The Love Of Science Fiction - Love & Sex in Sci-Fi

Space... The final frontier... The cosmos....  it's a really, really big place.  They say the most important question we can ask ourselves as a species is:  Are we alone?  Well, it's certainly no fun to be alone, at least all the time.  Like the sci-fi movie Contact (based on Carl Sagan's novel) promotes:  If we are all alone, it seems like an awful waste of space.  In Ridley Scott's Alien, they say, In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream.  Scream - from what, the desperation of loneliness?

Being all alone - even on a crowded planet - is definitely not much fun either.  Fans of Star Trek know that Captain Kirk (William Shatner) wasn't the kind of guy to be lonely for very long.  He may have been a bit too amorous for some of the more prudish among us, but compared to say James Bond, or the devilish Han Solo (Harrison Ford), James T. Kirk wasn't so unusual.  Kirk's crew is also no stranger to the poetry of love, or even the lustful leanings of plain, old fashioned sex.  From Spock to Scotty, Chekov to Uhura, the Enterprise crew knew that partnering up during those demanding space voyages was not only healthy, but downright logical.