Note: This is the first in a series of excerpts from Doctor Meredith Underwood’s influential book on the erotic lives of xenosapient people, Explorations in Xenophilia.

“When I first proposed this book to the Department of Anthropology and Exploration at Badchester College, it was met with vigorous opposition. Although I had only submitted the proposal to a few key readers in my department, copies proliferated and spread throughout the university like wildfire. Within a week it was the talk of campus, my department was being referred to as AnthSex (instead of the more commonly accepted abbreviation, AnthEx), and I had been called everything from dangerously hedonistic (at best) to irredeemably evil (at worst). There were calls to discipline me, to strip me of my tenure or relieve me of my position altogether. There were even those among the more radically conservative colleges calling for my arrest and imprisonment. Even the most generous critiques of my proposal agreed that the research was—potentially, at least—prejudiced and self-indulgent, and that it would necessarily eroticize and exoticize its subjects. There was near-universal agreement that the project would ruin my academic career and expose me, my department, and the university as a whole to ridicule…”