Liquid Silver Books, $5.95, ISBN 978-1-59578-415-5
Sci-fi Erotica, 2008

Taking Command is actually a pretty well-balanced story with both sex and plot, with the sex taking on some mild domination/submission elements at times. However, there are one too many aspects of the plot that I’m really not sure of.

Kind of like an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (or one of those later series – I can never keep track of them), this one takes place on a spaceship where there is a Virtual Fantasy Room or VFR. You go inside and tell the computer program what your fantasy is, and voila, the appropriate fantasy and all relevant holograms will be served up for your pleasure. Daniella Pierce is a mechanic on the Zenith and she uses this room to play out her submission fantasy. The hologram Jake is a pretty hot one, but there is a problem that she isn’t aware of that time – Jake is real. He’s Captain Jake Tarune. He never imagines that a hologram can get all heated up and ready to go.

Daniella and Jake will come face to face over some matters involving sabotage on the ship. Daniella becomes a suspect, but oh, how will poor Jake ever decide which head to listen to when he has to get to the bottom of this situation?

The love scenes are all pretty well done, but I’m not sure about the plot. When it comes to the characters, these two are pretty okay, although sometimes Jakes does seem more interested in having sex with Daniella rather than investigating her possible involvement in the sabotage case. Daniella is a fine heroine with no weird hang-ups about sex, although she, like Jake, have some issues about some unhappy moments in their past. The plot, however, has some developments that leave me wondering. Not to get into too many spoilers, let me just say that some things, like a matchmaking computer program to a final scene where everyone gets a virtual shock therapy session on confronting the past and letting it go, are a little too much on the cartoon side for me.

Taking Command is a pretty readable story. The characters are adequately developed to be a little more deeper than one-dimensional and they have some pretty explosive chemistry. Just don’t think too much about the plot is my advice.