Ellora’s Cave, $5.20, ISBN 1-84360-343-8
Sci-fi Erotica, 2002
Sexual fantasies can be funny. What is one’s fantasy can be another person’s concept of absurd. In this case, Lord of Avalon has a slave girl fantasy is one I don’t find sexy at all. Amusing, even hilarious, yes, but alas, I don’t think that’s the expected reaction to this book.
Set in 2035, the story starts with a Jack Baxter returning home from work one day to find his wife naked and calling him the Breeder. It turns out he is transcribing an autotape about the social norms and culture of this planet Avalon where the women are subservient happy little breeders to our powerful manly He-Man/Conan breeders. (This is what NASA is doing in the future? Translating happy sex stories? Where can I sign up?) Apparently the dear wife is so turned on by the stories that she ovulates just thinking of it.
Then we turn to the story of our slave girl Jenya, as told by Jack to his obligingly ovulatory broodmare wife, who has been dreaming of being Lord Rydah’s slave since she was ten. All eighteen now, she is willing and ready to be ravished by her lord. And so we go. These people do nothing to but have sex all day and night – and assuming that the hours of day and night on that Avalon are longer than that on Earth’s, wow.
It’s hilarious though. I laugh out loud when Jenya wishes she could lay down after her master has, er, arrived in her, because her heart breaks at the thought of all those precious seed gone to waste. In this book, the women seem to be more obsessed with the idea of ovulation, ejaculation, fertilization, and conception than the idea of sex alone. I don’t find the idea of being permanently bedridden thanks to endless rounds of childbirth sexy, so sorry, no hot flushes from this reader today. In fact, reading this book sometimes feels like reading a medical textbook detailing the process of fertilization (ejaculation, sperm swims up into the Fallopian tubes, the ovaries release an egg, the egg meets the sperm and says hello, et cetera) in a purple way that is supposed to be sexy. Trust me when I say gynecology is not an even remotely sexy subject.
Jenya is a dim-witted type whose existence seems solely to cater to her master’s happiness. That’s a given: she’s raised to be like that. Nonetheless, reading about her being happy because her master is just a little bit nice to her can be really trying.
Anyway, this one’s not for me. I can’t go through two pages without giggling like a silly twit or snorting at some of Jenya and Lord Rydah’s boink-tacular antics or how Jenya often reacts as if it’s her duty to be fertilized by every one of Lord Rydah’s bazillions of sperm cells that he geysers into her with alarming regularity like clockwork, every day, every night, every hour, forever and ever. You can tell that I probably miss the entire point of this story when my reaction is to pity the cleaners who will have to clean up the mess in the room afterwards.
Well, you know yourself and your reading preferences. If this slave girl fantasy is your thing, you’ll probably like this one better than me. I don’t know. Me, I have to pass. This book is, uh, a little bit too sticky for my liking.
