Ellora’s Cave, $4.45, ISBN 978-1-4199-1028-9
Sci-fi Erotica, 2007

At 39, Janis Stone has lost 32 pounds in the last three months in order to fit into her wedding dress. She still can’t fit completely into that dress unless she somehow finds a way to stop breathing. Our poor heroine has been rendered insane by the biological clock, you see, and she’s determined to marry a man who’s already making digs about her weight before they are married.

As she is trying to get her dress fitted, comes a message from one “Primus Taddus of the Black-Striped Pelt” who claims to be “a council member of the colonization ship Ecstasy of Generations“. He has hijacked the media of the area to tell everyone that a virus has killed all women on their planet and now they are going to take one thousand “fertile females under age forty, childless and not presently pair-bonded” from Earth in order to help them with their program to repopulate their planet.

Can someone tell me what the heck is “pair-bonded”? This Primus Taddus guy uses the word “wife” so why can’t he say the word “married”? Is there some kind of stigma to the word “married”? Mated, lifemated, bondmated, matebonded, and now pair-bonded. God help us all. Anyway, I don’t know how these stupid aliens manage to do it, but Jan blacks out from trying too hard to fit into her wedding dress and finds herself on board Ecstasy of Generations when she regains consciousness. A cat-like fellow informs her that she’s been out for seven weeks now and he’s so glad that she hasn’t died or something because it’s now time for the same old “mate, mate, ma-aaa-aaa-aate” thing to take place. This fellow, Secondus Delos, is a doctor.

There is some attempt by the author to have the women trying to go against their captors but eventually One Thousand Brides merely pays lip service to the whole “You can’t kidnap us, genetically alter us, and expect us to be your brood mares!” nonsense as one touch from the smelly cat people is all it takes for them to go all putty. Jan is soon shrieking to Delos, “Mount me again!” and I just have to roll up my eyes.

This is a pretty formulaic “alien porn” thing at the end of the day. It’s pretty silly and contains some silly sex. If you have read a few Ellora’s Cave stories with aliens before, you can probably know what to expect from this one because… well, let’s just say that it is what is.