OPUS: #158
Title: World Without Sex
Author: Robert O. Wentworth (Edmond Hamilton)
Year: 1940
Type: short story
“Many a person has spoken in jest of the war between the sexes. Thurber has produced some of his funniest cartoons on that subject: the inability of the male to comprehend the female and vice versa. Nobody can fail to notice the means by which each sex plots to ensnare the other; and intrigue which extends throughout every medium – dress, drama, conduct, arts, etc. There have been cultures in various places – semi-primitives in isolated lands still testify – where there exists an actual hostility between the sexes, where for instance women maintain secret codes and languages, live separately from the community of men. To this day, modern American males maintain lodges from whose portals women are barred and whose affairs are conducted which codes and ceremonies no woman may hope to learn. There is therefore nothing at all impossible about Edmond Hamilton’s startling story of a period twenty thousand years from now. Nothing impossible, we repeat, but we certainly hope that it will always remain at least improbable.”

Publication:

• Marvel Tales [v2 #1, May 1940] (15¢, 116pp, pulp, cover by ?)
• Sensuous Science Fiction from the Weird and Spicy Pulps, (Dec 1984, ed. Sheldon Jaffery, publ. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 0-87972-306-8, $8.95, 164pp, tp, anth)