Day Million
by Jeff Baker
Gender fluidity. A love story. A man and a woman who are not a man and a woman. And this is not in a modern work of fiction but in the 1966 story “Day Million” by the very cisgender Frederik Pohl.
“Day Million” is not a story that would be called “groundbreaking” for LGBT fiction but it fits the 1960s in that it broke taboos and norms with frank explorations of gender and phrases like “he doesn’t need the flesh for pleasure…it is the brain that feels; it is the interpretation of (the) impulses that make agony or orgasm…”
The plot is simple—taking place ten-thousand years from “now” it is simply a love story between a boy and a girl. Sort of.
According to the story: “The reason the girl was not a girl was that she was a boy.”
The girl (Pohl calls her “Dora”) leaves her underwater home and literally bumps into the boy that Pohl calls “Don.”
“They met cute.” And yes, that line is actually in the story!
Don is tall and bronze. No, not tan, he’s literally bronze. (“More than that he was a cybernetic man.”) Our characters are mutated and adapted to their future world. Dora has fur and a tail among other characteristics.
Pohl, who said he wrote the whole story in one sitting, was riffing on a lot of fiction’s cliches; the future world and boy-meets-girl for openers. He probably had no intention of making a legitimate comment on the genderfluidity of OUR era. And yet “Day Million” includes lines like this:
“If we find a child with an aptitude for music we give him a scholarship to Julliard. If they found a child whose aptitudes were for being a woman, they made him one.”
It has been said (often on paperback book blurbs) that Science Fiction is a literature that predicts the future. In 1966 “Day Million” at least gave us a hint of some of it. A world with acceptance as well as differences.
A note here on the author: Frederik Pohl was considered one of the greats of the Golden age of Science Fiction. He said he kept to a strict regimen of writing four pages a day. He only slowed down when he approached his nineties and was still writing when he died at the age of 93 in 2013.
Jeff Baker writes about reading and writing sci-fi, fantasy and horror and other sundry matters on or around the thirteenth of every month. Mr. Baker does not write four pages a day but he does write regularly. He has (as Mike Mayak) a story in the recent anthology “Five Seconds Of Power.” He posts weekly fiction on his blog https://authorjeffbaker.com/ and wastes time on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/jeff.baker.524042 and Blue Sky https://bsky.app/profile/jeffbakerauthor.bsky.social as well as Mastodon (as “Mike Mayak”) https://mastodon.otherworldsink.com/@MikeMayak