a daughter. Heterosexist assumptions of reproduction as a moral imperative have been encoded and replicated in science fiction since Shelley’s novel, as have refutations of and resistance to those assumptions.

Lamenting the apparent predominance of a “stylistically transparent, reactionary, anti-intellectual, anti-philosophical” kind of realism in writing by Irish women in the late 1980s, Eve Patten remarked that, “In Ireland, there is a sad lack of encouragement for experiment in the kind of futurist fantasy or magic realism with which Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood have created rigorously critical social visions” (Patten 1990, p. 7). Despite this lack of encouragement, however, the history of Irish women writing science fiction is long and storied.

For example, the suffragist and animal rights campaigner Frances Power Cobbe, in her novella The Age of Science (1877), predicted ‘advances’ in biological warfare and the break-up of the British Empire, satirizing the self-assuredness of those who preached the inherent morality of scientific progress. Her imagined future of 1977 Britain includes a Parliament made up exclusively of doctors, a servant class of educated apes, and a world where the domestic dog is extinct due to the enthusiastic practice of vivisection. Most strikingly, she describes a time when women would excel in higher education and become doctors and lawyers in huge numbers; men, feeling threatened by this influx of competent women into professions they regard as their personal fiefdoms, successfully campaign to have women’s education outlawed altogether.

Jane Barlow, meanwhile, repeatedly used the trope of interplanetary travel to ask disturbing philosophical questions that few other Irish writers would address, as in the 1898 short story “An Advance Sheet,” which explores the Nietzschean idea of the ‘eternal return’ to show us a horrifying view of a fatalistic universe. L. T. Meade (Elizabeth Smith) pondered how science might be misused to criminal ends. With Robert Eustace, she co-authored a series of short stories called The Brotherhood of Seven Kings (1899), in which an intrepid young man assists the police in their efforts to thwart a scientifically literate mafia led by his ex-girlfriend, a mastermind whose schemes hinge on obscure but verifiable scientific fact (e.g., the bite of a tsetse fly, or the resonant frequency of glass).

Early in the twentieth century, Charlotte McManus created a parallel universe in which Ireland was never conquered in The Professor in Erin (1918), foreshadowing later debates about Irish culture and nationhood. In 1940, when Buck Rogers and ‘space opera’ adventures were at the height of their popularity, Máiréad Ní Ghráda proved that an Irish-language version could work with her children’s novel Manannán. In 1980, political activist Margaret O’Donnell’s only known novel, The Beehive, depicted a feminist resistance movement playing cat-and-mouse with the apparatus of a fascist state (unnamed, but in many respects analogous to Ireland) which categorizes women as wives or ‘Grey Ones’ according to their predetermined roles as child-bearers or unpaid labourers.

If the history of Irish women writing science fiction has gone largely unexamined, this is likely a consequence of the cultural, gendered and generic factors inherent in the subject. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar demonstrate that historically, women writers did not relate to their precursors in terms of an Oedipal “anxiety of influence,” as attributed to male writers by Harold Bloom; instead, they have tended to struggle with an “anxiety of authorship” arising from the sexist assumptions of a male-dominated literary canon, with the result that they relate to those forerunners in a kind of “secret sisterhood” (Gilbert and Gubar [1979] 1984, pp. 50–51).

2. The National Marriage and Ireland’s Gender Trouble

The Act of Union, voted on in 1800 and enacted in 1801, was consistently framed in marriage rhetoric, casting Ireland as the bride and Britain as the groom. Jane Elizabeth Dougherty argues that this metaphor became ingrained in popular political discourse at the time “because the Act of Union had so many of the hallmarks of the classic marriage contract,” chief among them being the bride’s voluntary relinquishment of her civil rights, “specifically [her] right to make any future contracts,” which was paralleled in the Irish Parliament’s vote for its own dissolution (Dougherty 2004, p. 134). This presents us with a remarkable example of Adrienne Rich’s “compulsory heterosexuality” applied to international relations. Compulsory heterosexuality, described by Rich as an ideological framework “both forcibly and subliminally imposed on women” (Rich 2003, p. 30), is ubiquitous and culturally embedded, and it inculcates universalising assumptions of heterosexuality as the innate orientation of most of humanity, with marriage and reproduction as its presumed default outcome (Rich 2003, pp. 13–14). The marriage rhetoric surrounding the Act of Union thus not only communicated patriarchal expectations of loyalty, obedience and servitude, but positioned Britain as the ‘natural’ recipient of same.

It is thus not surprising that themes of matrimony and domesticity recur in popular fiction that reflected upon Anglo-Irish relations, even in fiction set in the future. John Francis Maguire’s The Next Generation (1871), set in the year 1892, has Ireland existing in an egalitarian federal union with Britain (Maguire 1871, p. 181); Home Rule has been instituted (Maguire 1871, p. 124), and women are free to serve as MPs and civil servants, provided they give up those careers upon becoming mothers (Maguire 1871, p. 326). Political violence has vanished, and day-to-day Irish life is described as “prosaic, but pleasant” (Maguire 1871, p. 126), thanks to the granting of Home Rule (Maguire 1871, pp. 154–55), the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland (Maguire 1871, p. 158), and a marriage between the British Prince and “the daughter of a great Irish house,” with the Prince serving as Viceroy thereafter. This marriage was politically important, we are told, because “We Irish are not Republicans in spirit—we are Monarchists at heart” (Maguire 1871, pp. 182–83). A different approach to the same theme is evident in Alice L. Milligan’s A Royal Democrat (1892), set in 1939. In this “sensational Irish novel,” socialist-leaning Prince Cormac Arthur is dispatched on a ‘grand tour’ to keep him out of the public eye following a political scandal, only to be shipwrecked in Inishowen; knowing that he will be presumed dead, he pretends to be an American tourist (Milligan 1892, pp. 39–49), thereafter falling in love with a local girl.

Concomitant with this ‘national marriage’ rhetoric—effectively compulsory heterosexuality writ large—was a crisis of masculinity that is clearly legible in Irish science fiction texts of the 19th century. The murderous microscopist Linley, narrator of Fitz-James O’Brien’s “The Diamond Lens” (1858), waxes poetic about his newfound ability to “penetrate” the subatomic realm with the titular microscope lens, only to fall hopelessly in love with a woman inhabiting that tiny universe, and thus reveal his impotence; unable to enter into a relationship with her, he accidentally destroys her world instead of ‘penetrating’ it by allowing the water droplet containing it to dry out on his microscope slide. In 1894, Dermot Robert Wyndham Bourke (Lord Naas; 7th Earl of Mayo), an Anglo-Irish peer and later a member of the Seanad, contributed The War Cruise of the Aries [sic] to the then-popular ‘future-war’ genre; the story, an account of a novel warship equipped with a sort of battering-ram to puncture enemy vessels and sink them, reads like a Freudian fantasy of overcompensation.

More obvious and striking by far are the treatments of gender in Belfast writer Robert Cromie’s A Plunge Into Space (Cromie 1890) and The Crack of Doom (Cromie 1895), the former a Jules Verne-style tale of an intrepid voyage to Mars, the latter an adventure yarn about an everyman’s efforts to foil a secret society’s plans to vaporise the Earth. The Martian civilization of the 1890 novel is a post-scarcity utopia where gender equality is taken for granted. Initially, the visiting Earthmen assume that there are no women on Mars at all, because there is so little difference between the sexes’ presentation (Cromie 1890, p. 121), and the heroine of the story is at first mistaken for an androgynous Martian boy (Cromie 1890, pp. 126–28); later, we learn that Martian women have “lost the instinct of flirtation,” rendering them, in the Earthmen’s eyes, rather boring in spite of their ethereal beauty (Cromie 1890, p. 141). Furthermore, that heroine’s Martian lover quietly abandons his courtship of her when he learns of her attraction to one of the Earthmen, a fact that disgusts the Earthman in question (Cromie 1890, pp. 198–99). On Cromie’s imagined Mars, gender equality is accompanied by the wholesale emasculation of men, and it is a sort of chicken-and-egg question as to which came first; either way, the consignment of traditional courtship rites and romantic fervour to the past—specifically to museum displays (Cromie 1890, pp. 198–99)—is figured as a tragic societal loss.

The villains of The Crack of Doom, meanwhile, read as an agglomeration of all the forces threatening the late-Victorian status quo, being materialist, socialist, radical scientists. The most pronounced aspect of their philosophy, however, is a belief in gender equality and the rejection of traditional gender roles: female members of the secret society wear men’s clothes, deeming themselves “rationally dressed” (Cromie 1895, p. 24); they smoke, exhibit “manly” handwriting (Cromie 1895, p. 21), show a lack of “hysterical fear” (Cromie 1895, p. 29), and reject the protection of men as “enslavement” (Cromie 1895, p. 34). The latter point resonates rather obviously with anti-marriage arguments advanced by writers Mona Caird, George Eliot and Cicely Hampton, who variously compared the institution of marriage to slavery, prostitution and trade work (Williams 2002, p. 263). These characters are clearly meant to be caricatures of the New Woman, sporting the stereotypical accoutrements such as bicycles, smoking and divided skirts (O’Toole 2008, p. 128), though they dismiss the New Woman as “a grandmotherly old fossil” (Cromie 1895, p. 27). Meanwhile, the hero’s presumed rival for the heroine’s affections is described as feminine in appearance and demeanour (Cromie 1895, p. 66) and is later revealed to only be interested in the heroine’s friendship (Cromie 1895, p. 161).

The production of feminist utopian fiction in the 19th century, particularly utopian narratives set in worlds without men, emerged from a cultural sea-change in Britain that came about partly in reaction to demographic rhetoric. In the 1860s, census data revealed that women outnumbered men, thus consigning large numbers of women to ‘spinsterhood’; among the proposed solutions for this “superfluity of women” was shipping them off to the colonies (Williams 2002, pp. 261–62). By the 1880s and 1890s, however, the perception of unmarried women as hapless victims of demographic circumstance started to give way as a new generation started to actively choose spinsterhood as a means of attaining personal freedom (Williams 2002, p. 262). The influence of this situation and the rhetoric around it is legible in American works such as Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora: A Prophecy (1881), which depicts a technologically advanced, all-female society that has developed video conferencing and lab-grown meat; Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Robinson Merchant’s Unveiling a Parallel: A Romance (1883), in which an Earthman visits two societies on an egalitarian Mars, with the narrative favourably contrasting traditional femininity against an anticipation of ‘ladette’ culture; and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), which shows a region where women have reproduced parthenogenically for thousands of years without any men present among them, and consequently have no understanding of romance, love, marriage, sexual intercourse or traditional femininity.

Nineteenth-century Irish science fiction novels that address the era’s celibate politics in good faith are comparatively few, as are science fiction novels by Irish women; this makes Amelia Garland Mears’ Mercia, the Astronomer Royal (1895) an exemplary case of an Irish woman writer addressing these concerns through genre conventions.

3. Mercia, the Astronomer Royal

Mercia, the Astronomer Royal is set in the year 2002, in a future world ruled by a ‘Teutonic Emperor,’ who presides over an empire forged from the fusion of the British and German ones, which has started to undertake colonisation of the solar system. For reasons that are not entirely clear from the text, English is the lingua franca of this empire and has regressed to its Early Modern form in its use of verb inflections and ‘Biblical’ pronouns (e.g., thou, thee, thine). Commendably, the Teutonic Empire boasts equal employment of men and women, hence the titular female character’s ascent to the position of Astronomer Royal, advising the Emperor on astrophysics and deep-space phenomena, a role which is “deemed as honourable as that of Prime Minister”; astronomy is considered so important to the running of the Empire that those appointed to the post are expected to swear an oath of celibacy, so as to not be “trammelled by the entanglements of love, nor the ties of wedlock” in further advancing scientific knowledge (Mears 1895, p. 46).

In contrast to some of the more fanciful aspects of the setting, the future-history of how gender equality was achieved eschews fanciful science-fictional shortcuts and instead charts a progression of feminist campaigns that demanded equality in higher education followed by campaigns for “political, social, and marital equality between the sexes” (Mears 1895, pp. 2–3). These educational reforms allowed women to “[utilise] the talents that had for ages lain dormant, turning them into worthier and more useful channels,” and thus, equality was won “by almost imperceptible degrees” (Mears 1895, p. 5). Significantly, Mears’ account mentions “feminine monstrosities” among the reforms’ opponents, who “stooped to the unworthiness of writing down those devoted champions of liberty for their own sex” (Mears 1895, p. 4), and says that “[The New Woman] was told that her aspirations were bold and offensive in the extreme; that they ‘unsexed’ her” (Mears 1895, p. 3). There is an interesting correspondence here with the words of Queen Victoria herself, who in an 1870 letter to Sir Theodore Martin declared that “Were women to ‘unsex’ themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen, and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection” (Horsler 2006, p. 104).

Despite the vicious opposition, and even though sex discrimination originated “in the coarser instincts of the male, whose desires it tended to foster and encourage” (Mears 1895, p. 4), we are told that the new equality was accepted by men because “Like all wise reforms it benefited equally its adversaries as supporters; and man, who at the outset bitterly opposed the movement, reaped the advantage derived therefrom” (Mears 1895, p. 6). Unfortunately, workplace sexual harassment still exists in this version of the future, and the Emperor causes a scandal by forcing himself on Mercia. Thereafter, he disseminates a false version of events to paint her as the aggressor, thus accusing her of breaking the vow of her office. Luckily, an audio recording of the incident comes to light, thanks to a visitor to the royal apartments who just so happened to have a recording device in his hand in an adjacent room.

The novel’s predictions for human reproduction reveal that Mears’ egalitarian future still contains persistent traces of gender essentialism. Upon becoming pregnant, a woman is expected to take full charge of her child’s psychological development to steer them towards a predetermined career, by immersing herself in appropriate aesthetic and educational material. Despite equality of employment between the sexes, nosy neighbours will hazard guesses at the sex of the unborn child based upon the career the parents seem to have chosen: a woman who immerses herself in engineering textbooks is assumed to be expecting a boy, because “she would hardly put a daughter to such a profession” (Mears 1895, pp. 14–15). The story is told of a couple who went to great efforts to teach their baby the principles of aeronautical engineering in utero, only to be taken by surprise when the child turned out to be a girl (Mears 1895, pp. 16–17). By contrast, chemistry is regarded as a fine career for either sex (Mears 1895, pp. 15–16), and another couple’s attempts to shape their son into a poet result in a “simpleton” instead, showing that the process is not an exact science (Mears 1895, p. 17). This essentialism is all the more pointed for the fact that the parents can select the sex of the child as well, resulting in a situation where two-thirds of the children born are male, but each country still ends up with “a redundance of adult females” due to men’s generally shorter life expectancy (Mears 1895, pp. 18–20). More notably, as the birth rate drops somewhat, women’s physical vigour increases over the generations, until they are equal (and sometimes superior) to men in size, strength and endurance (Mears 1895, p. 23); 20th-century women, we are told, “could not understand the imprudence of parents bringing children into the world for almost the whole of their natural lives” (Mears 1895, p. 24). By the 21st century, men and women do not dress very differently, and the sexes are told apart mainly by how they style their hair (Mears 1895, p. 28). Mercia herself, we are told, “In former times […] would have been considered too tall for the ideal of womanly beauty, for she was five feet, ten inches, in height” (Mears 1895, p. 42), though Mears is careful to underline the Astronomer Royal’s physical attractiveness with three pages of detailed description (Mears 1895, pp. 42–45).

All of this chimes with 19th-century arguments for women’s equality that took as their basis an acknowledgement of ‘essential’ gender differences, often rooted in women’s prescribed roles as mothers and housewives—sometimes with a positive emphasis, as in Anna Julia Cooper’s argument that women’s influence over children in early childhood made them powerful drivers of “racial uplift,” and sometimes negative, as in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s belief that household duties prevented women from attaining the same mental development as men (Donawerth 2009, p. 216).

We can say, therefore, that Mercia’s mandatory vow of celibacy is a historically important detail. As Williams notes, women choosing to remain celibate in the late 19th century were castigated as rebelling against their natures, levelling unfair charges against men, and being “boring,” often with explicit comparisons to labour activists, accompanied by tacit admissions from their detractors that these women were going “on strike” (Williams 2002, p. 259). By the 1890s, celibacy had thus become a radical political choice for women disenfranchised by compulsory heterosexuality and patriarchal institutions such as marriage. In the year 2002, as imagined by Mears, it appears that vows of celibacy are unremarkable, though still taken very seriously—the Emperor’s disrespect towards Mercia’s vow is sufficient to cause a scandal, aside altogether from his sexually aggressive behaviour. The sincerity of Mercia’s vow is also legible in a scene where she experiences something that reads much like a description of an orgasm, but does not seem to realise what it is:

Her countenance was overspread with the warm glow of an unseen, mystic force, while her bosom heaved with tumultuous emotions. Speechless she sat, with downcast eyes, lost in a silent joy, while delicious sensations that were entirely new to her thrilled her whole frame.

“Is this then love!” she exclaimed at length.

(Mears 1895, pp. 279–80)

This passage calls to mind Latham’s assertion that “[science fiction], willy-nilly, is always treating [of] sexual topics, perhaps most powerfully when it seems to be primly avoiding them (252). More significant, however, is he repetition of a pattern established in earlier ‘national marriage’ science fiction: rather than the more radical option of abolishing marriage altogether, or otherwise making it just a matter of personal choice, the desirability of matrimony is taken for granted throughout, and in contrast to the “strike” tactics of political celibacy, Mercia’s vow largely serves to heighten the tension between her and the various men who exhibit some kind of romantic interest in her, including the Emperor and Mercia’s assistant (and later successor) Geometrus. The flood of sensations quoted above can thus be taken, less pruriently, as a sincere description of love finally triumphing over all—though in this case, Mr. Right is not a British prince, but an Anglo-Indian mystic, Dayanand Swami.

4. Conclusions

Through the 20th century, scholarship and political activism gave an impetus to projects of recovery that not only brought previously neglected works by women writers to light again but also allowed for contemporary women writers to build upon their predecessors’ work in a definite tradition. This also held true for woman-authored science fiction, especially as the genre’s radical political potential became apparent.

Second-wave feminist utopian texts often present as unambiguous science fiction, as in the aforementioned The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). Indeed, through the 1970s, there was a feminist utopian ‘mini-boom’ in which all-female collectives were depicted living in harmony with nature, with technology not rejected but considered secondary to social requirements; usually, love in these texts is technologically uncoupled from the necessity or inevitability of sexual oppression, classism, drudgery and biological parenting (Lefanu 1989, p. 76). This trend was sidelined by the right-wing resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, which saw radical utopian fiction occluded by cyberpunk, a genre better positioned to reflect the growing mood of pessimism and greed. Anti-utopianism—the assertion that utopia is not merely a flawed or impractical idea but an immoral and dangerous one—determined the tone of most discussions or treatments of utopia as a literary theme or subject. There were a few novels set in science-fictional feminist utopias published during this time, including Joan Slonczewski’s A Door Into Ocean (1986) and Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite (1993), but the main thrust of feminist science fiction at the time was dystopian, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) being the pre-eminent example. Alongside the persistent residual traces of each of these historical moments, at the time of writing, we now appear to be entering a period of ‘anti-anti-utopianism’: rather than a resurgence or renewal of ‘pure’ utopianism, this mood is more focused on a rejection of the convenient cynicism that pours scorn on any attempt to improve the world while actively benefiting the neoliberal order destroying it.

To judge by Eve Patten’s remarks in 1990, a similar sense of a genre tradition had not yet taken root in Ireland by 1990, but it has since started to coalesce around a similar dystopian or ‘anti-anti-utopian’ impulse. Eilís Ní Dhuibhne’s The Bray House (1990) is set in an Ireland depopulated and destroyed by radioactive fallout and follows the leader of a team of archaeologists as they excavate the titular house; in Catherine Brophy’s Dark Paradise (1991) humanity has diverged into two separate species ruled over by a totalitarian government; Sarah Maria Griffin’s Spare and Found Parts (2016) is set in a future plague-ravaged Dublin, in which teenage inventor Nell brings a self-aware automaton to life, in defiance of repressive laws banning computer code; Sarah Davis-Goff’s Last Ones Left Alive (2019) and its sequel Silent City (2023) depict an Ireland destroyed by the zombie-like ‘skrakes’ (from the Irish scréach, ‘scream’), in which the one apparent safe refuge is a walled remnant of Dublin where women are kept as breeding stock and live in enforced silence. In each of these examples, marriage, domesticity and reproduction are re-inscribed: Ní Dhuibhne’s novel elevates the thoroughly ordinary McHugh family home to a site of enormous scientific and cultural importance, even as it depicts a discomfiting future world where Ireland has effectively ceased to exist. Brophy presents us with a breezy adventure story in which a ‘natural’ genetic underclass overthrows their engineered oppressors but in the end reveals that this has all been the prelude to a human birth, with one of the main characters ending the story reincarnated as a baby on present-day Earth. When Nell brings Io to life in Griffin’s novel, she very firmly corrects his first assumption by stating she is not his mother, but his maker, and later in the story, she uncovers the full extent of the abuse that took place in her parents’ relationship. Orpen, the heroine of Davis-Goff’s dystopian dyad, was raised on an isolated island by a lesbian couple and, after spending the first book trying to reach Phoenix City, is confronted with a society where the rights of women and girls can be suspended as a matter of expediency.

The project of recovery becomes all the more important with the emergence of a recognizable tradition such as this, to historicize it even as it continues into the future. In this context, it is imperative to consider the implications of 19th-century Irish texts in which Ireland is gendered as the bride in a ‘marriage’ to Britain, male characters find themselves unable to fulfil their assigned roles, and even physical differences between the sexes seem to be vanishing—an existential crisis for Robert Cromie but an inevitable consequence of social progress for Amelia Garland Mears. Curiously, for a literary period in which both feminists and patriarchs appealed to notions of women’s ‘essential differences’ or ‘essential natures’ to either advance or argue against legal equality for women, both sides regarded the convergence of the sexes as the natural outcome of that equality. In this light, men’s inability to ‘perform’ dovetailed neatly into women’s adoption of celibacy as a radical political tactic.