Meegat/Gamete, the time-squad capsule, Chris Boucher's fondly-remembered story. We've got quite a sub-genre here. Stories which dramatise the meaning, or lack of meaning, that sexual reproduction brings to an individual life, but using space-colonisation as a metaphor.
What I like about interpreting stories in this way is that it raises questions in my mind.
Does leaving children behind really make your life more meaningful? Does a 'failure' to reproduce take anything away from your worth? How much should you sacrifice of yourself for the chance to leave a legacy? Are we just carriers for our genes? If reproducing ourselves is all that gives us meaning - is meaning endlessly deferred?
And in some ways, because it is done obliquely, I feel the answers are less 'closed' than they would be in a realistic story about a woman facing some of these dilemmas herself. I should rephrase that. Even quite crappy SF stimulates my imagination, while realistic character-driven literature has to be pretty damn good to produce the same effect.
Another somewhat similar example is Kurt Vonnegut's 'The Sirens of Titan', where earth civilisation is manipulated by an alien to send pointless messages back to his home world (Stonehenge I think is the sign for 'arrived safely').
Anyway. There's one final example I'd like to mention and I really urge anyone with any interest in all this to read it. It's by just about my avourite SF author, Alice Sheldon, who wrote under the name 'James Tiptree Junior'. Her works are mostly short stories and they are highly informed by the whole gender/power/genetics deal. If that makes them sound boring, they really aren't, and they are also very very bleak.
Alas I now forget the name of the story, but read any collection of her works. In this a rocket ventures for the first time outside the solar system, where it encounters some kind of big wonderful object. All the astronauts experience ecstasy. Some new entity is created and goes away. And that's it for earth civilisation. That was all it was created to do, send DNA out of the solar system to be used. Job done, there is no more point to existence.
This is exactly the Meegat/gamete story but it is told from the male point of view. The rocket is a phallic symbol, the astronauts are gametes. But in this story the emphasis is on the female/egg symbol moving on, and leaving the spent male behind.
My point is that this is an example of a story which is very similar to Deliverance or Time Squad, but the subtext is definitely put there on purpose. And the power relations are the other way round, in reproductive terms. I just think this provides an interesting context to the discussion. Oh, and it was written in the early seventies.
Alison
PS sorry that this seems to continue a debate that might be old hat, but it only just occurred to me, and it seemed so relevant I had to chip in