[Book Review] Fur For All, by Christine Warren

[elfs]

I picked up Fur For All hoping for a good "furry" smut novel, but it qualifies as "interspecies sex" only in the same way Superman slash qualifies: our werejaguar hero, Rafe, stays in human form for almost the entire book; there is one short scene where he transforms just long enough to intimidate the heroine. His werewolf friends never transform at all; we see them entirely in human form. The love scenes, while hot, always begin with Rafe battering past Tess's weakly-voiced objections because "she doesn't really mean it." Not nice, although by pretty much the second scene they'd agreed on a protocol by which "no" didn't really mean "no"; she'd have to kick him in the balls or something if she really wasn't in the mood. (As one of her friends puts it, "You've been boinking him seven and three quarters of the past eight days.")

But the sex is hot, in a better-than-Harlequin-Blaze way. The plot is silly. The characters are some dense flavor of cardboard, not quite flat but hardly fully developed. Still, I ended up liking Tess, if not the way "destiny" drove her along.

But if you're looking for great girl-on-jaguar sex, it isn't in here. It's an erotic romance novel, its aim is for some mainstream acceptance, and it's not going to do anything that might threaten that.

As an aside, I tried reading the published excerpt from the BDSM SFnal book, Gates of Hell, from the same publisher. I couldn't even finish it. It's a set piece with contrivances that are deader than a Star Trek novel with Shatner's name on it. Why do all BDSM SF novels start with the assumption that not only does mind control work perfectly but that doing so has made society less, not more, interesting?

Comments

May I suggest

[murbin.livejournal.com]

Sparkle Hayter's "The Naked Brunch" for a good werewolf love story.

No real hot werewolf sex, but I enjoy her writing.

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

Why do all BDSM SF novels start with the assumption that not only does mind control work perfectly but that doing so has made society less, not more, interesting? Ummmm, Susan Matthews?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Does that even qualify? And after the second, I kinda got tired of the schtick.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

Lisanne Norman comes to mind for effective, though not particularly explicit, human/furry sex. There's other aspects of her Sholan Alliance series which take centre stage. One thing which does come across is the passionate physicality of what happens, rather than mere hydraulic detail. The scenes are still about how the people involved feel, rather than what they do.

But getting it into the "mainstream"? I think that furry smut almost has to be an offshoot of SF, because there's so much that otherwise has to be explained away.

[kengr]

Why do all BDSM SF novels start with the assumption that not only does mind control work perfectly but that doing so has made society less, not more, interesting?

Oh, like those "Journal Entries" by some guy in Seattle? :-)

Seriously, I've read stuff that didn't assume mind control at all.

One was a donated paperback in the local library. In the late sixties! Apparently the librarians hadn't read far enough to realize that it was SM porn as well as SF...

You know, I don't know many BDSM _SF_ novels...

[(Anonymous)]

...does the Gor series (*shudder*) count?

I mean, I know a good bit of BDSM (and BDSM-lite) fantasy -- it's almost obligatory in the genre.

I suspect that part of it is that up until maybe 15 years ago, it would have been fairly difficult to get something like that published (at least on any large scale and not thru a romance publisher).

Random question: Have you read the Moreau trilogy by S. Andrew Swann? It's furry scifi detective noir -- and the one book I've read so far was fairly good.

-Malthus

Re: You know, I don't know many BDSM _SF_ novels...

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I've got one of the Moreau books-- the last one, unfortunately, and people have told me not to read it until I've read the ones before or it won't make much sense. But I haven't found the others in any bookstore recently.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

The Sholan novels ran out of steam for me somewhere around the time travel plot. I just couldn't hack them much afterword; they become a kind of strange Mary Sue series, in one sense, and they didn't impress me.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

Yes, I can see where you're coming from on that. And either I've changed or the books have, and the last one didn't quite work in the same way for me.