Excretion
Entry updated 7 September 2026. Tagged: Theme.
The elimination of liquid and solid human waste was at one time in sf, as in other genres, a generally Taboo subject; the thorough subject indexes to E F Bleiler's Science-Fiction: the Early Years (1990) and Bleiler's and Richard Bleiler's Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years (1999) contain no mention of bathrooms, toilets, urination or defecation, indicating both that the subject was rarely addressed in the sf of those eras and that scholars as well as authors were reluctant to deal with it. Online commentators have discussed sf's general omission of this aspect of human life, sometimes offering counterexamples to the general pattern. The issue has been interestingly examined in Brian W Aldiss's The Dark Light Years (1964), which describes an alien civilization where beings freely defecate in public but eat only privately, implicitly commenting that the human aversion to certain natural bodily functions is irrational.
One early author unafraid to tackle such matters was the Satirist Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels (1726; rev 1735) describes his hero Gulliver amidst the tiny Lilliputians (see Great and Small) urinating in order to put out what to them is a great fire, while the bestial nature of his Yahoos is conveyed by the fact that they regularly defecate in public and fling their dung at people.
Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel (October-December 1953 Galaxy; 1954) makes numerous references to the communal sanitary facilities called "Personals" (and their special etiquette), which allow protagonist Lije Baley to observe that his Robot ally R Daneel Olivaw is anatomically correct. The hardened deep nuclear shelter of Mordecai Roshwald's Level 7 (1959; text restored 2004) has discreet arrangements for handling of body waste: a moving partition in a large storage chamber separates the dwindling frozen food from increasing accumulations of dehydrated sewage, and the narrator perhaps disloyally worries, "What if the wall leaks?" In Arthur C Clarke's A Fall of Moondust (1960), it is mentioned that the waste material expelled from the lunar craft buried in dust is complicating rescue attempts. In one Mad magazine Parody, Superman is unable to apprehend a female Villain because she has gone into a women's restroom, a place that even the Man of Steel cannot enter; the situation is inverted in Damon Knight's "Not with a Bang" (Winter/Spring 1950 F&SF), in which the Last Man on Earth has a seizure in a men's toilet where the prudish Last Woman will never come to his aid. Toilets are literally public in Theodore Sturgeon's "The Skills of Xanadu" (July 1956 Galaxy), taking the form of absorbent rocks on which the energy-field-clad inhabitants of Utopian Xanadu can sit and unobtrusively relieve themselves; the "rocks" intelligently consume only excreta and unliving matter, to the dismay of a visitor who inadvertently sits on one while wearing expensive Powered Armour. Urine is distilled for immediate re-use as drinking water by the desert "stillsuits" of Frank Herbert's Dune (fixup 1965), the general point about recycling also being made in various tales of prolonged Space Flight. In James Tiptree Jr's "The Night-Blooming Saurian" (May/June 1970 If), Scientists using Time Travel for prehistoric research in the post-Dinosaur era appease their sponsoring US senator by letting him hunt a faked brontosaurus, with supporting evidence including characteristic droppings which (switching to a diet of contemporary vegetation) they must themselves produce. Piers Anthony's "Up Schist Crick" (in Generation, anth 1973, ed David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin) builds laboriously to a climactic realization of its punning title as the protagonist, clad in what amounts to a skin-tight Superhero outfit, desperately needs to take a massive dump but does not know how to remove the costume.
In Ursula K Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (in New Dimensions 3, anth 1973, ed Robert Silverberg; 2017 ebook) a nominally Utopian society is maintained by regularly choosing one child to be Tortured and left to sit in his or her own excrement. Harlan Ellison's "Croatoan" (May 1975 F&SF) posits that the aborted foetuses flushed down toilets have formed a society in the sewers. In Larry Niven's A World Out of Time (1976), a man uses a toilet that Teleports his waste away. In David MacAulay's Motel of the Mysteries (1979), future archaeologists interpret the toilet in a discovered motel as a religious shrine; they reverently bow before this "Sacred Urn" while placing the toilet seat, the "Sacred Collar", around their necks. In Frederik Pohl's Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1980), a toilet monitors all of a man's waste products. David Langford's spoof of James White's Sector General hospital tales, "Outbreak" (in A Novacon Garland coll 1985), counterpoints White's lovingly described multi-species refectory arrangements with similar complications in the lavatories. Iain Banks's Consider Phlebas (1987) opens with a prolonged scene of torture and execution in which the protagonist has been condemned to drown in a cell slowly filling with the excrement from revellers at a banquet thrown in his dishonour. Alan Moore confronts Superhero Adam Strange with Absurdist difficulties in Swamp Thing #57 (October 1986), where the space/time location of the Zeta Beam that will Teleport him to a far world proves to be in a currently occupied public-toilet cubicle. The problem of traditional superhero costumes in times of excretory need is mentioned in passing in Moore's 1987 Graphic Novel Watchmen. Dan Simmons's Hyperion (1989) describes a man with a home with rooms on several planets, including one that has his bathroom. Lawrence Person's "Details" (April 1991 Asimov's) is about a person visiting a subtly different Parallel World who observes people urinating in public. In Orson Scott Card's Ender's Shadow (1999), the young hero Bean escapes capture by hiding in a toilet's water tank. There is confusion in John Scalzi's Zoe's Tale (2008) as to which of a confusing variety of alien stateroom facilities is the toilet.
In Fantasy, the Magic-permeated Ecology of Piers Anthony's A Spell for Chameleon (1977) includes plants that bespell passers-by with an urgent need to relieve themselves and provide fertilizing excreta. Elizabeth Moon's Deed of Paksenarrion fantasies are unusual in emphasizing that troops in a wilderness must dig latrines, drawing upon her military experience in the United States Marines; Diana Wynne Jones makes the same point humorously in The Dark Lord of Derkholm (1998). The children's book Captain Underpants and the Tyrannical Retaliation of the Turbo Toilet 2000 by Dav Pilkey (2014) involves a struggle with a villainous toilet, while in Candace Fleming's juvenile Ben Franklin's in My Bathroom! (2017), Benjamin Franklin travels through time (see Time Travel) to appear in a young teen's bathroom. Lois McMaster Bujold's Penric novella Testimony of Mute Things (2025 ebook) features murder by secreting an asp in the victim's chamber pot.
In the numerous Star Trek and Star Wars series and films, there have been only a few references to the bathrooms that must exist in their Starships, though someone in an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-2005) comments that all such waste is recycled to make needed materials, and published blueprints of the Enterprise do show bathrooms. In Star Trek: First Contact (1996), Zefram Cochrane must explain to his visitor from the future, Georgi La Forge, that saying he had to "take a leak" meant having to urinate. (The Memory Alpha website lists several other times in the Star Trek series when urination is mentioned.) In the Videogame Star Wars: Dark Forces (1995), bathrooms called "refreshers" are observed, and the series The Mandalorian (2019-2023) has one episode that shows a toilet seemingly designed to accommodate Alien species. Babylon 5 (1994-1999) also includes brief scenes in bathrooms.
One film showing a bathroom is 12 to the Moon (1960), where a man going to the Moon interrupts a woman taking a shower. In Pasi Spre Lună (1963) a man using an electric razor in an airport bathroom causes a blackout that leads him into a fantasy world. In the Beatles movie Help! (1965), one effort to retrieve a valued ring worn by Ringo Starr featured an attempt to suck his hand into a hand-drying machine in a restroom. A famous restroom scene appears in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as Heywood R Floyd, travelling in space, struggles to read the lengthy instructions for using a zero-gravity toilet. (The ten steps listed are reproduced in their entirety in Jerome Agel's The Making of Kubrick's 2001 [1970]). As it happens, both the International Space Station and the Artemis 2 spacecraft had problems with their toilets, suggesting that preparing a proper facility for use in space is a genuine problem. A later scene in 2001 shows that the elaborate suite prepared by aliens for David Bowman included a bathroom.
In Doppelgänger (1969), an astronaut frustrated by the realization that he has landed on a subtly altered duplicate Earth breaks bottles in a bathroom. In Night of the Creeps (1976), a young man is attacked by aliens in a bathroom, and man-eating aliens are also encountered in a bathroom in Critters (1986). Ghoulies II (1987) has an interesting scene where a monstrous menacing hand emerging from a toilet. The series Late Night with Conan O'Brien (1993-2008) featured a series of humorous sketches featuring a robot sitting on a toilet. The present-day man awakened in the future in Demolition Man (1993) is puzzled by the newfangled toilets. The series Firefly (2002) features compact toilets that are moved into a wall when not in use. In one scene in the film Uncanny (2015), an Android bothers a woman in a restroom. As in the source novel The Martian (2012 ebook) by Andy Weir, the stranded astronaut in The Martian (2015) constructively uses his own excrement to fertilize the potatoes that he is growing. In The Shape of Water (2017), the evil-doer seeking to kill the Amphibian Man reveals his obnoxious character by urinating in a bathroom while two female cleaners are present. The animate Spaceship in Farscape (1999-2003; 2005) provided crew members with bathrooms, while another organic spaceship in the series Lexx (2017-2022) has living toilets that eagerly absorb human waste products. Glorious (2022) is about a man who encounters a strange being in a restroom, while the animated series Skibidi Toilet (2023-current) involves invading aliens with humanoid heads emerging from toilets.
Strangely, the real world may be doing a better job than sf of predicting the future of bathrooms, as an online search for "science fiction bathrooms" turns up several examples of designs for futuristic bathrooms that could now be created by interested persons. But such innovative bathrooms are still only rarely observed in sf stories and films. [GW/DRL]
see also: Swearing.
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