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Kim Stanley Robinson, science fiction, and the limits of what you can imagine
A couple times on this forum Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR, for short) has come up. He's an American science fiction writer who plies mainly in hard(er) science fiction, and especially likes to play with themes that explore the interactions between technology, culture, and economics. He takes some limitation of humans and imagines: what if it were not so? How would we change, what could we do, what new things would we discover about ourselves? He's a bit of a granola-eating utopian socialist so I'm sure some here would have certain ideological objections to his writing. But it's nice sometimes to read work from someone who has a fundamental sort of optimism for humanity, that we might one day be able to put aside our differences and Figure It All Out.
His "Mars trilogy" (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) might be his masterpiece, and extends his inquisitive nature. A depiction of the colonization of Mars over centuries, there is an endless series of problems for the characters to solve; some scientific in nature, but more than that organizational and cultural. The colonization of a virgin world yields all kinds of conflicts where there can be no true compromise between people with differing fundamental values. Alongside the geoengineering of Mars proceeds the genetic engineering of the human race, as scientists begin to unlock the ability to greatly extend the lifespan of humans. This might just have originated as a conceit by KSR to keep most of the characters across the centuries required for the geological drama to play out, but he dives fully into imaging all the upheaval such an advance would yield.
There are Luddites, reactionaries, those who wish to monopolize longevity for themselves, a great and deep anger from the masses at the prospect that immortality might be denied to them. There are myriad complications and problems; certain limits prove tricky to overcome. But technological progress is an unyielding wave, and by the end of the series humans dabble in every kind of imaginable self-customization, from the crucial to the trivial: yes, all sorts of environmental adaptations to Mars' ecosystems are quickly developed, but so are custom mixes of psychoactive drugs. People create physical backups of themselves so they can do dangerous sports. All sorts of modifications can be sought to fill the spiritual and emotional void. People delay their physical decrepitude indefinitely. Women put off having children into their 300s.
But what people don't do is change their sex. The trilogy was published between 1992 and 1996; KSR likely would not have understood the concept of "changing gender". Despite the near-infinite possibilities of changing one's physical form that is offered, no one seeks to transform themselves; no woman decides to father children, no man bears a child. There is no mention of purely cosmetic alterations to simply imitate the opposite sex, or become some even more complex sexual entity now that technology enables them to do so. No character ever feels any deep or emergent desire to push past this one final barrier, when all the others have already been crossed. And it's not like KSR is some prude or philosophically opposed to it; his more recent novels feature trans and non-binary characters, and in those that feature similar types of possibility with respect to genetic engineering people freely experiment with switching sexes even if they do not have some form of dysphoria. The simplest answer is that the notion that people would want to change their sex simply did not occur to him, and this is remarkable in the context of the books trying to imagine all the possible physical and societal limits that humans could push.
Most of the original hundred colonists are either American or Russian; one might speculate that if the books had been started five years earlier, the latter would have been Soviet, and if they had been started five years later, perhaps Chinese. To some extent this is the problem of all science fiction that deals in the near future (the the trilogy begins in the far-off future of 2026); it is far enough away to be unable to predict with certainty but close enough that mistakes seem obvious in hindsight. But I think this is also somewhat of a humbling notion that we just might not be as good at predicting societal changes as we might flatter ourselves to be. I used to feel that they were more strongly tied to material/economic forces; in recent years I've become less sure. When it comes to predicting the grand arc of human civilization it is a lot easier to look a fool than a wise man. I'm glad that there are people who are willing to ignore that and take a stab.
Ian Banks (one of my favorite authors, whereas Aurora makes me despise KSR) had characters switching their phenotypical sex on a whim in the Culture novels written in the late 80s and early 90s.
I don't think he was a trans ideologue, it simply makes sense in a setting where people can trivially become post-biological, and external sex is just as much of a choice as one's hair color.*
Now, if today, we miraculously had a pill that swapped genders quickly and reversibly, I think the majority of people would try it, yet switch back to their original after the novelty wore off. I'm perfectly content being a man, even if I have no particular sense of "gender identity" as some claim to possess, yet I think I'm better off as a man than a woman, all else being equal.
*Changing sex is something most Culture denizens do throughout their lives, as a sort of loose cultural expectation. They often opt to child bear, swapping genders with their partners if necessary. Then again, they can just upload into computers or change their species outright, so they'd look at you askance if you thought that one's choice of gonads was a particularly defining feature. I suspect it would take time for our society to get to a similar point, but it seems inevitable enough to me over long enough timescales.
I find myself in the likely unique situation of writing my own novel in a similar setting, including the near-term colonization of Mars.
Mars is a backwater, an insignificant ball of rusty dirt colonized more for the cred (and countries simply aping Elon rather than any true economic incentive), rather than any concrete benefit. Terraforming is stupidly wasteful, the same time and effort could let you make exponentially larger volumes of permanent space habitats, and cater to far larger numbers of people. Thus, there's no effort to do so there, at most people build massive biodomes that cordon off chunks of the surface, and combined with an artifical magnetosphere from a fusion plant hooked up to an asteroid at a Lagrange point, means you can walk around on the surface in some places with only mild physiological or pharmacological augmentation. Add in VR, and the sheer inconvenience of options like smashing water rich comets into an inhabited planet, and barring a few kooks, nobody takes it seriously.
It's also set close enough to our time that people don't regularly swap sexes, at least outside of say, VR, in a more involved manner than modern equivalents like a weeb using an anime girl avatar in VR Chat. Transgenderism as we know it is still mostly dead, because anyone who feels that strongly about it has availed of opportunities to get far better treatment than we have today.
Your post about Aurora was the inciting incident for this post. Is all you've read of KSR Aurora? Because I'm sure the context would be rather lost on someone new to him given it's essentially KSR meta-critiquing himself by reversing all his usual tendencies. It's not really his best work, especially given that it is so inward-focused.
I've read about half the Culture books (whenever I come across one in the library), and I really should start hunting down the rest.
Indeed, Aurora is all I've read, and it was bad enough to put me off him, albeit I am considering reading the Mars trilogy since it seems less odious.
I think describing it as "meta-critique" is being overly generous to the man, from what I've heard about his politics he's an environmentalist wingnut, and that shows in spades in Aurora.
The only gripe I have about the Culture books is that Banks had the temerity to die instead of spending the next few centuries writing more of them haha, let's see if GPT-5 is good enough to write pastiche. I've read every one, and most of his other works, barring The Wasp Factory, which isn't particularly scifi, and which I didn't enjoy.
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