The novel deliberately explores issues around consent and loss of consent, personal choice, and constraint in the context of unpredictable and uncontrollable environments. In particular, the narrative explores the nature and extent of sexual consent. This is key to the novel’s female focus and romance, relationship-based genre and also informs the novel’s wider consideration of personal agency in survival and adaptation.

In the first part of Ice Planet Barbarians, alien captors whom the women refer to as “basketball heads” use rape as a “disciplinary measure” against the women who make noise when they wake to find themselves imprisoned by an unknown species. The violent rape of one of the captives in the book’s first chapters was derided by many readers, who criticized its contrast with the remainder of the book’s light tone, even when characters face life or death circumstances. This scene was sufficiently controversial that it was edited out of the 2021 print re-release of the book by Berkley Books. Yet the absence of an on-page assault does not eliminate the fear of sexual violence that the women face when they consider their initial captors.