I intend to do a proper review of this book when I have time and energy, but I don't want to get side tracked into a long side-rant when I do, so I thought I'd get this issue off my chest, and open up a hopefully interesting conversation along the way.
Simply to get it out of the way, the creators of Eclipse Phase are quite obviously very much pro-social justice and 'allies' and all of the other issues of the progressive left. This is not meant as an aspersion upon their collective characters, but a simple statement of fact, of where their beliefs lie. This is relevant to the topic at hand, as presumably they are deeply concerned with being 'allies' if they themselves do not identify as some species of 'queer', and this informs their worldbuilding.
There are three topics of sex that are raised in Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition, which were largely (and appropriately) glossed over in 1st Edition, and the writers of EP seem to have allowed their perceived status to have overcome their common sense in world building. These three topics are, approximately, Homosexuality, Transexuality and Interspecies Romance. Note that I am forced to condense complex topics into simple subject headers, so please keep your outrage at my 'hate' confined to your pants until I've actually addressed these issues in the post. Its only going to be a paragraph or two until I get there, you can wait. As a bonus round I will also briefly gloss on the subject of childcare in the Transhuman Future.
To understand why these are issues, it is necessary to understand the explicit and implicit nature of the Eclipse Phase setting. The core premise which EP is built around, and thus can define itself as distinct from any and all other Science Fiction RPGs and settings, is the fundamental idea that "you" is not a body but a mind, an 'ego' which can change bodies the way people of today change clothes. Thus, any attempts to define a person by their origins or flesh is fundamentally doomed to failure. A coded computer program can run a biological body and call itself 'Bob', while the person who was in 'Bob's' body yesterday is now a digital entity slaving away at processor stacks, probably mining cryptocurrency.
This has drastic implications for the setting, for Humanity as a whole, and a great deal of the writing for Eclipse Phase involves inviting you to explore those implications.
Well, with a few exceptions. Namely: You can explore them as long as you are willing to indulge in draging early 21st Century sexual politics into a setting that has fundamentally changed the scene, complete and unchanged. Frankly I'm surprised BLM didn't get dragged into this new edition... perhaps it hit the presses a couple of months too early?
When I want to talk about homosexuality in Eclipse Phase, what I really mean to talk about is the entire spectrum sexuality as we understand it. In a way, this should be my second topic, but I think it is the most interesting so its first. You see: while in one way Eclipse Phase 'solves' the entire "Problem" of homosexuality in society, what it actually does is make it far more complex and interesting, at least from the perspective of a writer wanting to explore the human condition. Once upon a time you were relatively limited in what you could do: heterosexual romance, homosexual romance, cross sexual orientation attraction... that is a gay man attracted to a straight man (and how that influences their character dynamics), a straigtht man attracted to a gay woman (etc) and so on. The first option is the default, and will always be the default simply due to demographics (that is: a majority gay population, favoring a majority gay romance in literature, will quickly spiral into demographic death), and the second is currently the most popular in our modern culture. Both are relatively simple and mined out, you are not saying or doing anything interesting by exploring either. The third option I mention used to be fairly popular, and because it offers complex dynamics could be interesting even in a side character (I'm thinking of Travolta's gay henchmen in the Punisher film, and how their relationship plays out in the film). But there are only limited ways to play that out. Unrequited romance, tragic unrequited romance, or eventually a homosexual romance.
Enter Eclipse Phase and body swapping. A new variable appears, and the equation gets much more complex. Allow me to set an example: A man working for firewall goes on a mission to Mars, where he is expected to shoot a bunch of Exhumans in the face. He naturally wants to get into a combat morph, and that means a Fury. He doesn't see himself as a woman, doesn't pick his morph because of the tits, he just wants a solid combat morph, and prefers biomorphs. So, for the duration of his trip to Mars, he is in a woman's body. While he is there he meets a woman who just hits all his buttons. She's hot, of course. All morphs default to hot unless otherwise specified, but there is a real connection. This woman, as it turns out, is a woman. And she likes him back. As a woman, and plans to follow him back to, lets say Venus, where he normally lives. As a man.
Hopefully, just in the setup of this premise, you can see how this creates entirely new dynamics of sexual attraction and queerness. NEW dynamics, it eliminates the old dynamics entirely. Unfortunately, I rather suspect that Posthuman studios caught some flak after first edition for 'erasing' the LGBTWTFBBQ issues in 1st Edition, because you sure as shit see a strong emphasis on modern queer identity based issues in the 2nd. No Erasure in this edition, my friend...
Which brings me to my second topic, Transexuality, or to put it a bit more broadly: Sexual Identity Politics. If the 'gay' issue was utterly transformed by the premise of Eclipse Phase, then the Trans issue was completely 'solved'. See yourself born into the wrong body? Don't worry, mang, you ditched that one long ago for one that is more to your liking. Before the game even started!. I mean: If you are 'lucky' enough (per the setting's premises) to actually have a gendered body at all.
This is where politics come to the fore, however. You can't just erase the entire Trans movement, and all the surrounding prenumbras of sexual identities just because your setting's core premise magically solves every single issue raised! Not that EP set out to cure the Trans movement's ills, or this is something they added to the setting because of Sexual Identity Politics... this is the entire premise of the setting, this is the core, the foundation upon which it is built!
But as I said, Posthuman Studios are very concerned with Social Justice Issues and with being good allies (they go so very far as to insist that their game should not be played by fascists or pro-fascist people. Curiously, I am unaware of any actual fascists who are interested in RPGs. They are rather hard to find these days, but Posthuman Studios inability to define a fairly well understood political movement is a digression... The point is that Posthuman Studios absolutely must display their Trans Ally Bonafides or risk being ejected from the club of good-thinkers, regardless of what their setting actually does. Frankly the end result is fucking hilarious, and it raises far more questions about the setting than it could ever hope to answer.
For example: While the number of example characters has vastly expanded, and said characters have expanded into fully developed characters rather than frameworks, what is more noteworthy is that now it is super important that we understand each character's biological sex, gender identity AND sexuality. I feel compelled to point out that the idea of neckbeards playing lesbian stripper ninjas is well over thirty years old at this point, Gamers REALLY don't need to be told that they can play whatever gender and sexuality they like, but I digress. This insistance on providing these details for well over a dozen distinct individual characters means that some... interesting... examples are raised. Just to prove their virtue, one of the examples was born Intersex, and is listed as Non-Binary. To clarify the point:
Unless your parents were horrible, evil no-good bioconservatives (and probably fascists!), then you were born into a Splicer Morph by default, which means that all of your genetics were 'cleaned' to ensure no unfortunate health problems arose. One would naturally assume that 'intersex', the condition of being born with both sets of genetalia (usually with one set being non-functional, or less than fully functional) would have been 'erased' from Splicers, and all 'up-scale' biomorphs even if it isn't seen as being an actual 'health issue'... and if not, why not? But lets continue delving into this example character's issues, shall we? Since this character is NOT in a Splicer Morph (because... ew! That's almost as low-rent as being a Flat! (where being intersex would be understandable). No, they are in a Sylph Morph. So, does this mean that Morph Designers are creating a significant numbers of Intersex models for the tiny handful of naturally intersex individuals and the even smaller amount (presumably) of Intersex afficionados? I can't speak for everyone, but my explorations of the Interwebz has taught me that far more people would be interested in functional Hermaphrodites and Futas than in the semi-nonfunctional, but all too real, Intersex. Weirdly, however, Eclipse Phase doesn't have any morphs that I can recall that are Herms, but somehow this individual can always find an Intersex Morph whenever they resleeve. Curious.
That would be one weird character with some questionable design choices, but it goes on. THe very next character has 'Gender:Female" and 'Sex: Male" listed without a single bit of commentary as to why someone who identifies as female apparently consistently chooses male morphs. I'm not saying its not possible, or even likely, but now that you've raised the issue, you kinda need to tell me why, Posthuman Studios. This is a very interesting facet to this charater that needs to be given at least some explanation, right? I mean, if you showed me a D&D Elf who preferred living among Orcs, I'd expect some commentary about why.... or is the answer 'This is nonsense we had to include to appease our fellow travellers and we really don't know why someone would do that in our setting other than to prove a point of 21st century queer politics...'?
Moving on: We have the character with Gender Neuter and Sex:-, which would be fine if they were an AGI, but apparently they were born and raised a person who then decided to live an utterly asexual life as a spider robot. Again: Not saying it can't happen, but isn't the entire point of the modern Gender Politics movement that biological sex is innate, but Gender is a choice? Who were they before they were a spider robot? Small potatoes, lets move on... I'll speed it up: THe next character is also a sexless robot, but this one has a male gender. M'kay... a few more pages we have an AGI (computer person) slotted into a genderless Synth robot shell who has the Gender of Female, but no Sex...
But I missed one: I missed the character with an 'undefined' gender, a female sex and an apparently (based on Pronouns... for all I know it could be a Riley Denis and 'her' 'lesbian' girlfriend who really enjoyed Riley's dick on the regular. I'm old fashioned, but to me that means Riley is a man, his girlfriend is straight, and everything they say about sex is needlessly complex and probably wrong...). What does Undefined MEAN? That's female looking art and a female 'sex', so what exactly is 'undefined' in this context? Now I don't even know what you mean by Gender OR Sex in these examples! So Confuse.
I am not, but I thought it would be fun to say. What I actually mean is that clearly Posthuman Studios threw all of this in the second edition because in the decade or so since the publication of the first edition the Progressive Stack altered RADICALLY and the culture war went hotter than ever, which meant that new, hotter takes were necessary, even if it merely winds up exposing how made up most of this all is, how much of it was crammed into a setting which cannot support it meaningfully, just to make a public declaration of allegiance.
I haven't even got to the best example yet: In a later chapter on sexuality in the Transhuman Future (A waste of three pages, in all fairness, regardless of your setting...), there is a 'in character' sidebar of some size written from the perspective of a Trans Activist in the setting, pointing out that Trans is still a thing, etc. It is extremely abrasive and in your face and ends with a parting shot about being off to a Drag Show, and the entire thing is so, unbelievably bad... bad optics, bad representation, bad...everything (also: There is a difference between Transwoman and Drag Queen. Yes, yes... plenty of cross over, but they ARE Different Areas of Interest despite the similarities) that I can only think that one of the writers must have been as offended by including it as I was at reading it... it reads like a Poe, or like the writer was TRYING to make the Transhuman Trans Activist look as bad as possible as a passive aggressive shot at whomever insisted he write it. If so: I tip my hat to you, good sir or madam or xim...
But I've gone a bit too long, so lets get to the third point while we are fresh on the topic of the chapter on sexuality.
So, Posthuman Studios really, really wants to make a thing out of sexless robot Case Morphs having romantic dinners with their uplifted Octopus mate, and infomorp AGI sex workers masturbating based on which filing system they use to archive conversations. It is all very, very sad.
But it fits all too well with one of the less well understood facets of the Progressive worldview, which is that whole Pansexuality thing (you know: Lando Calrissian banging his Droid Co-Pilot...). I'm not suggesting all progressives, or all left leaning individuals go for this, but it is a part of their movement, and Posthuman Studios, with a setting ripe for exploring that sort of weirdness, had to go there. A huge part of what makes this assumption work is the idea that sexual attraction is all in the mind, biology need not apply. This is an evolution of the post-modernist idea that attractiveness is a social construct, that standards of beauty vary wildly from culture to culture. I certainly agree that different cultures can value different things in 'beauty', but that these tend to be variations within a surprisingly tight tolerance... that biology creates attractiveness, from there a culture layers on additional factors, sometimes to surprising degrees, but never too far out from that biological baseline.
However: Posthuman Studios also thinks that 21st Century Mental Disorders are merely lifestyle choices in the Transhuman future, and thus we are forced to assume they think paraphilias (people who want to fuck cars, or mannikens, or brick walls) are, in fact, on to something rather than people with an actual, if mostly harmless, insanity. If you start from the premise that car-fucking is perfectly natural and normal, than I suppose assuming that a genderless robot body (with out genitalia or a hormonal system) having a functional erotic relationship with an octopus (a species with absolutely no attraction vectors in common with humanity... I assume. Bold choice, I know.), is similarly natural.
Note that I don't dispute that it is possible. People fuck cars, after all. If you have sentient cars, it is only a matter of time before you find one that is into people rubbing their ugly bits on it. I do dispute that it is natural, or common, or that it needs to be pimped by the writers as something that should feature heavily in their Eclipse Phase Games about fighting Post Singularity AI-Gods turned Cthulu by body-hopping and shooting things in the face. I further would argue that someone in a Case Morph (genderless cheap robot bodies) who is sexually attracted to uplifted octopoids is far more likely to succeed at the romance of their dreams by actually getting an octopoidal body of their own. And if they are in it for the Hentai? Why a sexless robot body?
Why am I asking all of these weird questions? Because Posthuman Studios clearly didn't. And since they wanted to write about it, they sort of needed to. No one was satisfied by the Lando question being answered with 'It just works', and that was a movie, a 90minute time filler. You are a three hundred page book meant to be explored by groups of, say, four people at time for four or more hours at a shot, week after week. 'it just works' is a cop out.
Oh, do you care about my opinion on software masterbation via filing systems? Its three shades of stupid, but lets save time by leaving it at that, shall we?
Part one