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In Robert Ferro’s 1988 novel Second Son, Mark Valerian suffers from an unnamed illness afflicting gay men, spread by sex, and for which there is no cure Mark’s only hope seems to be a medical trial that requires the transfusion of genetically identical white blood cells, until his friend Matthew, who recently lost his lover to the ‘Plague’, begins writing letters to Mark revealing another potential cure Shortly after the disease erupted some seven years previously, a group of gay men made contact with aliens, living on a planet called Splendora, who are ‘long, lean, delicate, in the sense of a swimmer’s body’ ‘Darling,’ Matthew writes, ‘they are gay’ The aliens’ advanced technology will enable a group of gay men to escape to Splendora, be cured of their illness, and live safely on a planet populated only by gay men – and gay aliens Mark dismisses Matthew’s letters as the fantasies of a dying ‘queen out of control’; his family eventually acknowledge his illness, and a brother donates the blood needed for his trial Yet the novel ends with Mark and his lover Bill gazing at the sky, ‘waiting as if for the ship to Splendora’ – attracted, in spite of themselves, to Matthew’s fantasy of a gay planet It was a fantasy that seemed to promise everything, but there was one detail Matthew couldn’t explain about how this community could survive: ‘Reproduction is something of a mystery’   *   For centuries, writers, artists, and speculative thinkers have used science fiction to imagine the possible futures we might have That’s one reason the genre has long been a storehouse of fantasies about reproduction Imagining a different future requires imagining a different way of getting there, and the way we get there, the way any group makes it to any future, is by reproducing over time Science fiction’s reproductive fantasies have rarely been utopian in any simple sense, since one group’s utopia can all too easily slide into another’s dystopia But because of the genre’s commitment to world building — its requirement to have, if not always directly reveal, a logical