Re: Good literate erotic fantasy/SF?

In article <e1iedv$pg1$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, westprog
<westprog@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

There's two sorts of erotic SF. There's the standard SF, but the
characters get to have sex. This can be a realistic depiction of human
behaviour, or it can be exploitative porn. Both get the job done.

More interesting is the SF that deals explicitly with sexual behaviour
in an SF "what if" context.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with SF that does both. (The
Kushiel books are arguably both, but wouldn't need nearly as *much*
sex if they were solely concerned with the "what if" side of things.)

Much of Tiptree's work deals with sexual behaviour
with significant elements changed. I can think of

"I Awoke And Found Me Here On The Cold Hill's Side"
"Love Is The Plan, The Plan Is Death"
"The Screwfly Solution"

Granted, but of these, only the middle one has characters having sex
(by, well, conventional definitions, anyway) and those characters
are aliens.

You left out an example of Tiptree doing both; from <Meet Me at
Infinity>, not previously published, "Trey of Hearts". Also
notable for this (if otherwise unsatisfactory) is "The Earth Doth
Like a Snake Renew".

Philip José Farmer has some stories along the same line.

So as long as we're on short stories, I also want to mention a
rather extraordinarily erotic one I read last night, Ray
Vukcevich's "There Is Danger":

"There is danger in regarding her as a goddess, danger in
speculating about the lazy smile she directs at me over the
Dover sole, the lemony finger bowls, the steaming rice, and
bright green spears of asparagus, her gray eyes dancing with
golden candlelight, danger in the provocative tilt of her head,
her long chestnut hair flowing over her bare shoulder.
"Selena reaches over the table and traces her fingertips
softly over my hand. My hair bursts into flames. I know she
notices, but she chooses not to comment. Our waiter runs over
and pours a pitcher of ice water over my head.
"My ears will be red."

Five pages long, it is, and like most of the rest of the stories in
Vukcevich's <Meet Me in the Moon Room>, fantastical, though in
this case not even minimally science fictional. (Usually his
most explicitly science fictional stories are mocking s.f.
tropes, as in "White Guys in Space", anyway.)

Short fiction has the advantage that it needn't observe any
particular balance. You may want straightforward erotica,
or you may tolerate no more than a single sex scene, or you may
want something roughly halfway in between (that's where I take it
the OP is), but for short fiction these distinctions more or less
collapse; the only distinction that remains is between porn (about
automata) and erotica (about characters). So I observe that in
<The Gates of Paradise: The Anthology of Erotic Short Fiction>
edited by Alberto Manguel, who has also done several fantasy
anthologies, Robert Coover's "You Must Remember This", Stephen Dixon's
"Milk Is Very Good for You", Li Ang's "Curvaceous Dolls", and
Gloria Sawai's "The Day I Sat with Jesus on the Sun Deck and a Wind
Came Up and Blew My Kimono Open and He Saw My Breats" are at least
arguably sfnal, while Yasunari Kawabata's "One Arm", Valerie Martin's
"Sea Lovers", and Richard Matheson's "Arousal" are definitely so. Nor
have I read the whole book.

As to novels, though, I can't think of sf examples that are roughly
as sex-filled as the Kushiel books or as I imagine some Laurell
Hamilton books to be (but less sex-filled than the one I tried to
read is!). The closest I can come up with are books with maybe
half as much sexual content; several of Norman Spinrad's are like
that (in particular <Child of Fortune>), and modulo different
generations' approaches towards the explicit, John D. MacDonald's
<The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything> and Chester Anderson's
<The Butterfly Kid> are too. I suspect some of Farmer's novels
go beyond these, but I haven't read the ones in question.

The OP may or may not care that there exists such a thing as sf porn.
I have the impression that this is usually written by porn writers,
with a mild sfnal conceit, but I could be wrong about that; at
any rate, in the late 1960s and the 1970s, actual sf writers also
set their hands to it, the most famous examples being by Samuel
R. Delany.

Joe Bernstein

--
Joe Bernstein, writer joe@xxxxxxxxxxx
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/> "She suited my mood, Sarah Mondleigh
did - it was like having a kitten in the room, like a vote for unreason."
<Glass Mountain>, Cynthia Voigt
.