Elf porn? Clunk! Thud.

I seem to be dropping a lot of things on the table with the "I don't care what happens next" attitude. I had that toward Matrix: Revolutions, and with a few books, and now with the "Erotic High Fantasy" series Dark Elves, by Jet Mykles. Most of the reviews on the cover are from fellow writers at LooseId, and many complement the author on her use of illustration-- which is mostly really bad and unimaginative Poserporn^[?]. I got about ten pages into the first volume, Taken, and just dropped it.

A long time ago, I had a friend who worked for Williams Pinball. He was just a technician, but he helped make some great machines, like Black Knight and Hyperball. And he explained to me once that pinball designers had two terms that could not really be defined, but if you'd ever experienced them you knew what they were: "clatter" and "clank". Jet Mykles' story is nothing but clatter and clank. I haven't even gotten to the erotic part of the story, and already I'm completely turned off. An example:

Although the twisted oaks and soaring elms that lined the path were gorgeous, there was a sinister cast to them. With true night fast approaching, Gala became certain that eyes were upon them. The forest closed in around them. Sunlight was left behind. Evidence of plenty of wildlife grew around them.

"These people are insane," Diana said suddenly, gesturing toward a covey of quail that scurried boldly across the road. "This place is a wealth of game."

Gala stirred at the change of subject, but only nodded. She adjusted her seat in the saddle, yawning to shed the apathy caused by the gentle roll of her horse's gait.

"Where's this `dark danger' we were warned of?" Diana scoffed as the last vestiges of sunlight disappeared and plunged them into thick, gray twilight. Even so, Gala saw her friend's hand drift toward the sword at her belt.

The characters here are completely divorced from the writer: they're pawns of the writer's goal, not actual characters about whom we should care. Gala doesn't love and admire these woods for their fecundity, their resilience, their beauty; instead, Mykles just tells us the woods "are gorgeous." Gala doesn't feel threatened, doesn't have a sense of wrongness, can't pick out discordance that makes her uneasy; instead, the woods "are sinister." All of the sentences in the first paragraph contain linking verbs. Gala should feel something toward the woods, and the woods should give off impressions. All this passive crap sucks the life out of the story. The description of "thick twilight" after a cool, sunny day is so awkward I hurt just to read it. The whole first chapter is full of clatter and clank: Mykles just wants to get to the sex scene, and doesn't care how she gets there. Her carelessness hurts her readers (and I hope her sales).

Oh, and it gets better. Sex scene!

Diana saw Gala from the corner of her eye. A part of her mind suggested that this should stop. But the beautiful black man's hand was caressing her face. She turned to catch his gaze, riveted on her despite Gala's ministrations to his sex. Murmuring something she didn't understand, he gently pried her lips apart with his thumb, then eased the thick digit into the wet recess of her mouth.

Is it just me, or is there some lack of racial sensibility going on in this scene? "But," I can here the author saying, "There's no implication of race at all in this scene! The guy's a fucking elf, okay? He just happens to be black." [Link goes to George Carlin's brilliant routine, "Happens to be black."]

Modern sensibilities being what they are, playing with race in a fantasy setting is a risky proposition, and Mykles simply isn't smart enough to do it with anything approaching thought, much less aplomb.

Genderfucking, Futanaries, Blasphemy and the Journal Entries

More than once, The Journal Entries has wandered into Star Trek territory, commenting on social issues and having characters deliver silly speeches that would probably have been better left on the floor. I have returned to the Sterlings mini-series (a series in which the Pendorians discover a Terran colony where everyone is, on the surface, apparently feminine) to see if I can polish out the Polly & Zia subplot (and with it, by necessity, the Dove & the Twins subplot) and get them ready for release, when a ridiculous idea hit me last night as I fell asleep.

One of the joys of being able to read Japanese is that the literature is even weirder and wilder than the anime when it comes to erotic themes. But the biggest message that comes through loud and clear in all of Japanese fiction is a deep misogyny; it's rare to find stuff that isn't brutal in its reduction of the feminine to mere component parts. Even stuff presented as "nice" doesn't seem to appreciate female sexuality all that much, so it's especially nice to come across something where the woman is actually empowered in some way.

I think the whole futanari thing is weird because the whole idea is basic: give women penises and see what happens. It's fascinating to see where different writers will take this, but most of them do realize one thing: giving a woman a penis doesn't empower her the way men are empowered because she still looks too much like a girl. Polly & Zia is a futanari story where I've tried to stay away from power differentials based on gender assumptions. The power differentials there are cultural, personal, and caused by each character misunderstanding the other's motives.

My sleepy hallucination was about the opposite. I think it's the Stranger's fault (the magazine, not the Billy Joel album);they had an article entitled, "He's Having My Baby." I thought, why have I never seen stories where there are major, masculine characters who are equipped with vaginas? I realized that I shouldn't really write the story: I'd already done it once going one way and it would be way to Star Trek schlock to suppose the Terran galaxy coincidentally had another isolated colony that had gone in exactly the opposite direction. But I think the real reason is that a guy with a vagina is a threat: it's perceived culturally as a loss of power and a manifestation of castration fears. I then realized that that was something I just had to play with.

So it's been with me all day: how would I write this story? I started to play with the compare and contrast game: The Sterlings wanted to emancipate women from a masculinist culture, but they had no desire to actively denigrate men (although their culture evolved a revulsion toward masculinity); the Adamists, on the other hand, created a culture that actively pursues an agenda that is both anti-feminine and anti-female. The Sterlings relied on young girls being easier to oblige into modesty, whereas the Adamists would have to take into account boys' more common inclinations to crudity and thrill-seeking inquisitiveness. There would have to be a more rigidified mechanism for introducing the two "sexes" into society without each individual automatically knowing what sex the other (apparently masculine) person is.

I had to do some driving today, which gave me some thinking time, and then it all came together in an instant. Backstory, setting, characters, all dropped right into my lap in the milliseconds after I had a title. And the title said it all:

The Perfect Burqa.

My mind is all twisty now. I go lie down now.