Farmer's basic strategy in The Lovers is to combine a passionate love story with a political satire in a dystopian setting. There is no precedent in science fiction for the love story, but Farmer's celebration of the saving power of passion and love has suggestive echoes of the work of an earlier, mainstream writer, D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930). Considering sexuality a key element of life and believing sexual maladjustment to be the symptom and curse of our age, Lawrence avoided all reticence in his most controversial novel, Lady Chatterly's Lover (1928).

In this novel, the banality of a love affair between a dissatisfied wife and her husband's gamekeeper is transcended by the poetic revelation of their sexual experience. Lawrence's work inspired subsequent writers to a far more specific and frank scrutiny of sexuality in personal relationships, just as Farmer's The Lovers had a liberating effect...