text:
Sex and sexuality in speculative fiction

Sexual themes are frequently used in science fiction or related genres. Such elements may include depictions of realistic sexual interactions in a science fictional setting, a protagonist with an alternative sexuality, a sexual encounter between a human and a fictional extraterrestrial, or exploration of the varieties of sexual experience that deviate from the conventional.

Science fiction and fantasy have sometimes been more constrained than non-genre narrative forms in their depictions of sexuality and gender. However, speculative fiction (SF) and soft science fiction also offer the freedom to imagine alien or galactic societies different from real-life cultures, making it a tool to examine sexual bias, heteronormativity, and gender bias and enabling the reader to reconsider their cultural assumptions.

Prior to the 1960s, explicit sexuality of any kind was not characteristic of genre speculative fiction due to the relatively high number of minors in the target audience. In the 1960s, science fiction and fantasy began to reflect the changes prompted by the civil rights movement and the emergence of a counterculture. New Wave and feminist science fiction authors imagined cultures in which a variety of gender models and atypical sexual relationships are the norm, and depictions of sex acts and alternative sexualities became commonplace.

There is also science fiction erotica, which explores more explicit sexuality and the presentation of themes aimed at inducing arousal.

Critical analysis
As genres of popular literature, science fiction and fantasy often seem even more constrained than non-genre literature by their conventions of characterization and the effects that these conventions have on depictions of sexuality and gender. Sex is often linked to disgust in science fiction and horror, and plots based on sexual relationships have mainly been avoided in genre fantasy narratives. On the other hand, science fiction and fantasy can also offer more freedom than do non-genre literatures to imagine alternatives to the default assumptions of heterosexuality and masculine superiority that permeate some cultures.

In speculative fiction, extrapolation allows writers to focus not on the way things are (or were), as non-genre literature does, but on the way things could be different. It provides science fiction with a quality that Darko Suvin has called "cognitive estrangement": the recognition that what we are reading is not the world as we know it, but a world whose difference forces us to reconsider our own world with an outsider's perspective. When the extrapolation involves sexuality or gender, it can force the reader to reconsider their heteronormative cultural assumptions; the freedom to imagine societies different from real-life cultures makes science fiction an incisive tool to examine sexual bias. In science fiction, such estranging features include technologies that significantly alter sex or reproduction. In fantasy, such features include figures (for example, mythological deities and heroic archetypes) who are not limited by preconceptions of human sexuality and gender, allowing them to be reinterpreted. Science fiction has also depicted a plethora of alien methods of reproduction and sex.

Uranian Worlds, by Eric Garber and Lyn Paleo, is an authoritative guide to science fiction literature featuring gay, lesbian, transgender, and related themes. The book covers science fiction literature published before 1990 (2nd edition), providing a short review and commentary on each piece.

Themes explored
Some of the themes explored in speculative fiction include:
 * Sex with aliens, machines and sex robots
 * Reproductive technology including cloning, artificial wombs, parthenogenesis, and genetic engineering
 * Sexual equality of men and women
 * Male- and female-dominated societies, including single-gender worlds
 * Polyamory
 * Changing gender roles
 * Homosexuality and bisexuality
 * Androgyny and sex changes
 * Sex in virtual reality
 * Other advances in technology for sexual pleasure such as teledildonics
 * Asexuality
 * Mpreg, an abbreviation of male pregnancy
 * Sexual taboos and morality
 * Sex in zero gravity
 * Birth control and other, more radical measures to prevent overpopulation

Proto SF
True History, a Greek-language tale by Assyrian writer Lucian (120-185 CE), has been called the first ever science fiction story. The narrator is suddenly enveloped by a typhoon and swept up to the Moon, which is inhabited by a society of men who are at war with the Sun. After the hero distinguishes himself in combat, the king gives him his son, the prince, in marriage. The all-male society reproduces (male children only) by giving birth from the thigh or by growing a child from a plant produced by planting the left testicle in the Moon's soil.

In other proto-SF works, sex itself, of any type, was equated with base desires or "beastliness," as in Gulliver's Travels (1726), which contrasts the animalistic and overtly sexual Yahoos with the reserved and intelligent Houyhnhnms. Early works that showed sexually open characters to be morally impure include the first lesbian vampire story "Carmilla" (1872) by Sheridan Le Fanu (collected in In a Glass Darkly).

The 1915 utopian novel Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman depicts the visit by three men to an all-female society in which women reproduce by parthenogenesis.

Pulp era (1920–30s)
During the pulp era, explicit sexuality of any kind was not characteristic of genre science fiction and fantasy. The frank treatment of sexual topics of earlier literature was abandoned. For many years, the editors who controlled what was published, such as Kay Tarrant, assistant editor of Astounding Science Fiction, felt that they had to protect the adolescent male readership that they identified as their principal market. Although the covers of some 1930s pulp magazines showed scantily clad women menaced by tentacled aliens, the covers were often more lurid than the magazines' contents. Implied or disguised sexuality was as important as that which was openly revealed. In this sense, genre science fiction reflected the social mores of the day, paralleling common prejudices. This was particularly true of pulp fiction, more so than literary works of the time.

H. P. Lovecraft seminal short story, "The Call of Cthulhu", first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928, launched what developed into the Cthulhu Mythos, a shared fictional universe taken up by various other writers and considerably affecting the entire field of Fantasy. Bobby Derie's 2014 book Sex and The Cthulhu Mythos treats extensively the various sexual aspects of this Mythos:"'H. P. Lovecraft was one of the most asexual beings in history - at least by his own admission. Whether we accept this view of his own sexual instincts or not, there is no denying that sexuality - normal and aberrant - underlies a number of significant tales in the Lovecraft oeuvre. The impregnation of a human woman by Yog-Sothoth in 'The Dunwich Horror' and the mating of humans with strange creatures from the sea in 'The Shadow over Innsmouth' are only two such examples.'"Sex and The Cthulhu Mythos examines the significant uses of love, gender, and sex in the work of H. P. Lovecraft, moving on to some of his leading disciples and noting that "The work of such significant writers of the Lovecraft tradition as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Ramsey Campbell, W. H. Pugmire, and Caitlín R. Kiernan, features far more explicit sexuality than anything Lovecraft could have imagined". Finally, Derie goes on to study sexual themes in other venues, such as Lovecraftian occultism, Japanese manga and anime, and even Lovecraftian fan fiction.

In Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel Brave New World (1932), natural reproduction has been abolished, with human embryos being raised artificially in "hatcheries and conditioning centres." Recreational sex is promoted, often as a group activity; what passes for a religious ceremony consists of six men and six women meeting once a week to hold an "orgy porgy". To prepare for this life, little boys and girls are made to play sexual games with each other as part of the official curriculum in what passes for kindergartens and elementary schools. On the other hand, marriage, pregnancy, natural birth, and parenthood are considered too vulgar to be mentioned in polite conversation. An important part of the plot concerns the Savage Reservation in New Mexico, where marriage, pregnancy and motherhood are still practiced by the local Native Americans. Linda, a woman from 'civilized' London who was marooned there and sticking to her accustomed sexual mores, is persecuted as "a whore" by the local women whose husbands she seduced. John, Linda's son who grew up on the Reservation but was always alienated from its society, comes to London and there falls deeply in love with a girl - seeking a happy loving consummation with her and then violently assaulting her from jealousy when she behaves according to her society's sexual mores.

One of the earliest examples of genre science fiction that involves a challenging amount of unconventional sexual activity is Odd John (1935) by Olaf Stapledon. John is a mutant with extraordinary mental abilities who will not allow himself to be bound by many of the rules imposed by the ordinary British society of his time. The novel strongly implies that he has consensual intercourse with his mother and that he seduces an older boy who becomes devoted to him but also suffers from the affront that the relationship creates to his own morals. John eventually concludes that any sexual interaction with "normal" humans is akin to bestiality.

War with the Newts, a 1936 satirical science fiction novel by Czech author Karel Čapek, concerns the discovery in the Pacific of a sea-dwelling race, an intelligent breed of newts – who are initially enslaved and exploited by humans and later rebel and go war against them. The book includes a detailed appendix entitled 'The Sex Life of the Newts', which examines the Newts' sexuality and reproductive processes in a pastiche of academese. This is one of the first attempts to speculate on what form sex might have among non-human intelligent beings.

C.L. Moore's 1934 story "Shambleau" begins in what seems a classical damsel in distress situation: the protagonist, space adventurer Northwest Smith, sees a "sweetly-made girl" pursued by a lynch mob intent on killing her and intervenes to save her. But once he takes her to his room, she turns to be a disguised alien creature who spreads her inhuman long tendrils of hair, trapping Smith in a kind of psychic bondage and drawing out his life, and but for his partner arriving and killing her, it would have ended with his death. The story has little explicit sex, and no other physical contact than that of the hair of the "girl" with Smith's body; ye t the story clearly explores sexual themes in a way highly daring for its time.

In C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, a prominent place is given among the cast of villains to a monstrous lesbian – Miss Hardcastle, Security Chief of the satanic "Institute" which quite literally intends to take over the world. Hardcastle is presented as an inveterate sadist who takes pleasure in torturing "fluffy" young women and inflicting on them burns with a lighted cigarette.

Golden Age (1940–50s)

Regarding the aversion to sexual material in science fiction magazines well into the 1950s, Sam Moskowitz reported: "Writing in the December, 1945, Fantasy Times, Thomas S. Gardner, Ph.D., said: “Sex should be incorporated into science fiction as a standard life pattern and treated from all phases just as political systems are discussed.... But just mention sex and one has not only a figurative fight but a literal fight on his hands. Sex is very, very tabu, and can cause the most violent disagreements possible. Just why that is so is hard to understand.” G. Legman, erotica authority, presented his theory. “The reason for this [aversion to sex] is neither due to oversight nor external censorship, but the fact that the largest percentage of the audience for … pulp science fiction literature is composed of adolescent boys (who continue reading it even after they are grown up), who are terrified of women, sex, and pubic hair.” The foregoing might explain the policy that kept sex out of science fiction, but it fails to explain the absolute rejection of such material until Philip José Farmer’s The Lovers. The answer most probably is that science fiction is a literature of ideas. The people who read it are entertained and even find escape through mental stimulation. Sex, vulgar or artistic, is available to them in countless forms if they wish it, but the type of intellectual speculation they enjoy is presented only in science fiction."

As the readership for science fiction and fantasy began to age in the 1950s, writers were able to introduce more explicit sexuality into their work.

William Tenn wrote in 1949 Venus and the Seven Sexes – featuring the Plookhs, natives of the planet Venus, who require the participation of seven different sexes in order to reproduce and who get corrupted by human film director Hogan Shlestertrap. The rather satirical story might be the first case of an author speculating of creatures having more than two sexes, an idea later taken up by various others.

Philip José Farmer wrote The Lovers (1952), arguably the first science fiction story to feature sex as a major theme, and Strange Relations (1960), a collection of five stories about human/alien sexual relations. In his novel Flesh (1960; expanded 1968), a hypermasculine antlered man ritually impregnates legions of virgins in order to counter declining male fertility. Theodore Sturgeon wrote many stories that emphasised the importance of love regardless of the current social norms, such as The World Well Lost (1953), a classic tale involving alien homosexuality, and the novel Venus Plus X (1960), in which a contemporary man awakens in a futuristic place where the people are hermaphrodites.

When Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters was originally published in 1951, it was censored by the publisher to remove various references to sex. The opening scene, where the protagonist is called urgently to HQ on an early morning hour, was re-written to remove all mention of his being in bed with a girl he had casually picked up. The published version did mention that the book's alien invaders cause human beings whose bodies they take over to lose sexual feeling – but removed a later section mentioning that after some time on Earth the invaders "discovered sex" and started engaging in wild orgies and even broadcasting them on TV in areas under their control. Thirty years later, with changing mores, Heinlein published the book's full, unexpurgated text. Heinlein's time-travel short story All You Zombies (1959) chronicles a young man (later revealed to be intersex) taken back in time and tricked into impregnating his younger, female self before he underwent a sex change. He then turns out to be the offspring of that union, with the paradoxical result that he is both his own mother and father. In Time Enough for Love (1973), Heinlein's recurring protagonist Lazarus Long – who never grows old and has an extremely long and eventful life – travels backward in time to the period of his own childhood. As an unintentional result, he falls in love with his own mother. He has no guilt feeling about pursuing and eventually consummating that relationship – considering her simply as an extremely attractive young woman named Maureen who just happens to have given birth to him thousands of years ago (as far as his personal timeline is concerned). The sequel, To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987) takes place after Maureen had discovered the true identity of her lover – and shows that for her part, she was more amused than shocked or angry. Poul Anderson's 1958 novel War of the Wing-Men, centers on a species of winged intelligent creatures and sexual differences are central to its plot. Of the two mutually-hostile societies featured in the book, one practices monogamous marriage, while in the other there are every spring several days of a wild indiscriminate orgy – and a complete celibacy for the rest of the year. Ironically, both societies alike consider themselves chaste and the other depraved: "We keep faithful to our mates while they fuck around indiscriminately – disgusting!"; "We keep sex where it belongs, to one week per year where you are not really yourself. They do it all over the year- disgusting!". Humans who land on the planet intervene in the centuries-long war, by showing members of the two societies that they are not all that different from each other.

Another Poul Anderson novel of the same period, Virgin Planet (1959), deals in a straightforward manner with homosexuality and polyamory on an exclusively female world. The plot twist is that the protagonist is the only male on a world of women, and though quite a few of them are interested in sex with him, it is never consummated during his sojourn on the planet.

A mirror image was presented by A. Bertram Chandler in Spartan Planet (1969), featuring an exclusively male world, where by definition homosexual relations are the normal (and only) sexual relations. The plot revolves around the explosive social upheaval resulting when the planet is discovered by a spaceship from the wider galaxy, whose crew includes both men and women.

Until the late 1960s, few other writers depicted alternative sexuality or revised gender roles, nor openly investigated sexual questions.

More conventionally, A. Bertram Chandler's books include numerous episodes of free fall sex, his characters (male and female alike) strongly prone to extramarital relations and tending to while away the boring months-long Deep Space voyages by forming complicated love triangles.

New Wave era (1960–70s)
By the late 1960s, science fiction and fantasy began to reflect the changes prompted by the civil rights movement and the emergence of a counterculture. Within the genres, these changes were incorporated into a movement called "the New Wave," a movement more skeptical of technology, more liberated socially, and more interested in stylistic experimentation. New Wave writers were more likely to claim an interest in "inner space" instead of outer space. They were less shy about explicit sexuality and more sympathetic to reconsiderations of gender roles and the social status of sexual minorities. Notable authors who often wrote on sexual themes included Joanna Russ, Thomas M. Disch, John Varley, James Tiptree, Jr., and Samuel R. Delany. Under the influence of New Wave editors and authors such as Michael Moorcock (editor of the influential New Worlds magazine) and Ursula K. Le Guin, sympathetic depictions of alternative sexuality and gender multiplied in science fiction and fantasy, becoming commonplace.

In Brian Aldiss's 1960 novel The Interpreter (in the US published as Bow Down to Nul), Earth is a backwater colony planet in the galactic empire of the Nuls, a giant, three-limbed, civilised alien race. The plot, dealing with complicated relations between humans and their Nul rulers, touches among other things on Nul sex. The Nul wear no clothes, but their equivalent of hands and arms are wide membranes which are normally held in a fixed position before the body, not moving even when the "fingers" are manipulating a tool. Only in a sexual context are the hands moved aside, to reveal the genital organs behind – the equivalent of humans undressing. In one scene, the human protagonist is able to tune to an erotic (or pornographic) Nul sensory device, made for internal Nul consumption and not intended for humans, which replicates the wild ecstasy felt by Nuls when daring to move aside their membrane hands and reveal their bodies to each other – similar in some ways to human sexual arousal but also very different.

Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966) both depict heterosexual group marriages and public nudity as desirable social norms, while in Heinlein's Time Enough for Love (1973), the main character argues strongly for the future liberty of homosexual sex. Heinlein's character Lazarus Long, travelling back in time to the period of his own childhood, discovers, to his surprise and (initial) shame, a sexual desire of his own mother – but overcoming this initial shame, he comes to think of her simply as "Maureen", an attractive young woman who is far from indifferent to him.

Samuel R. Delany's Nebula Award-winning short story Aye, and Gomorrah (1967) posits the development of neutered human astronauts, and then depicts the people who become sexually oriented toward them. By imagining a new gender and resultant sexual orientation, the story allows readers to reflect on the real world while maintaining an estranging distance. In his 1975 science fiction novel entitled Dhalgren, Delany colors his large canvas with characters of a wide variety of sexualities. Once again, sex is not the focus of the novel, although it does contain some of the first explicitly described scenes of gay sex in science fiction. Delany depicts, mostly with affection, characters with a wide variety of motivations and behaviours, with the effect of revealing to the reader the fact that these kinds of people exist in the real world. In later works, Delany blurs the line between science fiction and gay pornography. Delany faced resistance from book distribution companies for his treatment of these topics.

In 1968, Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight launched the Dragonriders of Pern series, depicting the lives of humans living in close partnership with dragons. In a key scene, the young golden Dragon Queen takes off on her mating flight, pursued by the male dragons – until finally one of them catches up with her and they engage in passionate mating high up in the air, their necks and wings curled around each other. On the ground the woman and man who are these dragons' riders share their passion telepathically – and inevitably wildly embrace and kiss, embarking in parallel human mating.

Ursula K. Le Guin explores radically alternative forms of sexuality in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and again in Coming of Age in Karhide (1995), which imagine the sexuality of an alien "human" species in which individuals are neither "male" nor "female," but undergo a monthly sexual cycle in which they randomly experience the activation of either male or female sexual organs and reproductive abilities; this makes them in a sense bisexual, and in other senses androgynous or hermaphroditic. It is common for an individual of that species to undergo at some moment of life pregnancy and birth-giving, while at another time having the male role and impregnating somebody else. In the novel, the Genthian political leader, who appears externally male, becomes pregnant.

Le Guin has written considerations of her own work in two essays, "Is Gender Necessary?" (1976) and "Is Gender Necessary? Redux" (1986), which respond to feminist and other criticism of The Left Hand of Darkness. In these essays, she makes it clear that the novel's assumption that Gethenians would automatically find a mate of the gender opposite to the gender they were becoming produced an unintended heteronormativity. Le Guin has subsequently written many stories that examine the possibilities science fiction allows for non-traditional sexuality, such as the sexual bonding between clones in Nine Lives (1968) and the four-way marriages in Mountain Ways (1996).

The complicated plot of Roger Zelazny's 1970 fantasy novel The Guns of Avalon includes the protagonist Corwin meeting and making love to Dara, who seems a normal (and very attractive) young woman. But at the end of the book, when she walks the powerfully magical "Pattern" she is changing, her hair "crackling with static electricity" and then she seems to grow horns and hoofs, then becomes an enormous cat, then "a bright winged thing of indescribable beauty" followed by "a tower of ashes". Finally, she again becomes a recognizable Dara, but "tall and magnificent, both beautiful and somehow horrible at the same time, her arms raised in exultation and inhuman laughter flowing from her lips". Shocked, Corwin wonders "had I truly held, caressed, made love to - that?". While Corwin struggles with feeling mightily repelled and simultaneously attracted as never before, the changed Dara declares herself his mortal enemy and nemesis - and disappears. Zelazny's publishers had no problem with this final scene and its ambiguous sexual connotations, but they did object to an earlier sex scene - straightforward but explicit by 1970s American publishing standards - between Corwin and the seemingly normal Dara. Zelazny was amused when the book's editor asked him to remove it "so that sales to libraries would not be jeopardized". That deleted scene has never appeared with the novel, even in later editions when mores had become more elastic, but has been printed for the first time in The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, Volume 3: This Mortal Mountain.

In his 1972 novel The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov describes an alien race with three sexes, all of them necessary for sexual reproduction. One sex produces a form of sperm, another sex provides the energy needed for reproduction, and members of the third sex bear and raise the offspring. All three genders are included in sexual and social norms of expected and acceptable behavior. In this same novel, the hazards and problems of sex in microgravity are described, and while people born on the Moon are proficient at it, people from Earth are not.

Similarly, Poul Anderson's Three Worlds to Conquer depicts centaur-like beings living on Jupiter who have three genders: female, male and "demi-male". In order to conceive, a female must have sex with both a male and a demi-male within a short time of each other. In the society of the protagonist, there are stable, harmonious three-way families, in effect a formalized Menage a Trois, with the three partners on equal terms with each other. An individual in that society feels a strong attachment to all three parents – mother, father and demi-father – who all take part in bringing up the young. Conversely, among the harsh invaders who threaten to destroy the protagonist's homeland and culture, males are totally dominant over both females and demi-males; the latter are either killed at birth or preserved in subjugation for reproduction – which the protagonist regards as a barbaric aberration.

In Anderson's satirical story A Feast for the Gods, the Greek god Hermes visits modern America and has casual sex with an American woman, who tells him that she is "on the pill" and does not take seriously Hermes telling her that "The Embrace of a God is always fertile". She ends up pregnant and destined to give birth to a modern demi god.

Feminist science fiction authors imagined cultures in which homo- and bisexuality and a variety of gender models are the norm. Joanna Russ's award-winning short story "When It Changed" (1972), portraying a female-only lesbian society that flourished without men, and her novel The Female Man (1975), were enormously influential. Russ was largely responsible for introducing radical lesbian feminism into science fiction.

The bisexual female writer Alice Bradley Sheldon, who used James Tiptree, Jr. as her pen name, explored the sexual impulse as her main theme. Some stories by Tiptree portray humans becoming sexually obsessed with aliens, such as "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" (1972), or aliens being sexually abused. The Girl Who Was Plugged In (1973) is an early precursor of cyberpunk that depicts a relationship via a cybernetically controlled body. In her award-winning novella Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (1976), Tiptree presents a female-only society after the extinction of men from disease. The society lacks stereotypically "male" problems such as war but is stagnant. The women reproduce via cloning, and consider men to be comical.

In Robert Silverberg's novelette The Way to Spook City the protagonist meets and has an affair with a woman named Jill, who seems completely human – and convincingly, passionately female human. Increasingly in love with her, he still has a nagging suspicion that she is in fact a disguised member of the mysterious extraterrestrial species known as "Spooks", who had invaded and taken over a large part of the United States. Until the end, he repeatedly grapples with two questions: Is she human or a Spook? And if she is a Spook, could the two of them nevertheless build a life together?

In the centuries-long, futile space war described in Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, the protagonist's increasing feeling of alienation is manifested, among other things, when he is appointed as the commanding officer of a "strike force" whose soldiers are exclusively homosexual, and who resent being commanded by a heterosexual. Later in the book, he finds that while he was fighting in space, humanity has begun to clone itself, resulting in a new, collective species calling itself simply Man. Luckily for the protagonist, Man has established several colonies of old-style, heterosexual humans, just in case the evolutionary change proves to be a mistake. In one of these colonies, the protagonist is happily reunited with his long-lost beloved and they embark upon monogamous marriage and on having children through sexual reproduction and female pregnancy – an incredibly archaic and old-fashioned way of life for most of that time's humanity.

Elizabeth A. Lynn's science fiction novel A Different Light (1978) features a same-sex relationship between two men and inspired the name of the LGBT bookstore chain A Different Light. Lynn's The Chronicles of Tornor (1979–80) series of novels, the first of which won the World Fantasy Award, were among the first fantasy novels to include gay relationships as an unremarkable part of the cultural background. Lynn also wrote novels depicting sadomasochism.

John Varley, who also came to prominence in the 1970s, is another writer who examined sexual themes in his work. In his "Eight Worlds" suite of stories and novels, humanity has achieved the ability to change sex quickly, easily and completely reversibly – leading to a casual attitude with people changing their sex back and forth as the sudden whim takes them. Homophobia is shown as initially inhibiting the uptake of this technology, as it engenders drastic changes in relationships, with bisexuality becoming the default mode for society. Sexual themes are central to the story "Options": a married woman, Cleo, living in King City, undergoes a change to male despite her husband's objections. As "Leo" she finds out what it means to be a man in her society and even becomes her husband's best friend. She also learns that people are adopting new names that are historically neither male nor female. She eventually returns to female as "Nile". Varley's Gaea trilogy (1979-1984) features lesbian protagonists.

Female characters in science fiction films, such as Barbarella (1968), continued to be often portrayed as simple sex kittens.

Modern SF (post-New Wave)
After the pushing back of boundaries in the 1960s and 70s, sex in genre science fiction gained wider acceptance and was often incorporated into otherwise conventional science fiction stories with little comment.

In 1968 Jack Vance introduced the Planet of Adventure, inhabited by four different alien races, each with its own distinct society and culture. One of these – the predatory, part feline, part bird-like Dirdir – is described as having a very complex sexuality, with many different genders that leads to many different combinations of gender-compatibility when it comes to sex and breeding, though each breeding still seems to involve only two individuals.

Jack L. Chalker's Well World series, launched in 1977, depicts a world – designed by the super science of a vanished extraterrestrial race, the Markovians – which is divided into numerous "hexes", each inhabited by different sentient race. Anyone entering one of these hexes is transformed into a member of the local race. This plot device gives a wide scope for exploring the divergent biology and cultures of the various species – including their sex life. For example, a human entering a hex inhabited by an insectoid intelligent race is transformed into a female of that species, feels sexual desire for a male and mates with him. Too late does she discover that in this species, pregnancy is fatal – the mother being devoured from the inside by her larvae.

In a later part, a very macho villain gains control of a supercomputer whose power includes the ability to "redesign" people's bodies to almost any specification. He uses the computer to give himself a "super-virile" body, capable of a virtually unlimited number of erections and ejaculations – and then proceeds to transform his male enemies into beautiful women and induce in them a strong sexual desire towards himself. However, a computer breakdown restores to these captives their normal minds. Though they are still in women's bodies, these bodies were designed with great strength and stamina, so as to enable them to undergo repeated sexual encounters. Thus, they are well-equipped to chase, catch and suitably punish their abuser.

In Frederik Pohl's Jem, humans exploring the eponymous planet Jem discover by experience that local beings emit a milt which has a strong aphrodisiac effect on humans. Characters who were hitherto not at all drawn to each other find themselves suddenly involved in wild, uncontrollable sex. At the ironic ending, their descendants who colonize the planet and build up a distinctive society and culture develop the custom of celebrating Christmas by deliberately stimulating the local beings into emitting the milt, and then taking off their clothes and engaging in a wild indiscriminate orgy – their copulations accompanied by a chorus of the planet's enslaved indigenous beings who were taught to sing "Good King Wenceslas", with the song's Christian significance long forgotten.

Also set on an alien planet, Octavia E. Butler's acclaimed short story "Bloodchild" (1984) depicts the complex relationship between human refugees and the insect-like aliens who keep them in a preserve to protect them, but also to use them as hosts for breeding their young. Sometimes called Butler's "pregnant man story," "Bloodchild" won the Nebula Award, Hugo Award, and Locus Award. Other of Butler's works explore miscegenation, non-consensual sex, and hybridity.

In Robert Silverberg's 1982 novella Homefaring, the protagonist enters the mind of an intelligent lobster of the very far future and experiences all aspects of lobster life, including sex: "He approached a female, knowing precisely which one was the appropriate one, and sang to her, and she acknowledged his song with a song of her own, and raised her third pair of legs for him, and let him plant his gametes beside her oviducts. There was no apparent pleasure in it, as he remembered pleasure from his time as a human. Yet it brought him a subtle but unmistakable sense of fulfillment, of the completion of biological destiny, that had a kind of orgasmic finality about it, and left him calm and anchored at the absolute dead center of his soul". When finally returning to his human body and his human lover, he keeps longing for the lobster life, to "his mate and her millions of larvae".

Quentin and Alice, the extremely shy and insecure protagonists of Lev Grossman's fantasy novel The Magicians, spend years as fellow students at a School of Magic without admitting to being deeply in love with each other. Only the experience of being magically turned into foxes enables them at last to break through their reserve: "Increasingly, Quentin noticed one scent more than the others. It was a sharp, acrid, skunky musk that probably would have smelled like cat piss to a human being, but to a fox it was like a drug. He tackled the source of the smell, buried his snuffling muzzle in her fur, because he had known all along, with what was left of his consciousness, that what he was smelling was Alice. Vulpine hormones and instincts were powering up, taking over, manhandling what was left of his rational human mind."

The next sequence depicts animal sex: "He locked his teeth in the thick fur of her neck. It didn't seem to hurt her any, or at least not in a way that was easily distinguishable from pleasure. He caught a glimpse of Alice's wild, dark fox eyes rolling with terror and then half shutting with pleasure. Their tiny quick breathes puffed white in the air and mingled and disappeared. Her white fox fur was coarse and smooth at the same time, and she made little yipping sounds every time he pushed himself deeper inside her. He never wanted to stop". When resuming their human bodies, Quentin and Alice are initially even more shy and awkward with each other, and only after going through some harrowing magical experiences are they finally able to have human sex.

Lois McMaster Bujold explores many areas of sexuality in the multiple award-winning novels and stories of her Vorkosigan Saga (1986-ongoing), which are set in a fictional universe influenced by the availability of uterine replicators and significant genetic engineering. These areas include an all-male society, promiscuity, monastic celibacy, hermaphroditism, and bisexuality.

In the Mythopoeic Award-winning novel Unicorn Mountain (1988), Michael Bishop includes a gay male AIDS patient among the carefully drawn central characters who must respond to an irruption of dying unicorns at their Colorado ranch. The death of the hedonistic gay culture, and the safe sex campaign resulting from the AIDS epidemic, are explored, both literally and metaphorically.

Sex has a major role in Harry Turtledove's 1990 novel A World of Difference, taking place on the planet Minerva (a more habitable analogue of Mars). Minervan animals (including the sentient Minervans) are hexameristically radially symmetrical. This means that they have six eyes spaced equally all around, see in all directions and have no "back" where somebody could sneak on them unnoticed. Females (referred to as "mates" by the Minervans) give birth to litters that consist of one male and five females, and the "mates" always die after reproducing because of torrential bleeding from the places where the six fetuses were attached; this gives a population multiplication of 5 per generation if all females live to adolescence and reproduce.

Females reach puberty while still hardly out of childhood, and typically experience sex only once in the lifetime – leading to pregnancy and death at birth-giving. Thus, in Minervan society male dominance seems truly determined by a biological imperative – though it takes different forms in various Minervan societies: in some females are considered expendable and traded as property, in other they are cherished and their tragic fate mourned – but still, their dependent status is taken for granted. The American women arriving on Minerva and discovering this situation consider it intolerable; a major plot element is their efforts, using the resources of Earth medical science, to find a way of saving the Minervan females and letting them survive birth-giving. At the end, they do manage to save a particularly sympathetic Minervan female – potentially opening the way for a complete upheaval in Minervan society.

Sex is also an important ingredient in another of Harry Turtledove's works, the Worldwar Series of Alternative History, based on the premise of reptile extraterrestrials, nicknamed "The Lizards", invading Earth in 1942, forcing humans to terminate the Second World War and unite against this common enemy. As depicted by Turtledove, the "Lizards" have no concept whatever that sex ought to be private, and they engage in it in public as in any other activity. This leads to human beings in areas occupied by them feeling shocked and outraged by the "immorality" of their new masters - especially that the invaders, preferring hot climates, prioritize conquest of the Arab and Islamic countries. For their part, the invaders are genuinely puzzled by the Humans' insistence on having privacy for sex and their outrage when reptile warriors walk in on them when engaged in it. As gradually becomes clear, on their home planet, the "Lizards" have a clearly defined mating season, when normal activity ceases and they engage in a days-long, indiscriminate orgy; as their young can fend for themselves from the moment of hatching from the egg, there is no of parental care and they have no marriages or families, and thus there is no reason to establish paternity. Outside the mating season, sex does not occur among them and does not concern them. However, when arriving on Earth they soon discover that ginger, an innocuous spice to humans, acts as a powerful narcotic on the invaders' physiology - and that it causes their females to become sexually active and emit pheromones, out of the normal season. This causes an unaccustomed disruption of their daily activity, with females who had taken ginger suddenly becoming sexual, males and females then feeling compelled to immediately engage in mating before they could resume their daily work. This also arises the phenomenon of females deliberately taking ginger in return for payment - prostitution having been completely unknown in their society before their arrival on Earth.

In the far future human colony of Frederik Pohl's The World at the End of Time, the common way to produce new humans is for a geneticist to take DNA samples from two or more "parents" – regardless of their being male or female. The DNA is then combined in a laboratory, and the parents arrive to pick up the baby nine months later. The few couples who prefer to do it in the old fashioned way, a man sexually impregnating a woman, are considered strange but harmless eccentrics.

Glory Season (1993) by David Brin is set on the planet Stratos, inhabited by a strain of human beings designed to conceive clones in winter, and normal children in summer. All clones are female, because males cannot reproduce themselves individually. Further, males and females have opposed seasons of sexual receptivity; women are sexually receptive in winter, and men in summer. (This unusual heterogamous reproductive cycle is known to be evolutionarily advantageous for some species of aphids.) The novel treats themes of separatist feminism and biological determinism.

Elizabeth Bear's novel Carnival (2006) revisits the trope of the single-gender world, as a pair of gay male ambassador-spies attempt to infiltrate and subvert the predominately lesbian civilization of New Amazonia, whose matriarchal rulers have all but enslaved their men.

The fantasy world of Scott Lynch's 2007 Red Seas Under Red Skies offers a new variation on the long-established genre of pirate literature – depicting a pirate ship which is run on the basis of complete gender equality. The pirate crew is composed of a roughly equal number of men and women, and crew members may freely engage in sex – homosexual or heterosexual, as they choose – when off duty. Since shipboard life offers little chance of privacy, the sound of people having a noisy orgasm is a normal part of night time routine on board the Poison Orchid.

However, any attempt at a sexual act without the other person's sexual consent is punished immediately and severely. The formidable Captain Zamira Drakasha is raising her two children aboard, and is well able to combine being a deadly fighter and strict disciplinarian with her role as a loving and doting mother – but having children aboard is a privilege reserved to the Captain alone; other female pirates who get pregnant must leave their children on shore.

The plot of The Tamír Triad by Lynn Flewelling has a major transsexual element. To begin with the protagonist, Prince Tobin, is to all appearances a male – both in his own perception and in that of others. Boys who swim naked together with Tobin have no reason to doubt his male anatomy. Yet, due to the magical reasons which are an important part of the plot, in the underlying, essential identity Tobin had always been a disguised girl. In the series' cataclysmic scene of magical change, this becomes an evident physical fact, and Prince Tobin becomes Queen Tamír, shedding the male body and gaining a fully functioning female one. Yet, it takes Tamír a considerable time and effort to come to terms with her female sexuality.

In Lateral Magazine, The freedom of a genre: Sexuality in speculative fiction:"In another twist of today's society, Nontraditional Love by Rafael Grugman (2008) puts together an upside-down society where heterosexuality is outlawed, and homosexuality is the norm. A 'traditional' family unit consists of two dads with a surrogate mother. Alternatively, two mothers, one of whom bares a child. In a nod to the always-progressive Netherlands, this country is the only country progressive enough to allow opposite sex marriage. This is perhaps the most obvious example of cognitive estrangement. It puts the reader in the shoes of the oppressed by modelling an entire world of opposites around a fairly 'normal' everyday heterosexual protagonist. A heterosexual reader would not only be able to identify with the main character but be immersed in a world as oppressive and bigoted as the real world has been for homosexuals and the queer community throughout history."The 2018 Fantasy novel Stone Unturned, set in Lawrence Watt-Evans' magical world of Ethshar, begins with the young wizard Morvash of the Shadows discovering that some of the statues in his uncle's house were real people turned to stone, and sets out to do the right thing. What Morvash considered the most disturbing of these statues "was hidden away in a sort of marble grotto in the garden behind the house, and depicted a young man and a young woman in what might politely be called an intimate embrace, or a compromising position. They were not in the sort of elegant pose that artists use for erotica, with graceful lines displaying the female's curves and the male's muscles. They were in an earthier position. The woman — a girl, really — was on her back, with her knees drawn up to her chest and her head raised as her blank stone eyes stared perpetually at the man's belly. Her mouth was open as if panting. Her partner was kneeling between her legs, leaning forward over her, one hand grabbing her shoulder, the other occupied elsewhere. His eyes were closed, but his mouth was also open; Morvash thought it was more of a moan than a pant. He could almost smell the sweat. Neither wore any clothing whatsoever, nor were there any artfully-placed draperies or fig leaves to obscure the details. Had the wizard responsible for this petrifaction timed it deliberately, or had he caught them in this position by accident?"

Eventually, it turns out that the couple were Prince Marek of Melitha and Darissa the Witch's Apprentice, who had fallen deeply in love with each other during a war that threatened their kingdom and who sought to celebrate victory with a bout of intensive love-making in the privacy of the Prince's bedchamber – but were surprised and turned into stone by a wizard in the employ of the Prince's envious sister, who sought to seize the throne. Afterwards, the couple spent forty petrified years, dimly conscious, perpetually caught in their sexual act and forming a prized item in Lord Landessin's sculpture collection. When the wizard Morvash finally manages to bring them back to life, they find themselves lying on the floor in a big hall, surrounded by various other people who were also revived from petrifaction, and hasten to disengage and look for something to cover their nakedness. After various other adventures, they finally get married and fully clothed mount the throne of Melitha as King and Queen.


text:
Kansas City Knights

The Kansas City Knights was the name of an American Basketball Association minor league basketball team based in Kansas City, Missouri. They have not played since the 2004–05 season.

Franchise history
The Knights were one of the ABA's charter franchises and began play during the 2000–01 season. In 2001–02, the following season, the Knights posted a league best 35–5 record that year and ended up winning the ABA championship under head coach and University of Kansas alumnus Kevin Pritchard.

Soon after winning the title, the ABA took the year off to re-organize. The ABA then resumed play in the 2003–2004 season. The Knights competed in the ABA for the 2003–04 and the 2004-05 seasons before going dark for 2005–06. It was announced via a press release on the team's website that the team would suspend operations until a suburban arena was built in Johnson County, KS. The team intended to play at an interim location once ground was broken on the new arena, but plans for the arena remain in limbo and there has been no word from the team's owners since. However, operation of the youth developmental "Knights Academy" program is ongoing.

Since the Knights folded, several ABA teams have appeared and disappeared in the Kansas City area. None of these teams are related to the Knights or have been as successful. The most recent ABA team in the Kansas City area was the Kansas City Soul, who folded in 2014.

Players of note

 * Jason Sasser
 * Nick Bradford
 * Antoine Carr
 * Maurice Carter
 * Joe Crispin
 * Eddie Gill
 * Anthony Goldwire
 * Derek "Buck" Grimm
 * Pete Mickeal
 * Ryan Sears
 * Paul Shirley
 * Doug Smith
 * David Vanterpool
 * Rex Walters
 * Jeff Boschee
 * Jeff Graves
 * Daniel Coulson

 * Ernest Brown

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Kansas City Knights


text:
Emery Worldwide Airlines

Emery Worldwide Airlines was the cargo airline subsidiary of U.S. based Emery Worldwide, and “one of the nation's major cargo airlines”.

History
Emery Worldwide Airlines began operations in the early 1980s with a fleet composed mainly of Boeing 727 and Douglas DC-8 freighter aircraft. It flew scheduled nighttime routes to and from Emery Worldwide’s freight sortation hub in Dayton, OH, and connecting flights to Emery's European hub in Maastricht, Netherlands.

Two of its cargo planes crashed in early 2000. Flight 17 crashed on February 16, killing its 3 crew members, and on April 26, another of its jets crash-landed in Nashville, TN. Both crashes were attributed to improper maintenance.

Following an FAA investigation that discovered more than 100 violations of safety regulations, Emery Worldwide Airlines had its planes grounded on August 13, 2001. It officially ceased operating on December 5, 2001.

At the time of its closing, Emery Worldwide Airlines operated 37 freighter aircraft, including Douglas DC-8 and DC-10 aircraft.

Fleet

Emery Worldwide Airlines had in the past operated the following aircraft:

Accidents and incidents

 * May 3, 1991: A Boeing 727 crew had to abort mid-takeoff roll at Bradley International Airport in Connecticut when an engine compressor disk came loose destroying the engine nacelle and severing oil, hydraulic, and fuel lines. The resulting fire consumed the plane and cargo. 3 crew members were on board. No fatalities.
 * December 9, 1996: A Douglas C-47A (registered N75142) crashed on an emergency return approach to Boise Airport in Idaho, killing both crew. Contracted by Desert Air, it was on a cargo flight to its base in Salt Lake City when the starboard engine caught fire shortly after take-off and the decision was made to return to Boise.
 * February 16, 2000: Flight 17, a Douglas DC-8-71F (registered N8079U) crashed on take-off on a scheduled cargo flight from Sacramento Mather Airport in California with three crew members aboard. Bound for Dayton, Ohio, the aircraft was destroyed by impact forces and post-crash fire; there were no survivors.  The accident was caused by improper maintenance.
 * April 26, 2001: A Douglas DC-8-71F (registered N8076U) landed with a left main landing gear up at Nashville International Airport in Tennessee. The aircraft sustained minor damage and the three-member crew was not injured. Post-accident investigation found improper maintenance to the left main landing gear was at fault.

title: Emery Worldwide Airlines


text:
Bituminous coal

Bituminous coal, or black coal, is a type of coal containing a tar-like substance called bitumen or asphalt. Its coloration can be black or sometimes dark brown; often there are well-defined bands of bright and dull material within the seams. It is typically hard but friable. Its quality is ranked higher than lignite and sub-bituminous coal, but lesser than anthracite. It is the most abundant rank of coal, with deposits found around the world, often in rocks of Carboniferous age. Bituminous coal is formed from sub-bituminous coal that is buried deeply enough to be heated to 85 C or higher.

Bituminous coal is used primarily for electrical power generation and in the steel industry. Bituminous coal suitable for smelting iron (coking coal or metallurgical coal) must be low in sulfur and phosphorus. It commands a higher price than other grades of bituminous coal (thermal coal) used for heating and power generation.

Within the coal mining industry, this type of coal is known for releasing the largest amounts of firedamp, a dangerous mixture of gases that can cause underground explosions. Extraction of bituminous coal demands the highest safety procedures involving attentive gas monitoring, good ventilation and vigilant site management.

Properties
Bituminous coal is a particular rank of coal, as determined by the amount and type of carbon present in the coal and the amount of energy it can produce when burned. It is higher in rank than sub-bituminous coal but lower in rank than anthracite. Bituminous coal is the most abundant rank of coal.

Coal rank is based on several characteristics of the coal. The fixed carbon content refers to the percentage of the coal that is neither moisture, nor ash, nor volatile matter. When evaluated on a dry, mineral-matter-free basis, the fixed carbon content is the fraction of the coal that is not volatile organic matter. An agglomerating coal is a coal that softens when heated, forming a hard, gray, porous coke that resists crushing. Vitrinite reflectance is a measure of how reflective a polished surface of an average particle of vitrinite in the coal is. It is determined by how much of the carbon has condensed to an aromatic form from the heat and pressure of deep burial.

In the United States, bituminous coal is defined as agglomerating coal yielding at least 10,500 Btu/lb (24,400 kJ/kg) of energy on combustion (on a moist, mineral-matter-free basis), with a fixed carbon content less than 86% (on a dry, mineral-matter-free basis.) Coal with a higher fixed carbon content is classified as anthracite, while agglomerating coal yielding less than 10,500 Btu/lb (24,400 kJ/kg) or nonagglomerating coal yielding less than 11,500 Btu/lb (26,700 kJ/kg) is classified as sub-bituminous coal. In the international market, bituminous coal is defined as coal with a vitrinite reflectance between 0.5 and 1.9. Vitrinite reflectance is also routinely measured for U.S. coal as a check on its rank classification

Bituminous coal is dark brown to black, hard, but friable. It is commonly composed of thin bands of alternating bright and dull material. Though bituminous coal varies in its chemical composition, a typical composition is about 84.4% carbon, 5.4% hydrogen, 6.7% oxygen, 1.7% nitrogen, and 1.8% sulfur, on a weight basis. Its bank density (the density of a coal seam prior to breaking up during mining) is about 1346 kg/m3 (84 lb/ft3) while the bulk density of extracted coal is up to 833 kg/m3 (52 lb/ft3). Bituminous coal characteristically burns with a smoky flame and softens and swells during combustion. It gets its name from this tendency to form a softened, sticky mass when heated, which reflects the presence of bitumen (mineral tar) in the coal.

Though almost all agglomerating coal is of bituminous rank, some bituminous coal is not agglomerating. Non-agglomerating bituminous coal includes cannel coal and boghead coal. These are nonbanded and nonreflective, and break with a conchoidal fracture. Both are sapropelic, in contrast with most bituminous coal, which is humic (composed of decayed woody tissue of plants). Cannel coal is composed mostly of plant spores, while boghead coal is composed mostly of nonspore algal remains.

Subranks
In the United States, bituminous coal is further divided into subranks based on its heating value and fixed carbon content.

Thus bituminous coal is divided into high-, medium-, and low-volatile categories based on fixed carbon content, and high-volatile bituminous coal is further subdivided by energy content.

ISO classification of bituminous coal is based on vitrinite reflectance. This classification divides medium rank coal (approximately equivalent to bituminous coal) into four subranks. In order of increasing rank, these are:
 * Medium D: Vitrinite reflectance of 0.5 to 0.6. Corresponds approximately to ASTM high volatile C bituminous or sub-bituminous A.
 * Medium C: Vitrinite reflectance of 0.6 to 1.0. Corresponds approximately to ASTM high volatile C to high volatile B bituminous.
 * Medium B : Vitrinite reflectance of 1.0 to 1.4. Corresponds approximately to ASTM high volatile A to medium volatile bituminous.
 * Medium A: Vitrinite reflectance of 1.4 to 2.0. Corresponds approximately to ASTM low volatile bituminous.

Uses
Bituminous coal is used primarily for electrical power generation and in the manufacture of steel.

Coking coal

Coking coal (metallurgical coal or "met coal") is used in the manufacture of steel. A good coking coal must have excellent agglomeration properties, a high carbon content, and a low content of sulfur, phosphorus, and ash. The best unblended coking coal is high quality medium-volatile bituminous coal. However, since single coals with all the necessary properties are scarce, coking coal is usually a blend of high-volatile bituminous coal with lesser amounts of medium- and low-volatile bituminous coal.

Smithing coal is bituminous coal of the highest quality, as free of ash and sulfur as possible, used to manufacture coke for use by blacksmiths.

Coking coal commands a higher price than coal used for energy production. , coking coal in the U.S. sold for about $$127 short ton$, compared with $$50.05$ for bituminous coal generally. The cost of coking coal is about 3.5 times as high as the cost of coal used for electrical power (which includes lower ranks of coal, such sub-bituminous coal and lignite, as well as noncoking bituminous coal.)

Thermal coal
Bituminous coal which lacks the qualities required for use as metallurgical coal is graded as thermal coal. This is used primarily for electrical power generation. The ideal thermal coal is easily ignited but has a high heat content.

Activated carbon
Bituminous coal is used for the production of activated carbon. The coal is first coked, removing volatiles, then steam treated to activate it. Chemical processes for activating coke produced from bituminous coal have also been investigated.

Origin
Like other ranks of coal, bituminous coal forms from thick accumulations of dead plant material that are buried faster than they can decay. This usually takes place in peat bogs, where falling plant debris is submerged in standing water. The stagnant water excludes oxygen, creates an acidic environment, and slows decay. The dead plant material is converted to peat.

Peat is mostly a mixture of cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin that originally made up the woody tissue of the plants. Lignin has a weight composition of about 54% carbon, 6% hydrogen, and 30% oxygen, while cellulose has a weight composition of about 44% carbon, 6% hydrogen, and 49% oxygen. Bituminous coal has a composition of about 84.4% carbon, 5.4% hydrogen, 6.7% oxygen, 1.7% nitrogen, and 1.8% sulfur, on a weight basis. This implies that chemical processes during coalification remove most of the oxygen and much of the hydrogen, leaving carbon, a process called carbonization.

During coalification, the maturing coal increases in carbon content, decreases in hydrogen and volatiles, increases in its heating value, and becomes darker and more lustrous. Chemical changes include dehydration (which removes oxygen and hydrogen as water), decarboxylation (which removes oxygen as carbon dioxide), and demethanation (which removes hydrogen as methane). By the time the coal reaches bituminous rank, most dehydration and decarboxylation has already taken place, and maturation of bituminous coal is characterized by demethanation. During coalification at bituminous rank, coal approaches its maximum heating value and begins to lose most of its volatile content.

As carbonization proceeds, aliphatic compounds (carbon compounds characterized by chains of carbon atoms) are replaced by aromatic compounds (carbon compounds characterized by rings of carbon atoms) and aromatic rings begin to fuse into polyaromatic compounds (linked rings of carbon atoms). The structure increasingly resembles graphene, the structural element of graphite. This is accompanied by an increase in vitrinite reflectance, used to assess coal rank.

During coalification, the pressure of burial reduces the volume of the original peat by a factor of 30 as it is converted to coal. However, the increase in rank of maturing coal mostly reflects the maximum temperature the coal reaches. Neither the maximum pressure, nor the nature of the original plant material, nor the length of burial is nearly as important. The temperature range for maturation of bituminous coal is from 85 to 235 C. The bitumen that characterizes bituminous coal forms under approximately the same conditions at which petroleum is formed in petroleum source rocks. Bituminization is accompanied by peak methane generation in medium to low volatile bituminous coal. This makes these bituminous coals "gassy" and precautions must be taken against methane explosions. If the coal reaches temperatures above about 235 C, bitumen breaks down (debituminization) and the coal matures to anthracite.

Occurrence and production
Coal deposits are widely distributed worldwide, and range in age from the Devonian (about 360 to 420 million years ago) to Neogene deposits just a few million years old. However, 90% of all coal beds were deposited in the Carboniferous and Permian periods, which represent just 2% of the Earth's geologic history. Vast deposits of coal formed in wetlands—called coal forests—that covered much of the Earth's tropical land areas during the late Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian) and Permian times. Bituminous coal is predominantly Carboniferous in age.

Most bituminous coal in the United States is between 100 and 300 million years old. Vast deposits of bituminous coal of Pennsylvanian age is found in the Appalachian and Interior Provinces of North America. Mining is done via both surface and underground mines. Historically, the many seams scattered over rugged terrain in the Appalachians have been conducive to mining by small companies, while the great extent and gentle dip of beds further west favors very large-scale operations. The Appalachian coal is notably low in sulfur and is often of metallurgical grade, while the Interior Province coal is much higher in sulfur.

The belt of Carboniferous coal fields extends into central Europe, and much of this is bituminous coal. Bituminous coal fields are found in Poland and the Czech Republic, and the Polish deposits are one of the most important of that nation's natural resources. The Czech deposits have been exploited since prehistoric times. The European deposits include the Coal Measures of Britain, which account for most of Britain's coal production and which are mostly bituminous coal. The Westfield coal basin is the largest in Britain. Other significant bituminous coal deposits are found through much of Europe, including France, Germany, and northern Italy.

Coal deposition was interrupted by the Permian-Triassic extinction event, but resumed later in the Permian. Extensive bituminous coal deposits of Permian age are found in Siberia, east Asia, and Australia. These include the Minusinsky coal basin in Siberia, the Queensland, Bowen, and Sydney Basins in Australia, and the extensive bituminous coal reserves of China.

A second peak in coal deposition began in the Cretaceous, though most of this is lower rank coal rather than bituminous. In the United States, Cretaceous bituminous coals occur in Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. In Canada, the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin of Alberta and British Columbia hosts major deposits of bituminous coal that formed in swamps along the western margin of the Western Interior Seaway. They range in age from latest Jurassic or earliest Cretaceous in the Mist Mountain Formation, to Late Cretaceous in the Gates Formation. The Intermontane and Insular Coalfields of British Columbia also contain deposits of Cretaceous bituminous coal.

, the countries with the greatest estimated ultimately recoverable resources of bituminous coal were the US, 161.6 Gt; India, 99.7 Gt; China, 78.4 Gt; Australia, 51.3 Gt; South Africa, 38.7 Gt; the UK, 26.8 Gt; Germany, 25.2 Gt; Colombia, 7.8 Gt; Indonesia, 5.6 Gt; and France, 4.4 Gt

, total world production of bituminous coal (coking coal plus other bituminous coal) was 6.220 Gt. The leading producer is China, with India and the United States a distant second and third.

U.S. production of bituminous coal was 238 million short tons in 2020 and represented 44% of all U.S. coal production. Bituminous coal is mined in 18 states, but the five states of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Kentucky, and Indiana produce 74%of U.S. coal.

Hazards and their mitigation

Maturation of bituminous coal at medium and low volatile subrank is accompanied by peak methane generation. This makes these bituminous coals "gassy" and precautions must be taken against methane explosions. Imidazolium-based ionic liquid solvents can reduce spontaneous combustion, which accounts for 2 to 3 percent of global annual carbon dioxide emissions.

Bituminous coal was once extensively used for home heating in the US. However, bituminous coal is a relatively dirty fuel. The reduction in the use of bituminous coal between 1945 and 1960 is estimated to have saved at least 1,923 lives of all ages and 310 infant lives per winter month. Bituminous coal quality is improved with floatation methods, which increase the fraction of vitrinite to yield a cleaner-burning product.

The bioconversion of bituminous coal to methane is being actively researched as a clean coal technology.

title: Bituminous coal


text:
Talk:Sex and sexuality in speculative fiction

Greenwood Encyclopedia
The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy contains several theme entries that could be used/cited here as sources. Disclaimer: I am the author of a couple of the entries that I have in mind (the one on "Marriage" and the one on "Nudity"). The thematic entries in this reference work are generally pretty in good in being concise and accessible but also reasonably comprehensive. Also, each has the advantage of dealing with both SF and fantasy texts. So anyone else working on this article might be interested to look them up. Metamagician3000 (talk) 11:24, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

Robert Sheckley
I have recently read Crompton Divided, and I must say that I believe Sheckley has a large influence still felt in Science Fiction today - like Douglas Adams but a bit darker. Some of the places he went in investigating the sexual nature of beings such as in "In a Land of Clear Colours" clearly show that some of his work is worthy of including on this page as among the works of early SF writers who pushed the boundaries. I hope you will consider him for inclusion. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.17.99.251 (talk) 03:53, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Themes explored section
I've removed this. Seems unencyclopedic and OR. Still, in case it comes in handy here's the material:

Some of the themes explored include: Metamagician3000 (talk) 10:13, 16 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Sex with aliens, machines and robots
 * Reproductive technology including cloning, artificial wombs, parthenogenesis, and genetic engineering
 * Sexual equality of men and women
 * Male- and female-dominated societies, including single-gender worlds
 * Polyamory
 * Changing gender roles
 * Homosexuality and bisexuality
 * Androgyny and sex changes
 * Sex in virtual reality
 * Other advances in technology for sexual pleasure such as teledildonics
 * Asexuality
 * Male pregnancy
 * Sexual taboos and morality
 * Sex in zero gravity
 * Birth control and other, more radical measures to prevent overpopulation

 * I restored the "Themes explored" section for the spoken version of the article. I think it improves the article. This list of themes is mostly missing inline citations at present; however, examples of the themes are manifest in the remainder of the article. DivineMeaninglessness (talk) 02:11, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Sex with Aliens
Sex and Sexuality to be complete should include mention of Larry Niven's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld where the Louis Gridley Wu character spends a lot of time like a sex tourist on holidays fornicating with as many of the local evolutionary divergent bipeds including a female with a beard that he can. Now this deserves a mention! (I have heard or read of no other SciFi Novel as explicitly sexualized in this sense!) 123.2.45.31 (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 04:22, 6 January 2015 (UTC)


text:
Index fund

An index fund (also index tracker) is a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) designed to follow certain preset rules so that it can replicate the performance ("track") of a specified basket of underlying investments. While index providers often emphasize that they are for-profit organizations, index providers have the ability to act as "reluctant regulators" when determining which companies are suitable for an index.  Those rules may include tracking prominent indices like the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones Industrial Average or implementation rules, such as tax-management, tracking error minimization, large block trading or patient/flexible trading strategies that allow for greater tracking error but lower market impact costs. Index funds may also have rules that screen for social and sustainable criteria.

An index fund's rules of construction clearly identify the type of companies suitable for the fund. The most commonly known index fund in the United States, the S&P 500 Index Fund, is based on the rules established by S&P Dow Jones Indices for their S&P 500 Index. Equity index funds would include groups of stocks with similar characteristics such as the size, value, profitability and/or geographic location of the companies. A group of stocks may include companies from the United States, Non-US Developed, emerging markets or frontier market countries. Additional index funds within these geographic markets may include indexes of companies that include rules based on company characteristics or factors, such as companies that are small, mid-sized, large, small value, large value, small growth, large growth, the level of gross profitability or investment capital, real estate, or indexes based on commodities and fixed-income. Companies are purchased and held within the index fund when they meet the specific index rules or parameters and are sold when they move outside of those rules or parameters. Think of an index fund as an investment utilizing rules-based investing. Some index providers announce changes of the companies in their index before the change date whilst other index providers do not make such announcements.

The main advantage of index funds for investors is they don't require much time to manage as the investors don't have to spend time analyzing various stocks or stock portfolios. Most investors also find it difficult to beat the performance of the S&P 500 Index. Some legal scholars have previously suggested a value maximization and agency-costs theory for understanding index funds stewardship.

, index funds made up 20.2% of equity mutual fund assets in the US. Index domestic equity mutual funds and index-based exchange-traded funds (ETFs), have benefited from a trend towards more index-oriented investment products. From 2007 through 2014, index domestic equity mutual funds and ETFs received $1 trillion in new net cash, including reinvested dividends. Index-based domestic equity ETFs have grown particularly quickly, attracting almost twice the flows of index domestic equity mutual funds since 2007. In contrast, actively managed domestic equity mutual funds experienced a net outflow of $659 billion, including reinvested dividends, from 2007 to 2014. Passively managed funds, such as index funds, consistently overperform actively managed funds. Investors Warren Buffett and John C. Bogle have long been a strong proponent of Index funds.

Origins
The first theoretical model for an index fund was suggested in 1960 by Edward Renshaw and Paul Feldstein, both students at the University of Chicago. While their idea for an "Unmanaged Investment Company" garnered little support, it did start off a sequence of events in the 1960s.

Qualidex Fund, Inc., a Florida Corporation, chartered on 05/23/1967 (317247) by Richard A. Beach (BSBA Banking and Finance, University of Florida, 1957) and joined by Walton D. Dutcher Jr., filed a registration statement (2-38624) with the SEC on October 20, 1970 which became effective on July 31, 1972. "The fund organized as an open-end, diversified investment company whose investment objective is to approximate the performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Stock Average", thereby becoming the first index fund.

In 1973, Burton Malkiel wrote A Random Walk Down Wall Street, which presented academic findings for the lay public. It was becoming well known in the popular financial press that most mutual funds were not beating the market indices. Malkiel wrote:

"What we need is a no-load, minimum management-fee mutual fund that simply buys the hundreds of stocks making up the broad stock-market averages and does no trading from security to security in an attempt to catch the winners. Whenever below-average performance on the part of any mutual fund is noticed, fund spokesmen are quick to point out 'You can't buy the averages.' It's time the public could.

...there is no greater service [the New York Stock Exchange] could provide than to sponsor such a fund and run it on a nonprofit basis.... Such a fund is much needed, and if the New York Stock Exchange (which, incidentally has considered such a fund) is unwilling to do it, I hope some other institution will."

John Bogle graduated from Princeton University in 1951, where his senior thesis was titled The Economic Role of the Investment Company. Bogle wrote that his inspiration for starting an index fund came from three sources, all of which confirmed his 1951 research: Paul Samuelson's 1974 paper, "Challenge to Judgment"; Charles Ellis' 1975 study, "The Loser's Game"; and Al Ehrbar's 1975 Fortune magazine article on indexing. Bogle founded The Vanguard Group in 1974; as of 2009 it was the largest mutual fund company in the United States.

Bogle started the First Index Investment Trust on December 31, 1975. At the time, it was heavily derided by competitors as being "un-American" and the fund itself was seen as "Bogle's folly". In the first five years of Bogle's company, it made 17 million dollars. Fidelity Investments Chairman Edward Johnson was quoted as saying that he "[couldn't] believe that the great mass of investors are going to be satisfied with receiving just average returns". Bogle's fund was later renamed the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, which tracks the Standard and Poor's 500 Index. It started with comparatively meager assets of $11 million but crossed the $100 billion milestone in November 1999; this astonishing increase was funded by the market's increasing willingness to invest in such a product. Bogle predicted in January 1992 that it would very likely surpass the Magellan Fund before 2001, which it did in 2000.

John McQuown and David G. Booth of Wells Fargo, and Rex Sinquefield of the American National Bank in Chicago, established the first two Standard and Poor's Composite Index Funds in 1973. Both of these funds were established for institutional clients; individual investors were excluded. Wells Fargo started with $5 million from their own pension fund, while Illinois Bell put in $5 million of their pension funds at American National Bank. In 1971, Jeremy Grantham and Dean LeBaron at Batterymarch Financial Management "described the idea at a Harvard Business School seminar in 1971, but found no takers until 1973. Two years later, in December 1974, the firm finally attracted its first index client."

In 1981, Booth and Sinquefield started Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA), and McQuown joined its board of directors. DFA further developed indexed-based investment strategies. Vanguard started its first bond index fund in 1986.

Frederick L. A. Grauer at Wells Fargo harnessed McQuown and Booth's indexing theories, which led to Wells Fargo's pension funds managing over $69 billion in 1989 and over $565 billion in 1998. In 1996, Wells Fargo sold its indexing operation to Barclays Bank of London, which it operated under the name Barclays Global Investors (BGI). Blackrock, Inc. acquired BGI in 2009; the acquisition included BGI's index fund management (both its institutional funds and its iShares ETF business) and its active management.

Economic theory
Economist Eugene Fama said, "I take the market efficiency hypothesis to be the simple statement that security prices fully reflect all available information." A precondition for this "strong version" of the hypothesis is that information and trading costs, the costs of getting prices to reflect information, are always 0. A weaker and economically more sensible version of the efficiency hypothesis says that prices reflect information to the point where the marginal benefits of acting on information (the profits to be made) do not exceed marginal costs.

Economists cite the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) as the fundamental premise that justifies the creation of the index funds. The hypothesis implies that fund managers and stock analysts are constantly looking for securities that may out-perform the market; and that this competition is so effective that any new information about the fortune of a company will rapidly be incorporated into stock prices. It is postulated therefore that it is very difficult to tell ahead of time which stocks will out-perform the market. By creating an index fund that mirrors the whole market the inefficiencies of stock selection are avoided.

In particular, the EMH says that economic profits cannot be wrung from stock picking. This is not to say that a stock picker cannot achieve a superior return, just that the excess return will on average not exceed the costs of winning it (including salaries, information costs, and trading costs). The conclusion is that most investors would be better off buying a cheap index fund. Note that return refers to the ex-ante expectation; ex-post realisation of payoffs may make some stock-pickers appear successful. In addition, there have been many criticisms of the EMH.

Tracking
Tracking can be achieved by trying to hold all of the securities in the index, in the same proportions as the index. Other methods include statistically sampling the market and holding "representative" securities. Many index funds rely on a computer model with little or no human input in the decision as to which securities are purchased or sold and are thus subject to a form of passive management.

Fees
The lack of active management generally gives the advantage of much lower fees compared to actively managed mutual funds and, in taxable accounts, lower taxes. In addition it is usually impossible to precisely mirror the index as the models for sampling and mirroring, by their nature, cannot be 100% accurate. The difference between the index performance and the fund performance is called the "tracking error", or, colloquially, "jitter".

Index funds are available from many investment managers. Some common indices include the S&P 500, the Nikkei 225, and the FTSE 100. Less common indexes come from academics like Eugene Fama and Kenneth French, who created "research indexes" in order to develop asset pricing models, such as their Three Factor Model. The Fama–French three-factor model is used by Dimensional Fund Advisors to design their index funds. Robert Arnott and Professor Jeremy Siegel have also created new competing fundamentally based indexes based on such criteria as dividends, earnings, book value, and sales.

Traditional indexing
Indexing is traditionally known as the practice of owning a representative collection of securities, in the same ratios as the target index. Modification of security holdings happens only periodically, when companies enter or leave the target index.

Synthetic indexing
Synthetic indexing is a modern technique of using a combination of equity index futures contracts and investments in low-risk bonds to replicate the performance of a similar overall investment in the equities making up the index. Although maintaining the future position has a slightly higher cost structure than traditional passive sampling, synthetic indexing can result in more favourable tax treatment, particularly for international investors who are subject to U.S. dividend withholding taxes. The bond portion can hold higher yielding instruments, with a trade-off of corresponding higher risk, a technique referred to as enhanced indexing.

Enhanced indexing
Enhanced indexing is a catch-all term referring to improvements to index fund management that emphasize performance, possibly using active management. Enhanced index funds employ a variety of enhancement techniques, including customized indexes (instead of relying on commercial indexes), trading strategies, exclusion rules, and timing strategies. The cost advantage of indexing could be reduced or eliminated by employing active management. Enhanced indexing strategies help in offsetting the proportion of tracking error that would come from expenses and transaction costs. These enhancement strategies can be:
 * Lower cost, issue selection, yield curve positioning.
 * Sector and quality positioning and call exposure positioning.

Low costs
Because the composition of a target index is a known quantity, relative to actively managed funds, it costs less to run an index fund. Typically expense ratios of an index fund range from 0.10% for U.S. Large Company Indexes to 0.70% for Emerging Market Indexes. The expense ratio of the average large cap actively managed mutual fund as of 2015 is 1.15%. If a mutual fund produces 10% return before expenses, taking account of the expense ratio difference would result in an after expense return of 9.9% for the large cap index fund versus 8.85% for the actively managed large cap fund.

Simplicity
The investment objectives of index funds are easy to understand. Once an investor knows the target index of an index fund, what securities the index fund will hold can be determined directly. Managing one's index fund holdings may be as easy as every six months or every year.

Lower turnovers
Turnover refers to the selling and buying of securities by the fund manager. Selling securities in some jurisdictions may result in capital gains tax charges, which are sometimes passed on to fund investors. Even in the absence of taxes, turnover has both explicit and implicit costs, which directly reduce returns on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Because index funds are passive investments, the turnovers are lower than actively managed funds.

No style drift
Style drift occurs when actively managed mutual funds go outside of their described style (i.e., mid-cap value, large cap income, etc.) to increase returns. Such drift hurts portfolios that are built with diversification as a high priority. Drifting into other styles could reduce the overall portfolio's diversity and subsequently increase risk. With an index fund, this drift is not possible and accurate diversification of a portfolio is increased.

Losses to arbitrageurs
Index funds must periodically "rebalance" or adjust their portfolios to match the new prices and market capitalization of the underlying securities in the stock or other indexes that they track. This allows algorithmic traders (80% of the trades of whom involve the top 20% most popular securities ) to perform index arbitrage by anticipating and trading ahead of stock price movements caused by mutual fund rebalancing, making a profit on foreknowledge of the large institutional block orders. This results in profits transferred from investors to algorithmic traders, estimated to be at least 21 to 28 basis points annually for S&P 500 index funds, and at least 38 to 77 basis points per year for Russell 2000 funds. In effect, an index, and consequently, all funds tracking an index are announcing ahead of time the trades that they are planning to make, allowing value to be siphoned by arbitrageurs, in a legal practice known as "index front running". Algorithmic high-frequency traders all have advanced access to the index re-balancing information, and spend large sums on fast technology to compete against each other to be the first—often by a few microseconds—to make these arbitrages. Losses to arbitrageurs appear as "tracking error", the difference between the performance of the index and the fund which is attempting to follow it.

John Montgomery of Bridgeway Capital Management says that the resulting "poor investor returns" from trading ahead of mutual funds is "the elephant in the room" that "shockingly, people are not talking about." Related "time zone arbitrage" against mutual funds and their underlying securities traded on overseas markets is likely "damaging to financial integration between the United States, Asia and Europe."

Common market impact
One problem occurs when a large amount of money tracks the same index. According to theory, a company should not be worth more when it is in an index. But due to supply and demand, a company being added can have a demand shock, and a company being deleted can have a supply shock, and this will change the price. This does not show up in tracking error since the index is also affected. A fund may experience less impact by tracking a less popular index.

Possible tracking error from index
Since index funds aim to match market returns, both under- and over-performance compared to the market is considered a "tracking error". For example, an inefficient index fund may generate a positive tracking error in a falling market by holding too much cash, which holds its value compared to the market.

According to The Vanguard Group, a well-run S&P 500 index fund should have a tracking error of 5 basis points or less, but a Morningstar survey found an average of 38 basis points across all index funds.

Diversification
Diversification refers to the number of different securities in a fund. A fund with more securities is said to be better diversified than a fund with smaller number of securities. Owning many securities reduces volatility by decreasing the impact of large price swings above or below the average return in a single security. A Wilshire 5000 index would be considered diversified, but a bio-tech ETF would not.

Since some indices, such as the S&P 500 and FTSE 100, are dominated by large company stocks, an index fund may have a high percentage of the fund concentrated in a few large companies. This position represents a reduction of diversity and can lead to increased volatility and investment risk for an investor who seeks a diversified fund.

Some advocate adopting a strategy of investing in every security in the world in proportion to its market capitalization, generally by investing in a collection of ETFs in proportion to their home country market capitalization. A global indexing strategy may have lower variance in returns than one based only on home market indexes, because there may be less correlation between the returns of companies operating in different markets than between companies operating in the same market.

Asset allocation and achieving balance
Asset allocation is the process of determining the mix of stocks, bonds and other classes of investable assets to match the investor's risk capacity, which includes attitude towards risk, net income, net worth, knowledge about investing concepts, and time horizon. Index funds capture asset classes in a low-cost and tax-efficient manner and are used to design balanced portfolios.

A combination of various index mutual funds or ETFs could be used to implement a full range of investment policies from low to high risk.

Pension investment in index funds
Research conducted by the World Pensions Council (WPC) suggests that up to 15% of overall assets held by large pension funds and national social security funds are invested in various forms of passive strategies including index funds, as opposed to the more traditional actively managed that still constitute the largest share of institutional investments The proportion invested in passive funds varies widely across jurisdictions and fund type.

The relative appeal of index funds, ETFs and other index-replicating investment vehicles has grown rapidly for various reasons ranging from disappointment with underperforming actively managed mandates to the broader tendency towards cost reduction across public services and social benefits that followed the 2008-2012 Great Recession. Public-sector pensions and national reserve funds have been among the early adopters of index funds and other passive management strategies.

Comparison of index funds with index ETFs
In the United States, mutual funds price their assets by their current value every business day, usually at 4:00 p.m. Eastern time, when the New York Stock Exchange closes for the day. Index ETFs, in contrast, are priced during normal trading hours, usually 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Eastern time. Index ETFs are also sometimes weighted by revenue rather than market capitalization.

International tax considerations
Typically mutual funds supply the correct tax reporting documents for only one country, which can cause tax problems for shareholders citizen to or resident of another country, either now or in the future.

Implications for US investors
US citizens/taxpayers living at home or abroad should particularly consider whether their investment in an ex-US fund (meaning the fund is administered by a foreign investment company) not providing annual 1099 forms (which report distributed income and capital gains/losses) or annual PFIC annual information statements will be subject to punitive US taxation under section 1291 of the US tax code. Note that if a PFIC annual information statement is provided, a careful filing of form 8621 is required to avoid punitive US taxation.

U.S. capital gains tax considerations
U.S. mutual funds are required by law to distribute realized capital gains to their shareholders. If a mutual fund sells a security for a gain, the capital gain is taxable for that year; similarly a realized capital loss can offset any other realized capital gains.

Scenario: An investor entered a mutual fund during the middle of the year and experienced an overall loss for the next six months. The mutual fund itself sold securities for a gain for the year, therefore must declare a capital gains distribution. The IRS would require the investor to pay tax on the capital gains distribution, regardless of the overall loss.

A small investor selling an ETF to another investor does not cause a redemption on ETF itself; therefore, ETFs are more immune to the effect of forced redemption causing realized capital gains.

title: Index fund


text:
Domus Dei

Domus Dei (Hospital of Saint Nicholas and Saint John the Baptist) was an almshouse and hospice at Old Portsmouth, Hampshire, England. It is now also known as the Royal Garrison Church and is an English Heritage property and a Grade II listed building.

History
The hospice was established by Peter des Roches (sometimes wrongly named as de Rupibus), Bishop of Winchester and William of Wrotham in around 1212 A.D.

In 1450 an unpopular advisor to the king, Bishop Adam Moleyns of Chichester was conducting a service at the chapel of Domus Dei when a number of naval seamen (resentful of being only partially paid and only provided with limited provisions) burst into the church, dragged out the bishop and murdered him.

As a result of this the entire town of Portsmouth was placed under the Greater Excommunication, an interdict which lasted until 1508, removed at the request of Bishop Foxe of Winchester.

In 1540, like many other chantry buildings, it was seized by King Henry VIII and until 1560 was used as an armoury. After 1560, a mansion built close by the south-side became the home of the local military governor.

In 1662 the mansion hosted the wedding of King Charles II and Princess Catherine of Braganza.

Towards the end of the seventeenth century it fell into disrepair until it was restored in 1767 to become the Garrison church. Once again, the Church fell into disrepair and in 1865 a new restoration project began under the direction of G. E. Street which lasted ten years.

On 10 January 1941 the buildings of Domus Dei were partially destroyed in an attack by German bombers, when all the stained glass windows were blown out and the nave was rendered roofless by incendiary bombs and a single high explosive bomb. New glazing was subsequently fitted. Apart from the East window with its traditional design, all the other windows show much of the British Army's relationship to the Church and the City of Portsmouth. The chancel is intact, but the nave remains roofless.

The aisles but not the central nave were re-roofed in 1995. In October 2021, the building was one of 142 sites across England to receive part of a £35-million grant from the government's Culture Recovery Fund.

title: Domus Dei