Samhain Publishing, $2.50, ISBN 1-59998-572-1
Sci-fi Erotica, 2007
Marie Harte’s A Scorching Seduction has a lovely futuristic romance pet peeve of mine – the abuse of awkward arrangement of alphabets and apostrophes in the names of the characters. The heroine’s name is Fia af’ Nicos while the heroes are Trace N’tre and Vaan C’vail. I’m just happy that there is no one named Xaand’er Cth’uluuon here. Yes, there are two heroes here with the most embarrassingly droopy names ever. Oh, and this is a ménage à trois story.
Fia is posing as a waitress in the Pacifica Resort in Planet Ermu. Apparently the folks here are all sex-mad and horny but Fia isn’t here to play, she’s here to spy on Trace and Vaan. Ugh, just typing their names feels somehow wrong. Why can’t Ms Harte give her heroes more normal names like Bruce and Harry? Anyway, Trace is the best assassin of Racor while Vaan is the “high commander of covert operations in Racor’s TAC Army”. From what I understand, Racor is a moon – it is also where Fia comes from. Fia is a Vendon, folks with the ability to morph their appearance considerably to camouflage themselves (think of Mystique from The X-Men – Fia is a little like that), so she’s the perfect woman for the job… except for the fact that the twin suns of Ermu can switch on the horny nymphomaniac in Fia. No, I don’t think sunscreen will help.
Trace and Vaan have been wrongly accused of plotting to kill the Prime by a mean high-ranking Racor officer so they are laying low at the moment in this resort. Unknown to them, Fia is spying on them on behalf of the Prime and her brother who is a high-ranking security officer, but she is becoming increasingly certain that these two are innocent. Then her cover is blown and she now has two giant penises hot on her behind.
I’m not sure why our heroine doesn’t use her skills to disguise herself once her cover is blown but I don’t think plot is of much importance here as much as the sex scenes. Like many generic and unrealistic ménage à trois stories out there, this one doesn’t fully explore the psychology of the main characters. Everyone just happens to be in a sharing mood here. On the bright side, I can tell Trace and Vann apart a little bit. Not much, but still, a little counts for something.
There is nothing particularly outstanding or bad about A Scorching Seduction. It’s a pleasant tale of sexual romp and a little bit of plot, no doubt meant to be breezed through in one sitting and tossed aside without much thought afterwards.
