My favorite short-story ideas often come to me as a sort of ironic counterpoint to something else I’m working on: usually the same general kind of idea, but skewed around so it’s shooting off in an entirely different, and probably antithetical, direction. Some of “The Jamesburg Incubus” comes from ideas I was playing around with for my most recent novel,
Larry Niven lives in California with his wife, Marilyn. His novel
HE’S FASTER THAN A speeding bullet. He’s more powerful than a locomotive. He’s able to leap tall buildings at a single bound. Why can’t he get a girl?
At the ripe old age of thirty-one,{Superman first appeared in
An unwed Superman is a mobile Superman. Thus it has been alleged that those who chronicle the Man of Steel’s adventures are responsible for his condition. But the cartoonists are not to blame.
Nor is Superman handicapped by psychological problems.
Granted that the poor oaf is not entirely sane. How could he be? He is an orphan, a refugee, and an alien. His homeland no longer exists in any form, save for gigatons upon gigatons of dangerous, prettily colored rocks.
As a child and young adult, Kal-El must have been hard put to find an adequate father-figure. What human could control his antisocial behavior? What human would dare try to punish him? His actual, highly social behavior during this period indicates an inhuman self-restraint.
What wonder if Superman drifted gradually into schizophrenia? Torn between his human and kryptonian identities, he chose to be both, keeping his split personalities rigidly separate. A psychotic desperation is evident in his defense of his “secret identity.”
But Superman’s sex problems are strictly physiological, and quite real.
The purpose of this article is to point out some medical drawbacks to being a kryptonian among human beings, and to suggest possible solutions. The kryptonian humanoid must not be allowed to go the way of the pterodactyl and the passenger pigeon.
What turns on a kryptonian?
Superman is an alien, an extraterrestrial. His humanoid frame is doubtless the result of parallel evolution, as the marsupials of Australia resemble their mammalian counterparts. A specific niche in the ecology calls for a certain shape, a certain size, certain capabilities, certain eating habits.
Be not deceived by appearances. Superman is no relative to homo sapiens.
What arouses Kal-El’s mating urge? Did kryptonian women carry some subtle mating cue at appropriate times of the year? Whatever it is, Lois Lane probably doesn’t have it. We may speculate that she smells wrong, less like a kryptonian woman than like a terrestrial monkey. A mating between Superman and Lois Lane would feel like sodomy—and would be, of course, by church and common law.
Assume a mating between Superman and a human woman, designated LL for convenience.
