Parenthood in Post-Biological Futures: What Still Makes a Family?

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

Child spending time with her parents (Source: FreePik)

One of the quiet revolutions in contemporary science fiction is not faster-than-light travel or artificial intelligence, but parenthood itself. As speculative futures increasingly abandon biological reproduction as a default, science fiction is asking an older, more unsettling question: what makes someone a parent when birth is no longer the defining act?

From artificial wombs and gene-edited embryos to collective child-rearing and state-managed reproduction, post-biological futures challenge assumptions that have anchored human societies for millennia. In these stories, family becomes less about biology and more about responsibility, choice, and moral obligation.

Beyond Birth: Parenthood as Intent

Long before post-biological reproduction became a staple of near-future science fiction, writers were already questioning whether biology should define parental authority at all. Ursula K. Le Guin repeatedly explored kinship structures untethered from genetics, particularly in societies where children are shaped as much by culture as by heredity. Her work suggests that parenthood is less about origin than continuity, the transmission of values, care, and restraint across generations.

Similarly, Octavia Butler framed parenthood as an ethically fraught responsibility, especially when children are born (or engineered) into conditions they did not choose. In Butler’s fiction, to create life without guaranteeing its agency is a moral failure, not a triumph of progress.

Butler asks what constitutes humanity when biology is rewritten?. 

In post-biological worlds, children are often designed, allocated, or grown rather than born. This removes the inevitability that once bound parent to child. Instead, parenthood becomes an act of intent.

Science fiction repeatedly explores this shift by asking who has the right (or the burden) to raise a child who was never physically theirs. When reproduction is decoupled from sex, pregnancy, and even individual bodies, parental bonds must be forged through commitment rather than biology.

This raises difficult ethical tensions. If a child is engineered for a specific purpose—space survival, planetary adaptation, cognitive specialization—does that purpose redefine the role of the parent? Or does love itself become an act of resistance against utilitarian design?

Designed Children and Moral Ownership

Many modern science-fiction narratives grapple with children who are meant to serve larger systems: governments, corporations, survival strategies, or civilizations facing extinction. Parenthood in these stories often exists in direct conflict with institutional control.

In Born in Space: Unlocking Destiny, this tension is central. The seven children are conceived artificially aboard an orbital laboratory, engineered to survive off-Earth conditions. Their existence is justified by necessity, efficiency, and long-term planning. Yet the emotional core of the novel rests on a far less abstract question: who is responsible for them once they exist?

Teagan Ward’s role is not defined by gestation or genetics alone. Her motherhood is asserted through protection, defiance, and moral clarity in the face of powerful institutions that view the children as assets rather than people. In doing so, the novel aligns with a growing body of science fiction that treats parenthood as an ethical stance rather than a biological fact.

The question of parenthood becomes even more complex when identity itself is distributed. In Ann Leckie’s work, particularly her explorations of collective consciousness and fragmented selfhood, care is no longer mediated through traditional family structures at all. Responsibility is embedded in systems, rituals, and long-term stewardship rather than individual lineage. Yet Leckie repeatedly exposes the emotional gaps that such systems leave behind.

When everyone is responsible, no one is fully accountable, and acts of care become meaningful precisely because they exceed what the system requires. Parenthood, in this context, is not assigned but claimed, emerging wherever an individual chooses to treat another life as singular and irreplaceable.

Collective Parenthood and the Loss of the Nuclear Family

More recent science fiction has pushed these questions into explicitly engineered and institutional settings. In Martha Wells’s work, caregiving often occurs in environments governed by corporate logic or system mandates, where emotional attachment is discouraged as inefficiency. Yet Wells consistently reveals how care persists anyway—emerging in unofficial bonds, improvised families, and protectiveness that defies protocol.

Meanwhile, writers such as Cixin Liu examine parenthood at civilizational scale, where individual families are subordinated to species survival. In such narratives, children become instruments of continuity rather than recipients of love, forcing readers to confront whether survival without compassion is meaningfully human at all.

In the Three-Body Problem trilogy, individual needs are often forcefully subordinated to the imperative of species survival. 

Post-biological futures also challenge the dominance of the nuclear family. In closed environments (space stations, generation ships, off-world colonies) children are often raised collectively. Care is distributed, standardized, or optimized.

While this model offers resilience, science fiction frequently interrogates what is lost when emotional bonds are diluted by systems. Who advocates for the child when everyone is responsible? Who mourns when something goes wrong?

Stories that explore collective parenting often reveal an unease beneath the efficiency. Without a singular emotional anchor, children risk becoming interchangeable. Parenthood, in this sense, becomes a scarce resource: the willingness to place one life above all others.

Parenthood as Rebellion

A striking trend in recent science fiction is the framing of parenthood as a form of rebellion. To love a child unconditionally in a system that demands conditional worth is a radical act.

In engineered futures, refusing to treat children as outcomes, insurance policies, or evolutionary tools becomes a moral stand. This is particularly evident in stories where parents must oppose the very structures that enabled their child’s existence.

Jeremy Clift's Born in Space and Space Vault position motherhood as a counterweight to technocratic logic. Teagan’s choices repeatedly undermine rational, system-approved solutions in favor of preserving the children’s autonomy. In doing so, the novel echoes a broader shift in science fiction away from celebrating control and toward interrogating its cost.

What Still Makes a Family?

As science fiction moves deeper into post-biological territory, it becomes less interested in how children are created and more concerned with who shows up afterward.

Across these narratives, family is no longer defined by blood, but by presence. Parenthood is measured not by origin, but by sacrifice, continuity, and accountability over time.

In Born in Space, Dr Cesar produces seven babies in an experimental orbiting lab.

In futures where bodies are optional, genomes editable, and birth programmable, science fiction insists on one enduring truth: raising a child is not a technical problem to solve, but a moral relationship to sustain.

It's difficult to read these post-biological futures without sensing their connection to the present.

Across much of the industrialized world, birth rates are falling, parenthood is increasingly postponed or abandoned, and child-rearing is framed as an economic liability rather than a social good. Science fiction rarely addresses this directly, but its preoccupation with engineered children, artificial wombs, and institutional parenting suggests an underlying anxiety: not about overpopulation, but about continuity. In worlds where fewer people choose—or are able—to become parents, the act of caring for the next generation becomes less assumed and more consequential.

Parenthood, in this light, is no longer inevitable. It is intentional and therefore morally exposed. That insight may be speculative, but it is also pressinglyy contemporary.

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