Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates

Murphy, Pat. "Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates." Alien Sex. Ellen Datlow, editor. (New York City: Dutton, 1990). Reprinted Cybersex anthology. For other reprints, translations, and honors, see Internet Speculative Fiction Database, as of January 2023, at link here.[1]

After the City of San José, California, is hit with an atomic bomb — the text has just "San Jose" — a dying and sometimes delirious scientist decides to spend her remaining time "constructing the future." If she's not a totally reliable narrator, that's forgivable, and, if hubristic, it's central to the premise of the story that

Someone must do it.

It's what I was trained for, really. My undergraduate studies were in biology — structural anatomy, the construction of body and bone. My graduate studies were in engineering. For the last five years. I have been designing and constructing robots for use in industrial processing. The need for such industrial creations is over now. But it seems a pity to waste the equipment and materials that remain in the lab that my colleagues have abandoned. (Cybersex p. [160]).

The Narrator may not be too well-informed about love, but she knows a great deal about sex in terms of mating rituals among various animals, definitely including invertebrates and builds a male and then larger female robot along dinosaur lines ("on a reptilian model" [p. 162]) that somehow know (or she can hallucinate them performing) mating rituals with precedents in nature. Her "construction made no provision for the stuff of reproduction: the sperm, the egg. Science failed me there. That part is up to the creatures themselves" (p. 168).

See for the reptilian/machine interface and the blurring of boundaries between mechanical and organic, living and robotic; and blending of various interesting mating rituals among non-human animals.

RDE, finishing, 31Jan23