Feminine Desire Often Overlooked in Sci-Fi: Could the Trend Be Changing?

The gun-toting heroine of the mobile game Love and Deepspace, first released in 2024, lives on Earth in the year 2048. The planet is suffering from environmental collapse and the reality-distorting effects of a spatial anomaly called the Deepspace Tunnel, which has appeared over the planet.

The player follows the heroine in her work investigating the violent disruptions caused by the Deepspace Tunnel and as she becomes aware that she cannot trust her own memory. Parts of her thoughts have been tampered with or are missing entirely.

In the 2017 film Blade Runner 2049, K (Ryan Gosling) is a replicant agent – an artificial lifeform almost indistinguishable from humans – charged with hunting his own kind. K’s memories were made for him by humans to fabricate a sense of self. Yet the emotions he experiences are undeniably real.

Both Love and Deepspace and Blade Runner 2049 explore the relationship between memory, desire and who gets to be considered human in the future.

Despite this, Love and Deepspace, like many other video games designed for women, is often overlooked for its contribution to contemporary sci-fi.

Now, Love and Deepspace has launched a collaboration with Blade Runner 2049, including a short in-game story where an object found in a laboratory allows the characters of Love and Deepspace to peer into the alternative Earth of Blade Runner 2049.

The collaboration draws attention to the similarities between these stories, in particular the way the identity and desires of their characters are impacted by technology.

It also highlights one of the main differences between the two stories – Love and Deepspace explores its subject matter from a feminine perspective.

Sex and sci-fi

Love and Deepspace, Blade Runner (1982) and its sequel all explore sex and desire amid hyper-modern technocracy. The Blade Runner films are evocative, visually moving and embraced as leaders in the science fiction genre.

In Blade Runner, Deckard becomes involved in a romantic relationship with replicant Rachel (Sean Young). Their interaction is tense, informed by the significant power disparity between the two characters.

When Deckard and Rachel are physically intimate, Rachel has little agency in her actions. Her exclusion from Deckard’s otherwise ruthless killing of other replicants is, in no small part, the result of her submission to his desire.

In Blade Runner 2049, K shares an intimate relationship with his digital companion, Joi (Ana de Armas). Joi, like K, is one unit of a mass-produced technology designed to serve humans.

K and Joi’s exploration of intimacy takes on a playful nihilism: doomed to fail, at least in the eyes of the status quo, but worth doing anyway. The film frames the effort as more “human” than the behaviours of most of the human characters, who have become distanced from the emotions of others.

In both films, sex is used as a device to expand upon the films’ philosophical consideration of what it means to be human and have human emotions.

In Love and Deepspace, the player, as a female protagonist, can choose to pursue an intimate romantic relationship with a selection of men entangled with the social and political world of Earth in 2048.

Rafayel, for example, is an elusive artist whose coy demeanour serves as a cover for his revenge killing of the members of a tech corporation who exploited and massacred his community. Caleb is the protagonist’s childhood companion who works for a powerful independent military. Deeply traumatised, Caleb fluctuates between gentle care and threatening obsession in his desire for stability.

As in the Blade Runner films, intimacy and companionship in Love and Deepspace is complex and deeply affected by the technological and social contexts of its science fiction setting.

Sex in Love and Deepspace is tactile, intimate and emphasises sound and voice. Like in Blade Runner, sex is also a moment of character study: a means by which the game explores questions of identity, place and power in a futuristic setting.

But here, the feminine becomes the subject, rather than the object, of desire.

A new collaboration

Despite its origins in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), science fiction has historically been appraised as a male-dominated genre. The perspective of feminine characters is often excluded from contemporary sci-fi.

In 2025 over 50 million people played Love and Deepspace. Yet there is little critical discussion that considers the composition of the video game itself and the interests of its story as a work of globally popular science fiction designed with a feminine protagonist.

Considering this omission is important, because the study of popular science fiction is an important way of understanding the changing hopes, nostalgias and fears of the time and place they emerge from.

Love and Deepspace challenges the often masculine framing of science fiction and explores the way technology and power impact feelings of desire from a feminine perspective.

The collaboration with Blade Runner 2049 sees the feminine protagonist of Love and Deepspace intersect into a cinematic sci-fi world we have often experienced from a male perspective.

As global warming and artificial intelligence change the way we experience the world, Love and Deepspace explores the role of sex and desire in contemporary science fiction – and what it means to be a feminine subject in a technocratic future. A future that, for many of us, has already arrived.