But they are the most refined example of an archetype dating to Plato’s Symposium, when Aristophanes says the gods created humans with two sexes, but they were too strong and managed to climb to Heaven, so Zeus hacked them in two halves, man and woman. Hence, sexual attraction, interpreted as the halves that search one another to become whole.

In science fiction the most poignant portrait of an alien hermaphrodite race is in The Left Hand of Darkness of Ursula K. Le Guin. Hers are alternate hermaphrodites, soume in certain life stages, ouana in another. Even Theodore Sturgeon, in Venus Plus X describes a race of hermaphrodites descended from humanity, but his, though an interesting variation, is essentially an utopian/dystopian novel, whit very little action.
It’s curious to mention an hermaphrodite race portrayed by Isaac Asimov: the solipsistic Solarians Spacers, that hate each other presence so much that in the last of Asimov’s Future History novels they’ve become hermitic self-foecundant hermaphrodites. Very distressing, really, they appear to have no sex, instead of being two-sexed.

Much more interesting is a character of Clive Barker’s Imajica, Pie Oh Pah. He belongs to a race of androgynes, and is one of their Mystifs, sorcerers and conjurors. He is hermaphrodite, and can play the role of the two sexes at will. The relationship between him and the sorcerer Sartori is very similar to that which exist between Panthera and Cal, though Sartori is male, and in his borrowed identity is a reckless womanizer. Yet he falls in love whit Pie Oh Pah, who appears to him "disguised" as a woman, but shall manage enchant him whit his/her selfless love. Pie oh Pah is very similar to a Wraeththu character.

A hermaphrodite named, would you believe it, "Cal" (for Calliope) is the protagonist of the novel Middlesex, of Jeffrey Eugenides. Calliope’s biography of an hermaphrodite’s life in the real world is a very poignant narration on what it means to be different in a world where being "different" is hardly tolerated. In the first chapters, one can feel echoes of Storm Constantine’s first paragraphs of "Paragenesis."

In conclusion, aspects of the potential androginy of humankind and the concept of hermaphroditism has been treated in various ways in science fiction and fantasy: No-one, though, managed to portray an entire hermaphrodite race in all its complexities, with characters so enticing and vibrant, as Storm did in the Wraeththu series. Only Pie Oh Pah of Clive Barker can be compared to a Wraeththu har ( I’m reminded of both Cobweb and Panthera). Still, it’s interesting to compare the variations that different authors imposed to an archetypal theme.