The Birth of Anakin Skywalker (Star Wars): Pulling a chapter from Joseph Campbell, George Lucas gave his tragic hero a mystical birth. Virginal slave Shmi Skywalker couldn’t figure out how she became pregnant with Anakin, who seemed to have no father. Qui-Gon Jinn realized that the midi-chlorians were likely responsible for Anakin’s conception and that the boy was the Force’s prophesized, albeit obnoxious, messiah.

Reproduction on Stratos (Glory Season by David Brin): Lysos, the founder of the colony on Stratos, is a genetic engineer who creates a new strain of human being. Humans may reproduce sexually, or women may reproduce parthogenetically, creating a society that is largely female. But this leads some of the women of Stratos to wonder why they need men at all.

The Birth of the Children (The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, adapted as Village of the Damned): After everyone in the town of Midwich falls unconscious, all the women of childbearing age find themselves suddenly and mysteriously pregnant. The Children are all born on the same day and appear human except for their strange hair and eyes. It soon becomes clear that these evil, telepathic Children are being born all over the world in an attempt at subtle invasion.

Reproduction on the Virgin Planet (Virgin Planet by Poul Anderson): After a spaceship full of female explorers crash on an uncharted planet, the survivors set up a new society and develop a way to reproduce through parthenogenesis. Generations later, descendants of the female colonists have never seen a man and the powerful doctors hold the secrets to parthenogenesis. But when a lone man lands on the planet, many of the women are eager to try an alternative method of reproduction.

The Birth of the Alien Queen (Alien Resurrection): The Alien xenomorphs generally take a rather forceful approach to pregnancy, literally shoving their embryos down a host’s throat. But Ripley’s clone is born pregnant, a circumstance that results in an Alien Queen with a healthy dose of DNA and a womb of its very own.

The Birth of Ian Troi (Star Trek: The Next Generation “The Child”): Deanna Troi’s uterus attracts the interest of an energy alien passing by the Enterprise. One night it enters her womb, triggering a speedy pregnancy. The pregnancy appears to be parthenogenic, since the resulting child is, like Troi, half human and half Betazoid, but it is inexplicably male.

Reproduction in Herland (Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman): The prototypical colony of self-replicating females, Herland is a man-free utopia. When a trio of men arrive in Herland, they manage to find wives who are interested in sexual reproduction. But there’s trouble when the women assert that sex between men and women is purely for procreative purposes.

Reproduction on GP (Ammonite by Nicola Griffith): A gender-specific virus attacks the planet GP, which both kills off the male population and gives the women the ability to reproduce. But triggering the reproductive process is less a physical act than a mental one.

The Birth of the Brood (The Brood): Nola Carveth sees a psychotherapist who has developed a bizarre, body-altering therapy called psychoplasmics. When her therapist encourages her to allow her negative emotions to take over, she gives birth to the Brood, deformed children who act out those emotions.

Vita-Lerp Induced Parthenogenesis (Sex and the High Command by John Boyd): A drug called Vita-Lerp not only allows parthenogenesis, but gives women an orgasm as well, causing some women to view men as obsolete. A battle of the sexes breaks out as a women’s crusade emerges to wipe out men and eliminate males from the future gene pool.

Birth of the Adipose (Doctor Who “Partners in Crime”): Adipose is a revolutionary diet pill that causes seemingly miraculous weight loss. That’s because the pill causes people to birth the alien Adipose, sentient fat blobs that pop off the body and literally walk away. But if the process goes too far, the dieters don’t merely gestate the Adipose; they are transformed into dozens of the infant creatures.

The Birth of Adria (Stargate SG-1): The Ori are a godlike race who command the worship of lesser beings. Looking to maintain a presence on the mortal plane, they do what godlike beings do: impregnate a mortal woman. Vala Mal Doran becomes mystically pregnant by the Ori and gives birth to Adria, who performs the will of the Ori.

The Birth of the Babylon Babies (Babylon AD): A geneticist engineered the fetal Aurora, programming her to give birth at a certain point in time without the contribution of male DNA. This gave the Noelite order a genuine virgin birth, which is necessary for their relgion.

The Whateley Twins (The Dunwich Horror by HP Lovecraft): It’s actually not clear how Lavinia Whateley became pregnant. But given that the father of her monstrous children is Yog-Sothoth, an Outer God locked out of our universe, it is safe to assume that mystical forces were at work.

In a universe stocked with sentient robots and faster than light travel, you'd hope that science would have mastered something as mundane as the human reproductive system, yet the fictive cosmos are littered with unplanned pregnancies, bastard children, and all manner of unpleasant critters bursting from one's internal organs. Is any form of contraception safe in world of science fiction? We looked at seven tried and true methods and started to worry that the future we’ve envisioned is one in which we’re all paying child support.

Socially-Mandated Birth Control
How it works: When the world is on the verge of overpopulation and resources are strained, sometimes a government’s got to put the breaks on reproduction and restrict baby-making to the desirable few. After all, after thousands of years spent clawing to the top of the Darwinian ladder, we can’t have every Tom, Dick, and Beowulf Shaeffer dumping his DNA into the newly limited gene pool. Fortunately, there’s a veritable buffet of methods for de-fertilizing the populace. The body-numbing “ethical birth control pills” of Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House make sexual contact utterly uninteresting, while Andrew Neiderman’s The Baby Squad opts for the simpler solution of mass sterilization. The women of Sarah Hall’s Daughters of the North are fitted with an outwardly visible IUD, and Brave New World does away with childbirth entirely, making pregnancy the pinnacle of personal disaster and arming women with a birth control utility belt that would make Batman proud.

Why it fails: It turns out that the long arm of the government can only reach so far. In Hall’s book, women occasionally slip off the reservation to join the Carhullan Army, where they’ll take out that contraceptive device post haste. And, despite the looming threat of execution, women in The Baby Squad and Larry Niven’s “Known Space” stories have been known to get pregnant on the sly. Of course, sometimes birth control just plain fails. Even with a lifetime of practice at the Malthusian Drill, Brave New World’s beta Linda still manages to get knocked up, and with nary an abortion tower in sight.

Making it with a Robot
How it works: Assuming you’ve gotten a hold of one of those fully functional models and not one that’s genitally lacking, robots may be the perfect lovers – all that stamina with no messy gametes.

Why it fails: While this might work with entirely abiological specimens, the rules get tricky when your partner’s a Cylon. If you’re a human doing a Cylon, don’t fall in love. If you’re a fellow toaster, then plug away – unless you’re one of the Final Five. Which you might be. On second thought, it’s best just to use a rubber.

Male Birth Control
How it works: As modern researchers are tirelessly working to staunch the flow of sperm, Starfleet has long known the benefits of offering contraceptive injections to men. It reduces the odds of accidents and prevents alien-loving starship captains from leaving little Kirklets across the Alpha Quadrant.

Why it fails: As with its modern female analog, the male contraceptive injection is only good as long as you keep it up. And captains like Ben Sisko are just too busy bringing down evil empires, battling Pah-wraiths, and preserving the timeline to stop by Sick Bay for a hypospray. But not too busy, apparently, to get it on with Kasidy Yates.

Living in a World Without Men
How it works: Maybe all the men died off one day in a mysterious and bloody event. Maybe women have gone off and formed their own society without thinking to take a few Y chromosomes along. Maybe a whole species is kept female to control their breeding. Whatever the reason, the absence of sperm would seem to take pregnancy off the menu.

Why it fails: Even in the face of gendercide, men are not so easy to fell. There are bound to be a few hiding out in secret labs, in orbit, or dangling in straitjackets from the ceiling, ready to impregnate the first female who pounces. Or, as in Jurassic Park, the absence of males may prompt a handful of females to tiptoe across the gender line. And maybe men aren't a necessary component after all; the women of all-female utopia Herland opt for parthenogenesis, making themselves pregnant without the benefit of a partner.

Being Male
How it works: Thomas Beatie aside, it’s unlikely that a man is going to find himself pregnant at the gonads of another human being. Even exclusively male societies, like that in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Ethan of Athos, tend to rely on external gestation devices rather than construct a male womb.

Why it fails: While human fetuses find the male body hostile, other species may not be so discerning. From the Octavia Butler’s Tlic to Ridley Scott’s chestbursters to that Alien in Red vs. Blue, there are plenty of extraterrestrials perfectly happy to place their embryos in our bodies, regardless of a uterus.

Abstinence
How it works: We all learned it in school: the only surefire way to avoid pregnancy is abstinence. Or sodomy.

Why it fails: As Deanna Troi and Shmi Skywalker will tell you, keeping your knees shut doesn’t exactly guarantee a baby-free existence. When those microscopic or incorporeal beings want something from you, be it a Force-balancing messiah or a chance at fleshy life, they aren’t going to wait around for a little thing like sexual intercourse.

Death
How it works: In olden times, death generally put a damper on one’s ability to become a new parent. But with today’s medical advances, it’s best to dispose of every last shred of genetic material – ova, sperm, and any gestating alien life forms.

Why it fails: Giving birth to an Alien queen was just the sort of thing Ellen Ripley was trying to avoid when she jumped into a vat of boiling lead. Little did she know that, in the hands of Joss Whedon and a handful of ethically-challenged scientists, even death is no match for the miracles of the reproductive process.

Back in the late 1990s, Matt Rice got pregnant and had a baby with his male partner Patrick Califia. And of course there have been dudes with uteruses dating back to the early twentieth century. If you don't believe me, just read Pagan Kennedy's amazing biography of one such wombtastic guy, The First Man-Made Man, which is about the first transgendered male — ie, the first dude who could get pregnant (he didn't choose to do that, but led a pretty damn interesting life).

Throughout the past century, people have been writing about pregnant men in science fiction. The people in Ursula Le Guin's novel Left Hand of Darkness are, like the aliens in Enemy Mine, all one gender and therefore "men" can get pregnant. In Marge Piercy's novel Woman on the Edge of Time, everybody grows babies in artificial wombs but both men and women can nurse the infants when they're born. And of course you haven't lived until you've seen Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie Junior, dressed in a peach-colored pregnancy suit and confessing, "My nipples are so sensitive."

Plus, as I mentioned earlier, trannies abound in Varley and Stross novels, so it wouldn't be OMG SHOCKING in their worlds if a chick became a dude but kept his uterus for further use. Plus, the genre of fanfic called MPreg, where familiar male characters get pregnant, has been around forever.

So say it loud and say it proud — dudes can has babies! And we already knew that!