Why do I do this to myself?

[elfs]

I'm not tagging this one "review" because I haven't gotten that far into the book to make the review worthwhile. The book in question is Mandy Roth's Droid Wars: Performance Criteria, and it falls into that category of "romantic SF erotica" that I absolutely cannot stand: the writer got her ideas about androids from Star Trek. The place where I stopped was here:

Oh, he certainly was perfection at its finest. Too bad he'd have little interest in sex. Even knowing that previous attempts at endowing androids with a sexual drive or the need to procreate had failed, Aeron had still labored over hers, modifying the equipment necessary to partake in sexual acts. It just didn't seem right to create a man, only to rob him of what made him male.

Okay, writers and other idiots, listen up: "Android" is a fancy word for "a robot that looks like a human being." Common SF parlance makes it a perjorative. Unless you're being clever and riffing off SF tropes about cultures having lost some measure of control or understanding of their own technology-- and Ms. Roth is not that clever-- the paragraph I quoted above is absolute nonsense. If you can program an android to be "passable" in all other ways, there is absolutely no reason you cannot program him to want, or seem to want, to completely fuck your brains out to your satisfaction. And robots are manufactured items: they have no need for "procreation" in the traditional sense.

If, as Ms. Roth seems to imply later, she's taken the rare brain-dead soldier and rebuilt him into the perfect killing machine, and he can still function the way she implies in all other ways, then the proscription that he be sexually dysfunctional is a sheer macguffin of the "thrown with great force" category. It simply makes no sense in the context of all the other technology she has available to her. The heroine's knowledge that "previous attempts have failed" to produce the sex machine result weakens the story even more: how many brain-dead soldiers have they had to rewire to satisfaction? She goes on to state that the victim, her beloved, was dead for an hour before she got her hands on him-- so it's not even science, it's cybernetic taxidermy! Even worse, this is a universe that should have gone asymptotic a long, long time ago. Like the atrocious Nyssa's Guardian by Gaby Reese that I panned a couple of months ago, this is bad SF in so many ways, lacking any real knowledge of the "science" part that makes SF meaningful.

Stories flow from first principles. Ms. Roth's principles are confused and broken: her universe asks for more than it can deliver, because it demands far more knowledge that Ms. Roth has at hand.

I really have to stop expecting the SF erotica writers to respect the SF.

Comments

[lisakit.livejournal.com]

That's why I tend to read the fantasy crossovers. It's easier to suspend your disbelief.

Try the Robin D. Owens "Heartmate" series. About all the scifi it has is the fact that the world is populated by colonists from earth who found a place where magic works. And she writes what little scifi is involved there in a way that she doesn't have to apoligise for.

And another that's sorta scifi (but mostly magic as science) is the Retrievers series by Laura Anne Gilman. Although there's not much by way of erotica there.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

I do my best to respect the SF. I am familiar with the conventions of the dark future genre and have gone to some pains to get my balkanized US into some sort of internally consistant logic. (I'm STILL agonizing, almost a year later, as to which country should get Illinois and Indiana) I work to make the technology--or lack thereof--plausible, and the economies function.

In the process, I'm learning about feudalism, dominionism, Cherokee tradition, biodiesel, cold fusion, surveillance technology, cotton harvesting and petroleum refining.

And yeah, all that for SF erotica. But if the worldbuilding doesn't hold up, the story won't hold up, no matter how hot the sex is. That's my opinion.

*headdesks on androids needing to procreate*
I always understood androids to have at least some organic components as opposed to being all metal and plastic.

Well, reannon did warn me EC will make one "write stupid."

[brannonb.livejournal.com]

I always understood androids to have at least some organic components as opposed to being all metal and plastic.

Androids can be all-machine, or part-machine. Their defining characteristic is that they attempt to mimic the human form. As for the others, in my experience with the genre, this is how it goes:

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Very cool.

Odd question: when did "borg" as short for "cyborg" enter the general vocabulary?

I was using it as early as '78.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

EC = Ellora's Cave? Yeah, can't disagree there.

And I just go with what the dictionary tells me. The medical dictionary defines it as "from two Greek terms meaning 'resembling a man'". Oxford defines it as 'an automaton that resembles a human being.'

It appears in the 1913 Webster's Dictionary under the first definition, no less.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

My information is old, like from an old SF magazine out of the 70s or early 80s. I may still have it somewhere in the archives.

It was a discussion of how the Star Wars droids meshed with the common understanding of robots and androids and the Three Laws of Robotics. And the only thing I realy rememebr taking away was that androids either had organic components or were shaped like people or both.

And yes, EC=Ellora's Cave.
I've got a piece out to them, but I'm not hopeful. It may be too SF/Twilight Zone for their readership.
Best thing I've read from them so far is Nocturnal Urges by Elizabeth Donald. (She's a reporter in real life, so her take on the murder-mystery hovering around a Memphis vampire brothel is very realistic.)