As someone who circulates in the sub-cultural worlds of science-fiction and a person who is heavily invested in questions of sexuality, speculative porn has always held a special fascination for me. By speculative porn, of course, I mean anything in which what is depicted or described is not demonstrably possible in real life meaning sex with aliens, androids, ghosts, etc. Some porn is based on extant media properties like the recently released Star Trek XXX Parody, which is loosely patterned off the classic Trek episode, “Space Seed,” while some is entirely original likes the comics that run in Meatman magazine’s special scifi issues (see image to the right by Stephen Lowther & Howard Stangroom). It may be professionally produced like Randy Blue’s vampire-themed Chris Rockway vehicle, A Taste of Blue, or amateur like my own forthcoming Twilight werewolf pack-sense circle jerk fanfiction. And of course, it very likely exists in every medium for which porn is created – text stories, comics, images, videos, ASCII art (?)… Therefore, I’d like to take a moment to (unacademically, unscientifically) offer some wild speculation about what people find appealing in this.

• One possibility for those of us who have grown up with far more exposure to porn than our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, speculative porn might be a way to shake things up in an otherwise bland porno landscape that we’ve trod on far too many times over the years. TheNewGay has actually covered this possibility before.

• By that same token, speculative porn sometimes offers us more narrative to situate the sex in, which definitely has its appeal. Everyone knows erotic movie scenes are super hot primarily because we’re invested in the characters despite the fact that we rarely get as much sex out of them as we really want. As a sidenote here I’d like to point to the upcoming X-Files porn tribute, The Sex Files, has many x-philes excited because the trailers have indicated it may be far better plot-wise than last summer’s filmic clunker, Fight the Future.

• For geeksters like me, I think scifi porn may simply be one more manifestation of the sexualization of everything. From school to sports, public transportation, the workplace, the armed forces, libraries, bathrooms, kitchens, mini-golf, the national park system, bowling, pizza delivery – everything can be porned. Therefore, since I like science fiction and science fiction is in my life, there can be porn of it. Incidentally, this is also how I rationalize the popularity of tokusatsu porn in Japan. For my non-geek, non-Asiaphile readers (do I even have any of those? I suspect not…), that would be porn in the style of Power Rangers and Godzilla, using oddly similar unrealistic costumes and special effects. Yeah….

Hustler's This Ain't Star Trek XXX features the fan-favorite villain, Khan Noonien Singh

• It was suggested to me while talking to people about this column that in the case of porn specifically targeted for consumption by LGBT people, science fiction provides a venue for the breaking out of rigid heteronormativity, which I think is very interesting. In other words, if one of the involved sex partners is a robot or computer program or an alien for whom sex and gender are constructed in radically different ways from us, do the same categories of heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual still have any meaning?

• Perhaps the most interesting explanation though is the idea that on some level all porn is speculative in that it is a fantasy we’re not actually living. The obvious examples might be the straight male jerking off watching a woman-woman sex scene, the lesbian woman masturbating to NC-17 Sam/Dean fanfic, or just about anyone getting turned on by images of people tangled up in crazy sexual positions that aren’t at all comfortable in real life, but really all pornographic scenes are lived vicariously by their consumes since they will never experience those exact scenes with their own bodies. Perhaps scifi porn then just takes that reality to its logical extreme by foregrounding the implausibility of the scenarios and feeding on the voyeuristic surreality kink that most of us seem to have developed these days whether we know it or not.

In conclusion, for anyone whose interest I’ve peaked but don’t know where to turn to dip their toe into the speculative porn world, I would suggest The Nifty Erotic Stories Archive as a jumping-off point. There are “Science Fiction or Fantasy” sub-sections under “Bisexual Stories,” “Lesbian Stories,” and “Gay Stories.” Under “Transgender Stories” there is a “Mind-control” section and a “Magic & Science Fiction” section. There is also a large area of the site devoted to bestiality stories but I have to draw my personal boundaries somewhere even in the name of investigation….