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Is this culture war? I'm not entirely sure anymore. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, and I'm not, not really, just wearied of it all.
So... list of recommendations of new SF/Fantasy popped up on a social media site (okay, it's Tumblr) and it's a mix of some continuing series (that I've never read but have at least heard of, e.g. Murderbot and the Ann Leckie Radch universe) and new novels. Much what you'd expect, except this one stuck in my attention like a splinter:
My immediate reaction was "that means abortion provider". And whaddya know?
So where's the culture war? Well, apart from the pro-life protestors being portrayed as screaming bigots and (of course!) the obligatory raped twelve year old*, it's just that I'm tired. There's not even the honesty of calling this what it is: abortion. No, it's "reproductive health care". That is the new shibboleth, I understand that, it's just... okay, the battle has been lost. Abortion is now enshrined as a fundamental human right, like food and water. We've long moved on from "sadly necessary, safe legal and rare" to "of course you're going to kill the baby, but it's not a baby, it's not a life well technically okay but not a real life, it's not a person, what do you mean murder, now please sign my petition about shrimp and AI are conscious entities that we should give legal rights so they can't be enslaved".
Yeah. I'm tired and I don't know where we're going from here on in, but if AI does turn us all into paperclips, we have no bloody leg to stand on in opposition.
*You think I'm joking?
There'd be some funny bits if this was just the dark mirror to those wacky christian film and book publishers, but Saga's a Simon and Schuster imprint, and not even one of the really wacky imprints. But it's still the same thing, just with a slight glazing of prestige. And given the extent that mainstream publishing is dying, it's not that much prestige.
It's... hard to figure out what deeper to say.
I haven't read the book, so I can't review it. It's possible that there's something interesting or deep under the obvious political allegiance, though I'm pretty skeptical. And while I've bought some books with really bad covers and interiors -- Morning Glory Milking Farm is going to be on my Kindle account forever -- I'd like to at least pretend I've got some dignity. At least the normal slop is cheap. And I don't think it would sate many frustrations, rather than highlight what a more serious engagement with the author's favored policies could have done instead.
If we want to focus on how it's a shallow version of its own politics, that's something with more meat and doesn't require a few hundred pages of less-than-AO3 grade urban fantasy. And it is shallow, both from that summary, from its own synopsis, and from the various reviews.
It's trying to rip from the headlines, except the headlines kinda suck. Chicago had a 2024 big deal over coordinated protests, except they looked like this. The city's had buffer zone laws since 2009! There were a couple heavily-reported cases in the US involving 10-12-year-old rape victims, but the controversy in each case involved questions like is the rape exception well-known enough written by reporters or whether the case had happened from people wanting the rapist prosecuted. I'd wager that the climax of the book involves a physical attack, probably a firebombing, except the real world versions of that are a lot less exciting, too.
Yes, it's a fantasy story, there aren't (presumably) Indian demons stored in a random museum you can touch, either. And the Indian demons (presumably!) aren't the real-world metaphor the author's trying to discuss, here.
Except they're not trying to discuss it. Anti-abortion activists are monsters or the outgroup in a deeper way than vampires or demons or dragons would be. The protesters being entirely unsympathetic and uncomplicated is the point, not a failure. It's the same reason that you make Dracula a dick in addition to a bloodsucker if you it to be really cathartic when he gets ground into concrete. There's an irony when that comes from someone talking up the complexity of real solutions, but there's nothing deeper to that complexity than people disagreeing with her.
That seems more critical than the weird discourse norm where whatever progressives want today is The Biggest Most Important Right Ever that can't have any limits at all, and then those actually-written-down-rights have all those penumbras and exceptions and balancing acts. But it's also less fun to point at.
How is this? I've been looking for a contemporary "spicy" book to read to get a better sense of the genre, and I've seen it mentioned a couple times.
It's not great as 'spicy' romance goes. That may not be what you're asking.
Pros: it is extremely accessible.
It's straight, and not asterisk-straight or orgy-straight or furry straight or werewolf pinata straight or MMF straight. There's a blink-and-you-miss it mention that might be a gay (or gay4pay) guy existing for a background sentence, but the story is pure girl-on-guy.
Despite the name (and front cover), it's surprisingly vanilla. The guy's basically just a rich dude with a big dick and horns, the woman's just service sector employee even if her 'it's not sex work' deflection is pretty transparent, the actually erotic scenes aren't actually focused around glory hole or prostitution kink. Most of the book focuses on handjobs and a large volume of semen, but without the rod-and-tackle 'worship' that's likely to be off-putting to straight guys (though it's definitely not written for men in terms of pacing and tone). Some very mild size difference and enhibitionism (don't get caught kink), but less than someone familiar with the genre would expect. That's more common than you'd expect from the 'female gooner' genre, but if you're looking for remotely deep monsterfuckery (artist: pantheggon. cw: f/f, mind control) you're going to be unimpressed.
It's also relatively short, as this sort of smut goes, while still being a full book rather than a short story. There's a joke about even really bad or dubcon smut being a better love story than Twilight, and damning with faint praise, but it's also half the length of the first Twilight book. If you want a sample without spending days on it, that's a bonus.
It's heavily tied into woman's psychology, and there's a lot of early scenes that are very sexual but not very erotic to support that framework. That makes it less interesting for most male readers, myself included, but if you want a good glimpse into monsterfuckery as permission structure to experience the desirable taboo, it's here, if not in a particularly grand form.
Cons: there's not much more to it than smut. Charitably, it's a romance... and so little will-they-or-won't-they (or even who-will-they) that I'd be hesitant to put it in that category; at most you get some who's-this-other-girl that resolves in minutes. That isn't unusual in the genre, but it makes it worse as a representative compared to some of the often-ludicrous plots or dramas that can come up. Still, the tension's low enough that it's a bit of a slog if you're not looking for the next sex scene, and all your suspension of disbelief has to go into the setup.
The windup to the sex isn't very erotic, and I'd expect it's even less erotic for straight guys. Part of that's a genre convention matter where the not!sex worker runs into a bunch of loser johns so The One really stands out, but it means you get a lot of premature ejaculation jokes in your porn, and not even sexy premature ejaculation, and it's not the only form (or worst) on that. The protagonist and her husbando-to-be do better, and there's some decent pacing so that when they finally get with each other outside of work it feels more reciprocal, but for the first half of the book you're getting a woman jerking a guy off, and the later jilling herself.
The prose is okay at best. There's the descriptions are sometimes a little off and you get some tense mismatches, but you're not facing a ton of simple typos or physical impossibilities. If you read a lot of fanfic, there's some tics that are really annoying (my god people, don't write sequences of a person's body parts acting individually during conversation scenes!); casual readers will probably just find them weird. Likewise, it's very fanficcy when it comes to sex scenes. If you want an idea of what conventions AO3 smut takes to a sex scene, a bunch of them are present here and distilled. Nothing to the point of dubious lube (cw:ouch), but don't think too hard about the anatomy.
The guy is boring, even by the standards of the genre. He's well-off, and tall, and has a deep voice, and is an ethical businessman, and he's divorced but it's not acrimonious, and he listens, and it's like they started with the character and then forgot to give him anything else to do. That's... probably better for a straight male reader, but it's a little unusual given the centrality of Guys Showing Vulnerability.
That said, most of the better stuff I can name is either furry, older, gay or bisexual, or some combination of all three. That's probably more an artifact of what I read than the state of the field, but limits my ability to speak on the matter.
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