Whether readers are repelled or intrigued, sexuality – and the exploration into our deepest sexual fantasies and fears – has been a significant theme in science fiction ever since I can remember. Few books affected me more profoundly than the Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972) anthologies. Both landmark collections – edited by the incomparable Harlan Ellison – examined, among other things, sexuality in a variety of science fiction settings, be it with an alien lifeform, in deep space or on some future Earth. (Piers Anthony’s wildly provocative “In the Barn,” for example, envisions an alternate Earth where almost all mammals have gone extinct and human women – “cows” – are treated like animals and used as the primary milk source.)
One topic that has been explored numerous times over the decades is man’s use of technology to create the ideal mate, the perfect woman, the ultimate orgasm. An iconic image that instantly comes to mind is the docile, robotic housewives depicted in Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972). And then there’s the seductive female android from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968); the “accommodating” female robots of the 1973 movie Westworld (written and directed by Michael Crichton); the orgasmatron in Woody Allen’s sci-fi comedy Sleeper; the super-sexed artificial human protagonist from Heinlein’s Friday (1982); the bio-engineered prostitute Emiko from Paolo Bacigalupi’s debut novel The Windup Girl (2009) – the list goes on and on…
This ongoing literary fascination with physical gratification certainly does mirror our society’s self-indulgent obsession with sex. We still haven’t found a cure for cancer or autism or AIDS but we have numerous pharmaceuticals that will help men sustain erections indefinitely. The civilized world essentially stopped moving for 14 minutes to listen to a golfer talk about his sexual indiscretions. In January, the Hubble telescope captured stunning images of the origins of the universe 600 million years after the Big Bang but what news was in the headlines? The John Edwards sex tape.
So it’s not surprise at all to find this theme of building the perfect sex machine in science fiction – it’s almost an inevitability. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction briefly touches upon the history behind this concept: “…SF has been an accurate reflector of popular prejudices and feelings about sex over the years – especially in stories at the pulp-magazine end of the SF spectrum, where the fantasies and taboos of the day are encapsulated more clearly than in sophisticated works.”
And this: “Since genre SF developed in a patriarchal culture as something written chiefly by men for men (or boys), the lack of female protagonists is unsurprising. When women do appear they are usually defined by their relationship to the male characters, as objects to be desired or feared, rescued or destroyed…”
The concept of scientifically produced “courtesans” is revisited in Christopher Rowley’s Pleasure Model, the first release from Tor Book’s Heavy Metal Pulp, a new line of novels combining noir fiction with fantastic art featuring the themes, story lines, and audacious style of Heavy Metal magazine. Except in Pleasure Model, there are numerous integral female characters and the future isn’t sexist – pleasure mods (highly illegal “vat-grown gene humans” with “the IQ of a pocket watch”) are built for the enjoyment of both male and females.
From the very first sentences, readers are immediately immersed in a dark, futuristic America replete with twisted sexual obsessions, crooked cops, and lawless government agencies: “The man was a massive specimen. Heavy shoulders, powerful arms, solid delts and lats. The deeply lined face was hidden in shadow, the head bowed with pain, but it was a strong face, brutal even, or so Mistress Julia thought. She had finished. One hundred strokes with the single-tail whip, following on eighty with the number three rattan cane. All delivered quite slowly, ten seconds apart, stretching the ordeal out to an hour. Blood ran from several welts on his back and buttocks...”
When a burned-out police detective named Rook Venner is assigned to a bizarre murder case involving a former general with a shadowy past, his only evidence is a virgin pleasure model named Plesur. “Of course, her – its – vocabulary was limited, but apart from that it was a gorgeous young woman, about twenty years old, with long golden hair, deep blue eyes, a pert little nose, and a large mouth loaded with heavy lips that worked like triggers on the heterosexual male mind.”
But with the intelligence of a toddler, Rook has to find a way to retrieve whatever information is inside her head. Before he can do that, however, seven-foot tall combat robots and military assassins wearing invisible plasmonic suits are dispatched to kill both of them. Forced to seek sanctuary in the seedy underworld of sex clubs, brothels and pleasure mod manufacturing, Rook begins to unravel the secrets inside Plesur – and what he discovers will change the way he sees the world forever.
Pleasure Model is the first book in the Netherworld trilogy so readers who enjoy this fusion of futuristic action and adventure and cool, stylish illustrations can look forward to at least two more highly entertaining installments….
That said: it’s fascinating to me how these hundreds of storylines that explore mankind’s quest for the ultimate sexual experience can be the antithesis of eroticism. I suppose that’s the point in many of these novels – they’re cautionary tales. Although we are social beings and the act of making love should be a normal and healthy one, some people’s addictions twist them to the point that they devolve into something more base than animals, something so perverted that nothing will satisfy their desires. English poet William Blake said it best in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
It makes me wonder where we as a society will be in a few decades. Will we be living in a 21st century Roman Empire – sexually decadent and morally bankrupt? Or will the pendulum swing back to a more restrained time?
melissas
on
I lean much more towards Fantasy than Sci-Fi, and have yet to come across home-grown hunks, human cows, and other science-fictionalized sexuality. In fact, I feel like the only genre book I've read in recent memory focusing on sexual impossibilities (or shall I say improbabilities?) is Ice Song. That said, I have read plenty of "classic" literature involving sexual depravity, including Venus in Furs, The Story of O, and The 120 Days of Sodom. Of course, this is realistic fiction that was written, in some cases, hundreds of years ago. So, I suppose we'll never really be able to say which way the pendulum is swinging, because appearances can be deceiving. In a time we would consider modest, by today's standards, people were still writing this sort of stuff. Now, whether it was being published....
Like everyone else, I do hope it goes in one direction versus the other, but that's a discussion for another blog. 
