u/entrailsevilratmeat

This is something I haven’t seen very often, but continues to absolutely fascinate me. I think it’ll make the most sense if I just describe the example I’m thinking of: China Mieville’s novel Perdido Street Station is a fantasy-foremost slipstream setting that features a race of people known as Khepri, who have the bodies of human women, but have heads that are themselves the bodies of scarabs.

That sounds a little confusing, so I’ll clarify that most of their organs exist in their human portion, like a regular person’s would, but their heads are also described as having things like legs and, yes, reproductive organs. They’re a large diaspora in a city with a few other bipedal species and have no problem functioning in it. However, it’s only female Khepri who are partially humanoid. Male khepri are just the scarabs, and consequently, they lack the sapience that khepri women have. This makes reproduction just as horrifying as it necessarily would be in these circumstances.

The only other example I can think of isn’t stated directly, but Octavia Butler’s ”Bloodchild” seems to imply a similar sexual dimorphism between male and female Tlic— males are said to remain quite small compared to their female counterparts, who can comfortably cohabitate in human architecture, and to have much shorter lifespans.

I’m currently workshopping a species of civilized aliens whose sex functions under this model, and it’s a very engaging challenge to try to find a societal solution to this conundrum that reads as ethical to a human audience.

Has anyone else encountered a species like this, or are developing one themself? Is there an attribute besides sex that this sapience divide might plausibly exist along— age, perhaps? It’s not uncommon for there to be outside influences that can render a member of a sapient species nonsapient, or vice versa, but what I’m looking for here is instances where the species naturally exists with this distinction between members.