Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison

The result is ‘a world at last with a dropping population, and with a genuine diminution of aggression, group or personal’. The governing ‘Code’ promulgated by Him and Her is continued by the world’s ruling Council: the doctrine forbids inequality and aggression, 4 and thus (in the text’s logic) discourages heterosexuality, particularly procreative heterosexuality. When that age-old sexual aggression changed to non-aggressive love of man for man and woman for woman, overt aggression dropped in the same curve as the still dropping popu-curve. 2 Solution Three is instigated by ‘Him’ or ‘Her’, the un-named leaders who emerge during the crisis period, and who are venerated as paragons of intelligence and wisdom: The challenge to aggressive inter-sexual love came first from Her then the challenge was made still clearer in the Code which He homologated and by the Council itself. 1 Overpopulation of the remaining living space and agricultural land reaches crisis level, and the titular ‘Solution Three’ is developed: ‘the women giving birth, popping the new lives out, over-populating, until at last it was realized that the attraction between the sexes was only a snare and an aggression the real thing was man to man and woman to woman’. A global, presumably nuclear war, leads to ‘the annihilation, as living and food-producing places, of large parts of the Earth’s surface’. Mitchison’s text, like much science fiction, offers instead a temporal journey into the future. In an earlier genre of writing, the ‘fantastic voyage’ across land and sea (like Lemuel Gulliver’s travels) would take the reader to a radically transformed society. Solution Three is undeniably polemical: it presents Mitchison’s manifesto for green politics, and for the politics of diversity.

Yet this future society is sinister in its own way, particularly in its technological dominance over both nature and culture the narrative sketches out a society sensing its need for a changed relationship to biological diversity and cultural difference. Despite its superficially post-apocalyptic setting, the world of Solution Three is largely peaceful, ruled by a universal Code that prohibits inequality and aggression.

Naomi Mitchison’s short science-fiction novel Solution Three (1975) imagines a near-future Earth transformed by global warfare and an ensuing population crisis.

Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison