Of Pulp, Porn and Perfect Shadows

The Manuscript Has Landed!

The complete Pocket Rockets collection is with my wonderful publisher at Uruk Press as we speak -- pre-orders are available now -- and the freebie editions of the stories have either come down or are coming down as we prepare for release. I'm looking forward to getting the full collection out there, and I hope you'll enjoy reading it as much as I've enjoyed writing it. 

The final story in the first Pocket Rockets series is "Perfect Shadows," a prequel adventure featuring the Thalian sex priestess who will later become Commander Oona of the S.S. Ecstasy. Set more than a decade before Space Princess Season One, it introduces us to a young Oona whose planet and society are still healing from the events of a galactic war that forced them to face the ordeal of occupation by an alien species. The Thalians are a prolifically polyamorous people, especially the class of hetaerae to which Oona belongs, but that's not to say they don't have particular attachments that go especially deep: Oona's first love and first husband, Airoh, was a hero of a quietist resistance during the dark days of the war, and never fully healed from his experiences. We find her mourning his recent death and trying to find peace on an isolated beach where an encounter with a group of strangers -- among them three Terran beauties belonging to an organisation called Space Princess -- will change the course of her life.

It might be heavy-ish sounding material -- one of my favourite things to do with Space Princess is to juxtapose silly bikini-girl sexuality, action and hardcore smut with more serious themes -- but not to worry, there is action, adventure and graphic sex aplenty to be had along the way as Oona both wrestles with her own personal demons and deals with a villainous smugglers' plot. (The story's title, in case you're wondering, comes from a monologue in the play "Edward II" by Christopher Marlowe: "[What] are kings, when regiment is gone, / But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?")

I thought I'd celebrate this milestone with a couple of reviews, covering both erotic and (for the first time here, I think) non-erotic titles. Have a look-see after the jump. (Warning for NSFW images.)

Cinder: A Cinderella Menage Fairy Tale (Erotica Review)

Syn Root is a multi-talented creator who produces some spectacular erotic art and is currently at work on a visual novel with the pretty great title Feral Pussycat, Pounce! (No mistaking the inspiration for that one if you're a Russ Meyer fan.) Just how spectacular is the art in question? That image at the right there is his own illustration of a scene in the novel I'm here to review.

I have been meaning to get a review of Cinder posted for some time. It isn't every day that a talented visual artist comes along who can also deliver creditable prose, and the fact that Root is able to turn out interesting and readable novels alongside his painting and drawing endeavours is worth taking some time out of one's day to recognise. Perhaps just as importantly, if you're thinking of contributing to a visual novel on Patreon, you might be interested in just how solid the creator's chops are going to be with the "novel" part of "visual novel." So, let's get into it.

Cinder is a hardcore erotic re-imagining of the classic Cinderella fairy tale, to which Root brings a pretty diverse bag of tricks: this version of the tale comes book-ended by some vivid and vigorous public sex scenes, starting off with a memorable orgy at the glorified brothel where this version of Cinderella works. Its story revolves around class struggle and revolution against a brutal monarchy and features cum fairies, perverted masquerades, rabble-rousing witches, cursed glass dildos (in a rather arch take on the "glass slipper" trope), double penetrations, chases, escapes, a climactic sex scene in which the earth literally shakes due to the simultaneous unfolding of a gunpowder plot, and a side order of surprisingly sophisticated dissection of the ravages of classism and privilege.

It is, in other words, deliriously bonkers and cracking good fun; Cinderella the way an alternate porn-hound China Mieville might have conceived it, and Cinder herself is an erotic heroine after my own heart, fiery, spirited and never-say-die no matter how dirty, dangerous or surreal the situation. On top of all this, the book comes with a heaping helping of bonus content including a whole other novella, Dox, and a series of standalone fairy-tales or fantasy tales each of which delivers its own unique twist on the sassy-heroines-and-alpha-males theme that Root seems to favour. There is in fact so much of this bonus content that you could almost call it three books for the price of one; extraordinary bang for your buck, as it were.

Cinder is not without its flaws. It could have used a couple of passes from a good copy-editor; prose isn't Root's main gig and from time to time it shows, especially in periodic stilted and/or confusing word choices or sentence structures that left me scratching my head and rereading passages. Truth be told the main story does drag a bit after its rousing opening act, particularly as the recognisable outlines of the Cinderella myth start to emerge, and if you put a gun to my head and demanded I explain what's happening in the epilogue you'd probably have to shoot me. Formatting of the bonus content is uneven, rendering some of the stand-alone stories into large run-on blocks of text that can be difficult to read.

Still, these flaws aren't enough to spoil the book outright; ultimately the sheer verve of Root's ideas, the engaging heroine and the delightful surrealism more than compensate for the occasional awkward or confounding passage. That combined with the sheer variety and quantity of bonus content pretty much ensures that a reader who gives it a chance is almost certain to find something to enjoy in these pages.

Root has two more prose titles on offer in his Orcgasm series (I see what you did there, mate), and I'll be back to review them on this blog later. In the meantime, if you've got a soft spot for elaborate and original fairy-tale erotica with sassy heroine protagonists, then I can recommend giving a rainy afternoon or two to Cinder: A Cinderella Menage Fairytale.

A Taste of Toffee (Pulp Fiction Review)

Near as I can tell, those ghosts who keep
turning up with Toffee on the covers of
Imaginative Tales are references to the
phantom sidekicks of the Topper stories.

One of the minor heroines of pulp ribaldry from the Fifties was Charles F. Myers' "Toffee." The inspiration appears to have been the comic Topper novels of Thorne Smith -- one of which once got the big-screen treatment as a Cary Grant vehicle, no less -- in which a mild-mannered protagonist goes on adventures with a pair of zany, trouble-making ghosts. In the Toffee stories the mild-mannered protagonist is one Marc Pillsworth, and the zany trouble-making end of things is handled by Marc's dream-girl, a pinup beauty in a perpetual state of dishabille who from time to time can come out into the physical world and play. 

The Toffee stories aren't erotica as such, at least not in any explicit way. They're very mildly spicy and squarely situated in the art of the tease, playing on the contrast between the long-suffering protagonist's futile attempt to make sense of the crazy world around him and Toffee, who manifests that craziness in a sweet-natured way and does her best to help him out of the scrapes he gets into, even if her efforts tend to multiply the havoc.

If this premise sounds familiar, it should. I'm pretty sure Ralph Bakshi must have had at least some inspiration from these stories when he was creating the much more lurid Cool World. The dream-girl-runs-amuck is at any rate a premise brimming with potential for both erotic and non-erotic stories, and from this angle I find the Toffee stories pretty fascinating. (It's a theme I might in fact want to work into the Space Princess stories at some point... wink-wink, nudge-nudge.)

Vintage pulp fiction can be an uneven proposition, and the Toffee stories are a case in point. On the one hand Toffee herself is as delightful and effervescent as she needs to be; she comes across as feisty and charming despite--or perhaps because of--having serious boundary and impulse-control issues. The parts of any Toffee story before or between appearances of the titular heroine, though, can be a slog; Myers aims for a comic mock-gravitas in his prose that can feel so genuinely leaden that the reader finds themselves skimming along for Toffee's name and reading around it. 

Still, for the vintage pulp enthusiast it's worth at least giving Toffee a go. Uneven as the stories are, Toffee herself is arguably worth the price of admission. There are collections of the Toffee adventures available from Pulpville Press, and you can download a free sampling of Toffee Take a Trip here.

And Now for Something Completely Different: 17776 (Multimedia Story Review)

17776 is well outside my normal topic matter on this blog, but I can't resist discussing it, because it's incredible and if you're not reading / viewing it, you totally should be.

17776 can be best described as an online multimedia story. In one sense it's a science fiction story, its register somewhere between the black comedy of Red Dwarf and the Lake Wobegon variant of Americana. It's set in a far future where humankind has achieved immortality and, for reasons which at first seem inexplicable, has decided to focus its time on play--in particular the creation of ever more exotic variants of the game of football. Looking on in bemusement and providing a running commentary are various pieces of space junk hurtling out into the void, several of which have achieved spontaneous sentience. We come into the story as one of these probes, Pioneer 9, emerges into consciouness and tries to figure out what's happened in the universe with help from his friends Ten (Pioneer 10) and Juice (the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer).

"Is that my name? Are you calling me Nine? ...
Please respond IMMEDIATELY ...
Please answer me. Please answer me. Please answer..."

That brief description really doesn't do the wonderful weirdness of 17776 justice, though. The simultaneous exploration of the future of football, the quirkiness of human nature, the vastness of space and time and horror of the infinite, and the sprawling ambition of the multimedia format in which all this is presented (about which all I can say is eat your heart out, Griffin & Sabine) makes 17776 irresistibly fascinating. Despite the setting and the far-out premise, ultimately this is a story about us and our moment in history, about a transition our culture is going through, and delivers a wide-ranging take on the subject through a series of vignettes that... well, you've just got to see them.

If sci-fi or football or wacky tales of the far future aren't necessarily your things on their own, I can still recommend 17776. Just make sure you're working with a good chunk of free time when you start in on it.

Allow Me to Play You Out

The Voyager 1 golden record is fascinating listening.

But if you're up for something a little more conventional:

" Cosmos without hatred," fellow babies. Until next time!