Old sci-fi stumpers. Can you identify the writer/story?

January 12, 2009 4:09 PM

Old sci-fi stumpers. Can you identify the writer/story? [more inside]

1. Humans don't have sex together but have recreational sex with flowers,
which collect semen and inseminate women

2. Arachnoid aliens arrive on the earth, looking for something - because
they have exhausted their local supplies of mammalian creatures in whom
to deposit their eggs

They are definitely from before 1980. Thanks!

posted by darkpony to media & arts (8 answers total)

I know a story similar to #2, but the story starts with the aliens having been here a while. Using us as hosts has given them some great offspring. They treat us as pets, and they give us sterile eggs to suck, which prolongs our lives. It's a not-quite symbiotic relationship. Is that it?
posted by adipocere at 5:53 PM on January 12, 2009

I have read the first one. In French. Early 70s. American author. Very sexy story.
The title that comes to my mind is Les pollinisateurs d'Eden, but I don't find it in Google nor in the Présence du futur collection where I would think it was published.

As far as I remember, sex with flowers was highly pleasant but not really recreational: human were used by flowers as pollinators.

Yes, pollinator! Here you are: The Pollinators of Eden by John Boyd. Yesss!
posted by bru at 6:56 PM on January 12, 2009

I think adipocere is thinking of Octavia Butler's Blood Child.
posted by gamera at 7:30 PM on January 12, 2009

Yup, that's definately what adipocere is thinking of, a probably No. 2 as well - if not then it's still worth a read.
posted by Artw at 9:56 PM on January 12, 2009

Yes, I was deliberately avoiding the name so I wouldn't invoke my somewhat confusing antipathy for everything of Butler's I've read. It might be No. 2, although Butler's aliens are more ... caterpillar-like than arachnid.
posted by adipocere at 12:27 PM on January 13, 2009

The Butler is not #2 - the arachnid story, whatever it is, definitely predates the Butler story and is definitely not about caterpillars.
posted by caitlinb at 7:58 PM on January 13, 2009

Tiptree perhaps? Love is the Plan was spiders wasn't it?
posted by Artw at 4:15 PM on January 14, 2009

FWIW I thought of the creatures in Bloodchild as more beetle-larvae like.
posted by Artw at 4:16 PM on January 14, 2009