elfs | On first blush: Evolution's Darling by Scott Westerfeld

This week I've been reading Evolution's Darling, Scott Westerfeld's first book. Westerfeld is one of those writers who frustrates other writers: he's clearly brilliant, with a beautiful style and a pretty damn solid grasp of the pulpy aspects of modern science and post-Singularity suppositions, but he insists on slumming in the lucrative but critically ignorable young adult market with books like Pretties and Specials. But Westerfeld blows my mind in this book, his least seller, because he's quite clearly got sex on his brain. The opening fifth of the book is about how a young woman, 15 when the book opens, who lives alone with her star-hopping freelance journalist father, encourages her father's AI (against her father's wishes) to full sentience and sentient rights. The scene where the AI goes over the top and develops a Turing 1.0 score includes this lovely tidbit:

They spent two days in these raptures, sleep forgotten after Rathere injected the few remaining drops of the med-drone's stimulants. The tiny cabin was rank with the animal smells of sweat and sex when Isaah discovered them.

When I read that, I was puzzled. Scott Westerfeld? One of the hottest properties in Young Adult science fiction? The guy who wrote the pulpy Risen Empire novels which, while geekily thrilling could not in any sense be described as sexy? I thought it was a fluke, but no. Later, an art dealer is describing an artist she admires:

Did thirty years in an outmoded blast-factory before he popped the Turing boundary. To Leao, that sounded even worse than her English public school. (Public/private, private/public— the kind where the big girls fist-fuck the little ones and you never tell your parents.)

This is followed in the next chapter by one of the most disturbing sex scenes between two consenting adults ever written.

Now, on the one hand, I find this heartening. On the other, this is his worst-selling book. It was also his first book. I can't help but wonder which made it a poor seller: the sex, or his relative obscurity at the time.