Dr. Karen Ishiguro is a professor of history and cultural studies at Michael Viscardi University in Neo San Diego, as well as a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Slate Magazine, and Amber Tamblyn’s Almanac, in the year 2121.  In the present day, her columns from the future appear solely at TheAtrox.com.

21/21 Hindsight
A look back from the century ahead

The 2005-2006 entertainment season represented a boom in the creative depiction of interspecies romance.  Explorations of the subject matter popped up all over screens “big” and “small,” on popular television programs like Invasion, Smallville, and Battlestar Galactica and in juggernaut spectacle films like King Kong, Underworld 2, X-Men 3, and Superman Returns.  Indeed, the taxonomy-defiant love story hadn’t received such attention since its heyday in the mid-1980s, when it seemed patrons couldn’t enter a cinema without discovering Tom Hanks or Geena Davis in the nude embrace of a mermaid, seraph, fur beast, glowing extraterrestrial, or insect-man.

In 2006 however (as you, dear reader, can probably corroborate), the phenomenon went almost entirely unobserved.  Either serious critics failed to notice the trend, or else they deemed it undeserving of commentary, most likely due to the plotline’s categorization in the “fantasy” genre.  Since every creature coupled with a human co-star was mythical or imaginary, the narratives offered no connection to reality beyond the merely allegorical.  Typically, broad contemporary mores were concerned with only one sentient species on the planet.

Those mores received a rude awakening in August of 2014, when a Floridian, Patrick Ironside, was arrested and tried on the (somewhat obscure) charge of bestiality.  According to his own much-publicized admission, Ironside had engaged in sexual relations with a number of dolphins for over two decades, since his own late adolescence.  Miami’s district attorney had sought Ironside’s arrest at the urging of a local animal rights organization, which claimed that the man’s carnal knowledge of the dolphins constituted abuse.  Throughout his trial and its surrounding media circus, Ironside loudly protested that all of his zoophilic acts were fully consensual, approved by the sea mammals themselves through a variety of non-verbal cues and invitations.  Ultimately, the case was scandalously thrown out, as there was no hard evidence, beyond the defendant’s own dubious testimony, that he’d truly engaged in cross-species intercourse; and no dolphins could be found to testify.  But Ironside remained a minor figure of public infamy (and later became the subject of a Werner Herzog documentary, Flipper Man).

Inevitably, a backlash followed, as the agitators of the political right seized upon the threat of interspecies miscegenation as a galvanizing weapon in the Culture War.  Though actual incidents of romantic relationships between human beings and other sophisticated mammals remained scarce, their specter loomed large.  Representative Joseph Simeon (R-Minnesota) won multiple elections in the 20s on a platform fiercely opposed to animal eroticism, stoking the fires of public alarm with assertions like, “Lying with seacows may satisfy your average French sailor, but among the Godfearing youth of America it will not stand.”  Simeon was discredited some years later when Cornelius “Monkey Man” Gimple appeared on the scene, claiming to be Simeon’s bastard child by a chimpanzee mother.  (In fact, though he was genuinely Simeon’s illegitimate son, Gimple was not, as he maintained, a hybrid “humanzee.”  He was just a very hairy young man.)  But the congressman’s subsequent resignation failed to subdue the hysteria he’d helped engender.

During this period, interspecies love stories in fiction became strictly verboten.  Film series like The Lord of the Rings, which defined fantasy narrative at the turn of the century, were abandoned for their elf and human couplings.  Instead, sword and sorcery morality plays like Walt Disney Pictures’ The Chronicles of Narnia, so careful to keep its centaurs and comely human teenagers at a safe distance, became the norm.  (In 2023, Disney also famously pulled its discs of Beauty and the Beast from retail shelves and excised the movie from its “classic” cartoon canon.)

Although rarely enforced with such vitriol, the restriction on cross-species romance was an ancient one.  Though the myths of ancient civilizations catalog innumerable breedings between human and non-human beings, each of these stories presents a firm warning.  Trysts with higher lifeforms, like the Olympians, are rewarded with the birth of a heroic demigod.  Dalliances with lesser entities, monsters and beasts, are punished with the birth of an abomination, like the Cretan minotaur.  Every tale enforces the rigid species hierarchy, with man placed above all other creatures, second only to the lords of heaven.  This idea of man’s special place in the universe is preserved in the tenets of the major monotheistic faiths.  (In the Book of Genesis, God says, “Let them rule over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon it.”)  And here we find the explanation for why, in the twenty-teens, the rule against extra-species dating went from a taboo (which one might flirtatiously bend) to an outright prohibition.  For this was a decade of upheaval, with its Vendequm plagues, and self-improving nanites, and fossils on Mars.  Suddenly mankind’s paramount positioning, the certainty of so many thousand years, seemed in danger of eroding.  And thus any relationship, sexual or otherwise, that implied another being was equal (or even worse, superior) to a human had to be violently rejected.

As is so often the case, the tide of public opinion finally turned through the efforts of popular literature.  In fact, two celebrated authors, over the course of a long partnership, revived the interspecies romance genre almost entirely by themselves.  Alicia MacTaggart (an essayist, philosopher, and Canadian human) and Ulysses Delphino (a poet, novelist, and Atlantic bottlenose), worked together closely for almost twenty years, winning widespread critical acclaim and publishing a score of international bestsellers.  (They are often cited as the Sartre and Beauvoir of dolphin/human collaboration.) 

As a young calf, Delphino had developed a close relationship with the Marine Research Institute of Havana, where he helped design LDM, the advanced computer program that would allow direct communication between sea mammals and humans.  MacTaggart was a mathematics prodigy who passed, to her parents’ chagrin, on a scholarship to MIT, choosing instead a life of letters.  By the time she met Delphino on a New England fishing trip, she had already achieved some success as a writer, but her greatest achievements, like his, would follow the formation of their extraordinary creative bond.  Initially, every major publisher dismissed their work, deeming it “obscene” and “depraved” (according to inter-office memos).  So MacTaggart and Delphino self-published through a variety of carefully nurtured web outlets in the 2040s, eventually earning the embrace of a grassroots audience so large that the publishing houses had no choice but to crawl penitently back.  Uncorrupted by mainstream success, the pair produced more than ever.  Along with his collections of maritime free verse, Delphino penned an epic trilogy, consisting of The Duchess and the Dolphin, The Porpoise-Driven Life, and the wrenching I, Manatee, for which he became the first non-human to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.  In addition to translating the majority of Delphino’s work, MacTaggart saturated the periodicals with eloquent articles advocating cetacean rights, and authored the inspiring My Orcan Heart, which I would identify as her generation’s most moving tribute to the “human spirit,” if her work itself hadn’t made such praise archaic.

Ironically, the couple most associated with bridging the species gap may never have consummated their own relationship.  Though many following their career, from tabloid gossipmongers to literary scholars, took for granted that Delphino and MacTaggart were lovers, there is little proof to support the assumption.  In interviews, they neither contradicted nor confirmed a love affair, preferring to describe their friendship in the language of a platonic ideal.  In her eulogy for Delphino (after his death at the ripe age of twenty-nine), MacTaggart concluded, “Ours was an essential love.”  Years later, her niece, Ayaan MacTaggart, flatly denied the possibility of a liaison, noting, “I believe she just never wished to give the impression that she disapproved of a human-dolphin romance, even if it wasn’t for her.”  Delphino’s cousin, Melville, made similar comments: “Look, he was obviously crazy about Alicia.  I just don’t think he was attracted to humans.”

A few friends and family members seemed more open to the possibility.  MacTaggart’s older sister, Caroline, once observed, “You know, as a kid, she was really into that book A Ring of Endless Light.  Like, really into it.”  And then there are the gestures of MacTaggart and Delphino themselves.  Though she always refused to allow her own work to be converted to the screen, recent sources have revealed that it was MacTaggart who, in private conference, convinced Warner Brothers studio chief King Lonergan to adapt the long-forgotten property Angel and the Ape into a major motion picture.  The psychological thriller, which paired a brooding Big Easy detective with a sexy superintelligent gorilla, went on to win the Best Picture Oscar, sealing the resurrection of the interspecies romance once and for all.  Alicia MacTaggart kept her involvement with the film a secret, and we can only guess at her motivation for nurturing it.  Could it have sprung out of the same longing that led Ulysses Delphino to write his most memorable lines of verse?  “She is sunlight dancing/ On the roof of the water/ Unsingable/ Untouchable/ And with me always.”

Perhaps the one conclusion we can reach is this: in 2056, just as in 2006 (or 2106 -- my own dizzy bohemian summer), the heart remained a wild and inscrutable thing, above sea level or below.