Venus Plus X

In Venus Plus X, Charlie Johns, a 20th-century man, awakes in a future in which hunger, overpopulation, bigotry, and war have been eliminated--and gender has vanished. Everything humanity knows about its divided nature is no longer true--and perhaps never was.

Theodore Sturgeon and Philip Jose Farmer were among the first SF writers to deal with sexuality in an open, adult manner. Sturgeon's approach was further distinguished by his uncommon awareness of sexual diversity and his passionate belief in the healing power of love. His story, "The World Well Lost" (1953), was the first SF work to present homosexuality sympathetically, and Venus Plus X (1960) was among the earliest SF works to explore and challenge gender-role stereotypes, and surely the first to do so with a vision of a single-sex, androgynous human race. --Cynthia Ward