Here is my critical take on two series that endeavor with varying degrees of success to combine elements of erotica with familiar genre forms; in this case, sci-fi/space opera, and historical fiction respectively
TAS
Korin I. Dushayl: The
Lady and the Spyder series
I have to admit, Korin
I. Dushayl’s The Lady and the Spyder
series has started to grow on me, notwithstanding some serious initial
reservations. I have always been a sucker for space opera, ever since I saw my
first episode of Gerry Anderson’s Fireball
XL-5 one Saturday morning in the fall of 1962, a time when interest in
space and space exploration was forefront in the collective consciousness, when
the astronauts of Project Mercury were every true-blue young lad’s heroes, and the
possibilities for adventure and discovery seemed limitless. Anderson’s
marionettes made a deep impression on my wide-eyed four-year-old imagination,
and I still had vivid memories of the show fifty years later when I purchased
the complete series on DVD. Unfortunately, it’s true what people say about not
being able to go home again. A kids’ series that was state-of-the-art for
television in the early 1960s comes off as decidedly less magical in the early
2000s. Beyond the fact that Steve Zodiac and Venus’ strings are showing more
obviously than ever (an “oops” mined for its full comic potential in Trey
Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America:
World Police, itself a brilliant send-up of Anderson’s technique and style), not to mention the horridly atavistic attitudes towards gender equality, the “science”, such as it was in that crudely embryonic attempt at science
fiction, strikes us nowadays as unbelievably bad. To save the time and expense of putting his puppets into space
suits, Anderson had the characters take “space pills” whenever
they needed to go EVA (the first real space walk was still three years in the
future), and there were aspects of physics and planetology that would have
driven more skeptical viewers up the wall even back then.
But I digress—if only but a
little. Dipping into Spyder’s Trouble,
the first book in Dushayl’s series, I was rather disconcerted to discover that
the strings were showing—qiote overtly as it turned out. The space-opera
aspects of the story are blatantly derivative to a point where at times I
thought I was reading Firefly fanfic—the
only difference being that the fanfic characters cuss in Hindi instead of Mandarin.
Then, too, some of the characters’ names are so poorly disguised as to make me
wonder how anyone could steal with that degree of cheek and not believe they
would be caught at it. (Captain Mal Reynolds becomes Varyl Malonds. Jayne Cobb
becomes Bunk—as in “I’ll be in my bunk”, while Serenity’s chief maintenance geek Kaylee
is thinly veiled as Tamara, albeit now a lesbian submissive.)
I might have simply stopped
reading the aptly named Spyder’s Trouble—and,
for a while, I was sorely tempted to abort the effort — but something kept me
forging ahead. In melding decidedly well-worn space-opera tropes with elements
of reasonably tame BDSM and—more interestingly— an exploration of issues
surrounding religion, patriarchy, sexual repression and theocratic hypocrisy,
Dushayl managed to hold my interest with increasing ease, especially in the
second installment, Spyder’s Truth,
which is written with a clearer vision and more acute technical assurance than the
first book. Some of the “tech” aspects are actually pretty plausible (is there
such a word as “near-fetched”?) and the author skillfully avoids the common pitfall
of going too “tech heavy” at the expense of a genuinely human story.
And, at root, this is a
deeply human story—albeit not a romantic one. The Lady whose collar all the
crew—very much including the captain—eventually wear, is a fascinating character,
alluring, persuasive, shrewd, deeply intelligent, but also at times tender,
caring, empathetic and wise—precisely the qualities a great Domme should
possess. Each character has a slightly different relationship with The Lady, a
different, often interesting, history with her, and this lends a fair amount of
variety to the narrative. All fine and
good.
Worth a look.
Lola Bruce-James
An attempt at erotic historical
fiction, albeit neither particularly well researched or imaginatively executed.
These two barely-chapter-length pot-boilers would have benefited considerably
from the slightest bit of basic inquiry into the sexual culture of ancient
Rome—that is, beyond a few re-runs of the Starz network’s Spartacus series, or soft-core Gladiator
parodies on “Skin-emax”. It’s not as if such information isn’t readily
available. Reay Tannahill’s Sex in
History has been around for over thirty years now, and even a cursory
glance at the first chapter of Melissa Mohr‘s Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing reveals a treasure trove of
insight into the sexual attitudes, mores and taboos of the time.
Yes, there were sexual taboos in ancient Rome, and
some fairly rigid ideas about what was and what was not appropriate. So far
from the lurid cinematic visions of orgiastic free-for-all (Bob Guccione’s Caligula comes immediately to mind), the
Romans were very clear about who they would and would not fuck—and even more
specific about how they would and
would not go about it. Basically, pansexualism had very little to do with
eroticism as we understand it, and everything to do with class domination and
the maintenance of the perceived natural order. A Roman citizen’s duty was to penetrate early and often—to penetrate (and thus dominate) as many
of his inferiors as possible, and this imperative was without regard to gender
or sexual orientation (a concept mostly foreign to the Romans). At the same
time, oral sex was regarded as something filthy, low-down and deeply, deeply
depraved. Enjoying fellatio was the sure mark of perversion. Female breasts
were not thought of as especially erogenous, mostly kept covered up, and seldom
the focus of erotic attraction we so take for granted in our own day . . . One
could go on and on . . .
While the second book is marginally better than the first, in the end, author Lola
Bruce-James employs ancient Rome as little more than a convenient one-dimensional backdrop for
her little skit-like portrayals of half-baked anachronistic adolescent fuckery. Too bad that
in her headlong rush to dress up a stroke book in the guise of “serious” historical
respectability, she misses a huge opportunity to write something that could
have been genuinely interesting and even reasonably original.
Not recommended.
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