Love As The Last Human Constant

By Jeremy Clift, author of Space Vault: The Seed Eclipse

In futures where bodies, timelines, and even identities are engineered, love becomes the one variable that refuses optimization.

Science fiction is full of systems designed to improve humanity: longer lives, cleaner genetics, curated memories, digital societies. Again and again, those systems assume that what makes us human can be modeled, regulated, or replaced. And again and again, they are undone by something far older and far less cooperative: feelings of affection and Love.

The question science fiction keeps circling is not whether technology will change us—it will—but what survives when reproduction is no longer biological, when lifespan is elastic and when memory can be edited, backed up, or erased. In those futures, this Valentine's Day, we ask does love become a relic, a software glitch, a sentimental holdover? Or does it become the final safeguard, the one thing no system can fully contain?

This tension runs quietly through some of the genre’s most enduring works. In The Time Traveler’s Wife, for example, ove persists across fractured timelines, stripped of synchronicity but not of inevitability. In Never Let Me Go, love survives inside a system explicitly designed to deny its participants any meaningful future at all. In Arrival, love is chosen with full knowledge of its cost, proof that foreknowledge does not diminish meaning.

These stories are not romances in the conventional sense. They are stress tests. They ask what happens when love is placed inside futures that should make it obsolete—and discover that it does something far more dangerous instead. It interferes.

Distance as the Default Condition

Science fiction is ruthless about distance. Time dilates, age asymmetrically and people leave or return to worlds that have moved on without them.

What is striking is not how often love fails under these conditions—but how often it doesn’t. It bends, distorts, and survives in forms that no longer resemble the present, but still shape choices long after reunion becomes impossible.

Modern relationships already live with versions of this—delayed communication, partial presence, lives conducted across screens and time zones. Science fiction simply extends the gap until it becomes impossible to ignore. Love does not solve distance. It endures it.

Love Is the Variable That Won’t Behave

Most science fiction futures are systems: political systems, technological systems, ecological systems. They are elegant, terrifying constructions where every component is meant to serve a purpose. Love does not.

Instead, it ignores incentives, resists efficiency, and produces loyalty where obedience was expected and sacrifice where optimization would have sufficed.

That is why love so often appears in science fiction not as comfort, but as a problem. It introduces noise into clean models. It causes characters to act irrationally at precisely the moment a system demands compliance. It creates priorities that cannot be negotiated away. And that is exactly why it matters.

Many of the most influential science-fiction writers return to love precisely where choice appears most constrained. Ursula K. Le Guin’s work, particularly The Left Hand of Darkness, treats love not as romance but as trust formed under radical difference, biological, cultural, and temporal. Her characters do not fall in love because circumstances allow it, but because understanding another consciousness becomes a moral act. Love, in that sense, is not separate from survival; it is the means by which survival remains meaningful.

Octavia Butler pushes this further, stripping love of comfort entirely. In Parable of the Sower and Xenogenesis, attachment becomes dangerous, costly, and often asymmetric—yet unavoidable.

Butler’s futures suggest that love does not preserve humanity as it is, but forces it to adapt, hybridize, and sometimes surrender the illusion of purity. Love, here, is neither sentimental nor safe. It is evolutionary pressure.

Love Without Centrality

More recent science fiction has explored love by decentralizing it, refusing to place it at the narrative’s emotional center while allowing it to quietly shape everything else.

Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice dismantles conventional identity, gender, and individuality, yet leaves room for devotion that operates without romance or even clear personhood. Love persists not as desire, but as loyalty stretched across bodies and time.

Similarly, writers such as Becky Chambers imagine futures where love is no longer dramatic because it is no longer rare. In her work, care becomes infrastructural, embedded in how ships are run, how communities are maintained, how difference is accommodated. These stories suggest a future in which love does not need to announce itself as resistance because it has become the default ethical setting.

Mothers, Engineers, and Unintended Futures

When I began drafting Born in Space, I wanted to write about how maternal instincts could coexist with genetic futures, about how the beauty of our world would infuse incubated beings. What emerged instead, was a story about how maternal love collides with a doctor's artificial design logic.

Teagan Ward does not challenge the system because she misunderstands it. She gets to understand it perfectly. That is precisely why she rejects its premise. Her children are engineered. Their futures are planned, their value has been calculated long before they are old enough to consent. Love, in that context, is not sentimental. It is subversive. It asserts that human beings are not interchangeable outcomes of a process, no matter how advanced that process becomes.

Love, here, is not a feeling. It is a refusal.

Can Love Be Engineered?

Science fiction has been asking this question for decades, and its answers are remarkably consistent. You can design compatibility, you can regulate desire, and you can simulate attachment. But love, the emotion that inspires defiance, grief, allegiance, and sacrifice, keeps appearing where it was never authorized to exist.

In my own work, this becomes clearest with engineered children and designed futures. What none of their creators fully anticipate is how deeply these individuals will care—about one another, about those who raised them, and about people they were never meant to protect.

Love becomes an exploit in the system. An emergent property no one planned for.

The more controlled a future becomes, the more dangerous love is, not because it is loud or revolutionary, but because it creates non-negotiable bonds. It gives people something they will not trade, even under pressure. It turns abstract risk into personal loss.

That is why so many dystopian systems attempt to regulate reproduction, attachment, and family structures. Love creates loyalties that compete with fear. It produces commitments that outlast incentives.

Why Science Fiction Still Needs Love

It is sometimes argued that science fiction should focus on ideas, not emotions.

That misunderstands both.

Love is an idea, arguably the most radical one we have. It asserts that some things are not scalable, not replaceable, and not reducible to data. It insists that individual lives matter even when the numbers say otherwise.

In an age of accelerating AI, engineered biology, and climate precarity, love is not ornamental to science fiction. It is what gives the future moral stakes. Without it, we are simply designing better ruins. And perhaps that is why, no matter how strange the future becomes, science fiction keeps returning to the same ancient question:

What—or who—would you refuse to give up, even if the future demanded it?

— Jeremy Clift, author of Born in Space  and Space Vault: The Seed Eclipse.  Read Clift’s profile on Kirkus.