Romance writers shouldn't even try to write skiffy.

[elfs]

I know I shouldn't make too much fun of romance writers. Suffice it to say that I really like Joanna Lindsey, usually, when she writes historicals. They're hot! When she tries to write SF, however, she's so stuck in the early 1960's:

He looked at the android with impotent fury, though his words were addressed to Shanelle. "You should have said he was your companion. Caris said your mother owned him, so I assumed you wouldn't be sharing sex with him, but--"

Shanelle's soft laughter cut him off. It was melodious and infectious, the kind of laugh that forced a smile even from strangers who merely heard it in passing. It had the ability to take the edge off his own jealous anger, particularly since it was genuine humor he was hearing, not anything ridiculing or sarcastic.

"I'm sorry, Jadd," she said after a moment, "but if you knew my father, you wouldn't have jumped to such a conclusion. Tell him, Corth."

Without expression, the android replied, "The Challen Ly-San-Ter would not allow me near his daughter until the Martha agreed to reprogram my abilities. I am no longer capable of sex-sharing."

"Oh, that's real tough, Corth." Jadd grinned with immense relief.

I know, I haven't written anything substantial for a while, but maybe it's just that between this stuff and John Updike, the whiplash is so bad I don't know where to start.

Comments

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[trinsf.livejournal.com]

AUGH! Silly name disease! *grin*

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

In her defense (sorta... it really was pretty damned bad, I gotta say) that's not a new release. I think it's at least ten years old, and I know that the prior book of that set came out sometime before 1991, because I read it before I left home for college, so the world was created almost twenty years ago.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I'm not really up on these things. When did Ramances start getting even coyly explicit. I vaguely recall hearing about passages which sounded vaguely architectural, so full of columns they seemed vaguely parthenon-genic. And in the early Eighties it was usually the Thriller genre that had the ANSI-Standard sex scene.

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

Erm... we must not have read the same romances, then. I started reading them... lessee... about 1982 or so. Some were, as you said, so full of 'shafts' you had to conclude the author had a mining fetish, but others were incredibly explicit. Take Beatrice Small, for example. I recall an old 'classic' of hers, Skye O'Malley, which included forced lesbian sex twice, once with an incestuous brother-sister pair raping the MC, hints of beastiality, and a whooooole lotta borderline kinky sex. Another of hers had a scene of pedobestiality, a third was pure bdsm. Another author, Jennifer Roberts, I think, but I'm not sure, also had seriously kinky, explicit stuff during the same time period... I recall one scene where our heroine is being rented out by her current keeper, and her first 'customer' is a spoiled, young teenage boy who likes to spank tied up older women. And of course, a whooooole lot of the pre-civil war slavery-era books are... so explicit that I have no idea how they got published, but they were shelved with the historical romances. I recall scenes of forced sodomy on young boys, cannabilism, and the use of a headless frog as a dildo.

So, they've always been there. You just had to know where to look. Though, as is similar today, the language (but not the scenes themselves!) is more explicit in contemporary romance than it is in historical.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I loved Skye O'Malley! And The Kadin, and Enchantress Mine, and The Love Slave (although I was disappointed by the lack of BDSM content) and The Innocent (cuteness and sodomy: what more could you want?). Bertrice (not Beatrice, dear) Small has been absolute fuel for the fire in a lot of ways.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Romances have been outrageously explicit since the early 80's, although in the 90's the explosion in both "racy" fanfic and the availability of just about anything else you could want on the Internet has fueled a "quality" race inside the industry. Heck, Harlequin's mass-produced fiction even has an "ANSI-standard sex scene" line, called Blaze, with the competition fielding its Torrid line. There's even the (hard to find) Dark Desires line, which features rather timid, ludicrous, and don't-try-this-at-home BDSM scenes. If you want weaker stuff, there's Temptations.

The best part about these popcorn series is their identifiability. You can walk into any used romance store and instantly find what you want: the spines are color coded (black for kink, red for sex, light red for euphemistic sex, pink and purple for suggestive scenes that end before the action becomes embarassing, and blue for no sex "just superromance.") with letter codes indicating just how much sex, etc, and icons for the kind of plot you're getting: handcuffs indicate the hero is a policeman, a clock indicates a whirlwind courting, a pistol for a private eye, a stork indicates a baby by the end of the book while a carriage indicates the protagonist is an unwed mother, etc. etc. Just by looking at the spine you can find exactly the kind of story you want. It is as shamelessly targetted at its female audience as some pornographer's "Two hot bi babes do it all for you!" would be to its male audience.

That's for the thin books. For the thicker historicals there's a solid rule of thumb: the more skin on the cover, the more sex between. Small's The Innocent breaks this, of course: the heroine is shown in profile, fully dressed in demure clothes, but inside the villainess is given the best sex scene as she takes on three (!) of her henchmen in one very explicit scene that wasn't nearly as touching as the heroine's next-chapter deflowering (which was Small's whole point, of course).

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Ah, that might explain it. I bought it at a used bookstore while hunting for some John Updike to read (really!). "Futuristic!" it said, so I figured I'd give it a look. It's a giggle. I might actually read most of it.