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Subject: {ASSM} {GALAGO} The Annex Reviews 11/10/99, by Lady Cyrrh (review)
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Date: Wed, 10 Nov 1999 07:10:00 -0500
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The Annex Reviews, 10/10/99
by Lady Cyrrh (ladycyrrh@aol.com)
Website: http://members.aol.com/ladycyrrh
Let me begin by saying as, as I send this article off to be posted,
how pleased and delighted I am that ASSM had passed into the
hands of worthy successors. Now, perhaps, readership and
support for straight and general porn will be as strong and
faithful as that for gay porn and Treksmut. I certainly hope so.
We will all be enriched (and armchair historian that I am) strike
another blow for diversity on the Net that future generations
may damn or praise us for.
I have been in hiatus over the summer and early fall for a
variety of reasons, most job and school-related, but will be
catching up with my reviewing over the winter. My next few
reviews will attack some of the backlog I've had. If I haven't
reviewed your story, please keep in mind my time is limited! It is
even more so now, as I've developed a back problem and can only
sit at my faithful terminal now for an hour or two at a stretch. I
also go on binges where I read only one certain kind of story so I
can compare and contrast them in these articles, which I feel
adds interest to them.
That said, in this review I'll be cleaning up some stories I've read
over the summer. And--surprise--all involve heroines of one sort
or another having fantastic sexual adventures in fantastic
worlds. Two are 100,000+ novels, one a novelette, and two the
opening chapters of novels. All involve elements of science
fiction, fantasy, or comics.
The stories:
Battle of the Heroines (Lord Shon): F Bond, catfight, humor, TV
Blue Planet (Jim Thompson): M/F, F/F, F+, D/s, rom, SF [Novel]
The Black Pearl of Pharazion (Cobalt Jade): M/F, F/F, BDSM, inter,
fantasy [Novel]
Kat Tales - Chapter One (B.K. Bilicki): M/F, fantasy [
Nianni's Saga, Chapter One (Lewie Bronson): M/F, fantasy
Battle of the Heroines [A]
Where posted: ASS
When posted: 6/17/99
Author: Shon Richards
Address: lordshon@aol.com
This is Shon's fourth or fifth story about Kiko, a female ninja
with severe psychological problems caused by her controlling
father. This makes the story more serious than it sounds, though
it is actually, in the words of the author, "a silly story about an
alien who captures various women to watch them compete in a
bunch of sex bondage games." The participants are Kiko, Xena
analog Zena, Buffy analog Muffy (she battles werewolves), and
tomb raider Flora Craft, all of whom place the story in the fanfic
category with a healthy dose of spoof. The spoof is somewhere
between the loving lampoon of a fan and the viciousness of
someone who sees all these shows as mindless drivel, and there's a
fair amount of catfighting between the females, too.
This was a fast-paced read that didn't have pretensions to be
anything other than entertaining fluff, and I enjoyed it
thoroughly. Each heroine was lovingly depicted and kept in
character throughout all seven chapters, not as the actual TV
character but the warped caricature Shon has turned them into.
Zena, for example, is terminally horny ever since her bard
companion Fabrielle turned celibate after a visit to India.
Actually, all the woman were horny and grouchy. The collective
bitchiness wore on me after a while, but all in all this was an
amusing treat.
I am puzzled, though, by the continuing popularity of Lara Croft
in porn circles. Sure she has a big chest. But she's a two-
dimensional computer-generated cast member in a video game,
for Chrissakes. What's next? Porn stories springing up around
certain animated gifs?
Blue Planet [A]
Where posted: ASS
When posted: June 1999
Author: Jon Thompson
Address: DMGpoet@aol.com
Website:
http://members.aol.com/dmgpoet/readingroom/adult01.htm
(NOTE: This novel is not yet available there.)
Blue Planet is a science fiction D/s novel about the adventures of
a sexually inexperienced young couple who are transported to
the far future to save the human race from a despotic Empress.
Females dominate this future, so Debbie, the young wife, must
take on the identity of Alaasha Imitian, an intergalactic Jem
warrior, while her husband Robert occupies a subordinate role as
her companion/lover Jex. Debbie must carry an artificial virus
within her body to a distant planet where it will be mass-
produced to counter the Empress's genetically induced plague,
and along the way the two have D/s encounters with aliens,
machines, and mind-expanding chemicals because, as the author
puts it, "only through the universe of science fiction could those
outer edges of sexuality be fully explored."
This means that virginal young Robert is kidnapped by a female
pilot and dommed for a number of chapters, while Debbie gets the
lion's share of the sex: she tops a crucified young couple at a
military outpost, makes love to an alien humanoid with two
penises, becomes the subject of an amusing sex education lesson
when she is kidnapped by yet more aliens, is fucked by a
machine to provide energy for a spaceship's warp drive, and
participates in a female-to-female orgy aboard a starliner that
seems to have inspired by a similar scene in the French film The
Fifth Element, where it was an effete black TV host who tongues a
young space-stewardess to orgasm. All of this flows from a
romantic vein rather than a brutal one, and the focus is softly lit
and centered on the emotions.
The novel was well written and kept my interest, but I have one
major criticism of it: the emotional relationships between the
characters weren't convincing. Not a problem with stroke or
conventional BDSM tales, but it's very necessary for romance.
Part of the problem was casting two virgins as the main
characters. I admit virgins have gotten a bad rap in recent years.
Now that the "Just Say No" eighties are long over, popular liberal
opinion says there's no cultural reason to abstain, aside from
certain religious laws (which, incidentally, don't get a lot of
liberal respect.) Probably there are a lot of people out there who
keep their virginity well into their thirties, but in today's
climate, it's comparable to being a homosexual in the 1950s, so no
one in their right mind is going to admit to it. Especially with
sexual information and portrayals of sexual activity widely
available, which make it easier to fake not being a virgin then it
used to be.
But back to the story. Since the couple were portrayed as being
bright, attractive, healthy, young, *and* not belonging to any
particular creed, their quaint insistence on saving themselves
exclusively for each other struck an unrealistic note with me, as
there's so much pressure from today's society not to. I can see
idealistic young teens feeling this way, but not post-college
twenty-somethings with years of beer parties and dorm life
behind them. (To be fair, the author may have been using
virginity to give the story a timeless fairy-tale feel, especially in
light of the love-lost-and-found themes that occur later on.)
Things were not helped by the fact that the main characters went
through most of the book amnesiac. They almost never thought
back to their lives on present-day Earth, which would have
helped me relate better to them, and would have made their
romantic travails heart-tugging rather than overwrought.
The book also struck me as being overlong in places. It seemed to
me the author spent, say, 200 words describing something when
50 would have sufficed. Exposition *is* necessary to frame a story
even in porn, and so is scene-setting, but if the said passages
begin to repeat themselves or sound alike, shift the focus, or let it
go. The wordiness was especially noticeable in the climactic
confrontation between Debbie, Debbie's lover Kal, the real Jem,
the real Jem's male companion, and Robert and his owner, which
went on for two chapters and about 20,000 words, from six
different points of view. I had expected an explosive
confrontation between all the personalities involved, but the
scene ended with barely a whimper from the hero and heroine.
The author has said this is a recreation of an earlier, lost work, so
that may account for some of the problems with pace (this evil
space empire is run by oddly milquetoast, cucumber-sandwiches-
and-tea matrons) as well as its structure.
All this doesn't mean I didn't like the novel or don't recommend
it. (If I didn't like it, I wouldn't bother critiquing it at all.) I've
enjoyed this writer's shorter pieces immensely--"Photo of E-
Slave" remains a perennial favorite, and is on my personal Top 20
list--so in my book it never hurts to keep pushing for quality
with applications of honest feedback.
To sum it up, a lengthy but engaging tale of romantic D/s in a
carefully-constructed science fiction setting, with emphasis on
the feelings of the female doms.
The Black Pearl of Pharazion [A+]
Where posted: ASS
When posted: May 1999
Author: Cobalt Jade
Address: cobaltjade@aol.com
Website: http://members.aol.com/cobaltjade
Cobalt didn't include a foreword with this novel, which is a pity.
I'd like to know what inspired the author to write this.
The Black Pearl is an erotic fantasy novel in the sword n' sorcery
vein of Robert E. Howard's Conan, with a touch of Anne Rice's
Beauty books and Gor thrown in as well. The style is compact and
energetic, and the tale fairly zipped along with some hair-raising
action scenes that wouldn't be out of place in an Indiana Jones
movie. The Black Pearl is Jozhande Tanimury, a black female
warrior in a desolate desert land dominated by an miles-deep
canyon known as the Rift. The story begins when she saves an
attractive prisoner from enemy soldiers and is enlisted into the
rebel forces plotting to overthrow the despotic Witch-Queen of
Obn Dhregni and return it to the rightful king. As Obn Dhregni is
also known as the City of Carnality there's plenty of sex, much of
it in the BDSM vein. The Black Pearl has encounters with a wolf-
man, her half-brother, a scheming noble, the world's most
submissive slave girl, and finally the sex-mad albino Witch-
Queen herself, who turns the heroine into her personal slave.
Over five chapters she is pony-harnessed, chained, shaved,
plugged, dommed, branded, and pierced, after which she is
presented to Court:
"Stand," the Queen said. "Show my court what you are now."
I stood, feeling the heavy gold rings tug against me. As a full
slave I faced the jeering nobles: branded and pierced, cuffed and
collared, oiled, naked, hairless...never in my wildest fantasies had
I thought this would happen to me, that I could be rendered so
lowly, so anonymous, so submissive. A new, drunken
helplessness, as pleasurable as it was mortifying, washed over
me, as the crowd responded with a roar of delight.
The heroine eventually winds up decorating the throne room as a
human chandelier, her life force drained to charge the Queen's
evil power-crystals. She is eventually rescued by a literal deus ex
machina and the day is saved...but not without lasting effects on
her psyche.
As you can tell this was a harder-hitting work than the previous
book, and some of it may squick, particularly a brutal BDSM scene
that is as cruel as any of Parker's that I've read.
The story is also fairly unusual in having a black heroine, and
Cobalt works in a number of amusing racial references
throughout ("Are all the folk there colored as you?" "All of us
Pharazii are dark, your Highness. We believe it is the only proper
color for people.") However, the fact the black heroine winds up
a sex slave of the White Queen (yes, she is called that in the book)
did not entirely sit well with me as a person, though it added to
the book's intensity. Anyone who's seen the movie Amistad would
have been horrified; still, it's hard to say what the author meant
by it. When the heroine finally goes toe-to-toe in battle with the
White Queen it's less of a racial revenge than one of good vs. evil,
and so is the Queen's demise: she explodes into a million crystal
wafers, and all that's left of her are her silver nipple rings. (I
actually laughed aloud at that point.) Cobalt also reveals a fine
sense of silliness in the evil Queen's palace--she transforms
disobedient slaves into bedposts and footstools--and there's pokes
at Gor and at barbarian movie cliches in general.
While Thompson explored the romantic side of D/s and bondage,
Cobalt uses the elements as thrill pieces; there is no moral tone to
them. Though the evil Queen uses BDSM in the name of evil, it
wasn't always so in the city; in earlier days the acts were
consensual and used in worship of the gods. While the heroine
acknowledges the dark side of slavery, she also notes its turn-ons;
trained as a warrior, she finds subbing an even deeper
challenge. BDSM is neither good nor bad, the author seems to say,
but it is as sure heck arousing.
Kat Tales - Chapter 1 [A]
Author: B.K. Bilicki
Available from: The Reality Corner
Address: http://www.execpc.com/~grmouser/
I found this story--it's actually the start of a novel--on the
author's website. Like the others, it features a heroine in a
fantasy world having fantastic sex, in this case with a 3-inch
fairy:
She reached a finger down and stroked Yv's back lovingly. "Am
sorry, dear," she apologized. She knew how much Yv detested
being held against her will.
Yv arched her back and pressed into Shalka's stroking finger.
"It's alright. I know how much this means to you. I shouldn't
have laughed."
Yv started to glow faintly. Looking up, she grinned impishly and
said, "If you really want to make it up to me..."
Shalka smiled back and brushed her thumb over Yv's tiny
nipples. "Oh no, little one," she replied. "The last time that
happened it took a week and you glowed like the noonday sun for
another week after that!"
But Shalka is more than she appears. When Karl, a man of
present-day earth, is inexplicably sucked into Faerie following a
car accident and transformed into a were-cat, he comes upon a
blonde maiden being butt-fucked on a table by several men. He
slaughters the attackers, but is set upon by the blushing
buttercup, actually old Shalka in magical disguise, for spoiling
her fun: "But damn it was good! I haven't had a man in some time.
I was going to fry him good after I was done with him. You
showed up before that and spoiled my cum."
Compared to the previous stories this one was airbrush-slick; the
author's been working on it since 1995, and it shows. He or she
follows the conventions of modern popular fantasy writing very
well, but this was also what made it comparatively uninteresting
to me. It didn't have the gung-ho cartoonishness of Kiko or the
overblown romanticism of Blue Planet or the inventive
viciousness of Cobalt's work. However, it was a pleasant read
overall, and the elves n' unicorns whimsiness may tickle some
readers.
Nianni's Saga - Chapter 1 [B-]
Where posted: ASS
When posted: 6/21/99
Author: Lewie Bronson
Address: HeatStryke@worldnet.att.net
Nianni, a young wood elf, has decided to be a sorcerer and is on
her way to apprentice to a mage who will teach her the basics.
When she falls asleep she wakes up in a dungeon with a tall
hooded figure hovering over her: "A pretty little Wood Elf. Her
ordeal is only just beginning. We will see if you are worthy of
your birthright. So sayth Jakial." Lady Cyrrh sayth, "You readeth
too many crappy TSR books, dude."
A few mild torture/bondage games follow, including one with
tentacles, before the kidnapper reveals he's actually the mage
she's been seeking. My, what a surprise.
In spirit this was closer to the Kiko tale than DMG's or Cobalt's
sagas, but it wasn't as witty, and it was pretty juvenile to boot.
You'd do better with one of the former tales.
___________________________________________________
Comments to: ladycyrrh@aol.com
Website---> http://members.aol.com/ladycyrrh
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