I’m glad someone brought up Foglio’s XXXenophile – that was some very good work of cartoon erotica in a F/SF idiom. Wisely, the stories were composed as episodic vignettes, rather than as a novel-length continuity.
And that’s where the biggest problem is when trying to mix sex and SF, or any other genre fiction – if you’re going for feature-length, at some point most auteurs will have to decide if the primary goal is to help your consumer wank/turn on their date, or tell an actual plot- or character- driven story. Unless you’re extremely gifted you won’t acheve both. You can have good porn set in a scenario from the SF (or Western, or Noir) idiom, providing the set-up in between the sex scenes in order to place the protagonists in the situation to get it on. Or you can have a good or at least decently plotter and characterized thriller/action/sitcom/SF, with some no-holds-barred sex scenes thrown in between the plot development in order to give us a different look at the protagonists (and increase sales). But incidental sex scenes, even very raunchy ones, do not “porn” make, and spaceships are not SF by themselves.
Consider if you will Milo Manara’s graphic novel Click!, and a series of quite lame direct-to-video/late night cable flicks based upon it. In these, the “SF” plot gimmick is a mind-control device. But very shortly after it’s established, there’s little further dwelling on its SF implications – Click! becomes primarily an exquisitely drawn story about how at any given moment, at the click of a button, Claudia turns into a raving nympho and Penis Ensues, in various settings where it normally would not. IOW, essentially the scenarios of most porn, only with the excuse that this is caused by some “blackbox” MC process. The comic is redeemed by the aforementioned gorgeous artwork – both plot AND sex are excuses for Manara to show off his skill – but the videos end up just plain stupid 'cause there’s no real story other than “Penis keeps Ensuing as people keep clicking the button”.
It’s not SF, but John Cameron-Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) attempts this in his new feature, Shortbus .
Actually, I posted before I read the entire article. I guess Shortbus doesn’t really try to do both after all:
Sounds interesting, though.
I have a copy of “Imaginative Sex.” It is not porn, or intended to be. It is intended to be a sort of “Joy of Sex” for people who like roleplaying. It’s a series of suggested roleplaying scenarios such as “captive spy and interrogator” and “teacher and naughty student” and “captive pioneer woman and Indian brave.” It also contains safety tips, such as don’t ever tie up someone on a boat. (It might sink.)
Around 1979 there was a softcore porn film called Sex World. It took the basic premise of Westworld–people go to a high-tech amusement park and live out their sexual fantasies with androids. This was during that brief window at the end of the 70s when X-rated movies were still shot on film and striving for artistic legitimacy. It wasn’t great porn or great SF, but within its niche, it was kind of impressive.
I don’t see it on the IMDB, so it may have disappeared without a trace. Unlike mainstream filmmaking, bigger budgets/higher production values never corresponded to bigger profits for porn.
I agree, this is the essential tension between porn and non-porn, and this is why I think John Norman is such a brilliant writer – because he came up with such a brilliant solution to the problem. People often decry his novels as so much porn, but actually, there aren’t a lot of long, detailed sex scenes in them, maybe two or three per novel, each one taking at most ten pages to describe. The Gor novels run 400-500 pages on average, so that’s not a lot. People THINK there is a lot of porn in Gor novels because Norman includes lots of tiny details and incidents relating to slavegirls throughout the novels that doesn’t impede the plot at all.
For example, in Marauders of Gor (IIRC) there’s a scene where the hero is travelling at night on foot with a caravan and it starts raining heavily. The wagons are parked for the night, and he spots a naked slavegirl under one of them, secured to the bottom of the wagon by a chain attached to her collar, and she’s hooded, too. So he ducks under the wagon, has sex with the slavegirl, snuggles up with her afterward and stays nice and cozy with her under his cloak, and after the rain lets up, slips a small coin into her hood, to repay her master for his use of her, and leaves.
Norman’s description of the scene is barely two paragraphs, and is only a little more explicit than the paragraph above, but it’s a very nice little bondage fantasy that doesn’t affect the plot at all. This is very typical of the sexual bondage imagery in the Gor novels. The real action of the plot involves warfare between city states and the protagonist’s role in exposing a secret agent of one of the cities, and the bondage imagery, although occurring throughout the novel, for the most part doesn’t distract from the plot at all. In fact, the sex scene helps establish the “differentness” of Gor and Goreans: by out standards, what occurred was a rape, but on Gor it was an act of kindness – the slavegirl was arguably much more comfortable during the rainstorm snuggled up with the protagonist under his cloak than she would have been otherwise, and her owner gets compensated for the use of his property, very responsible behavior on Gor.
The real problem with Norman as a writer isn’t the bondage imagery, it’s that his plotting is heavy-handed and slow, his characterization is weak, especiallly the female characters, and his dialogue is so wooden it would better be described as “leaden.” But to come to that understanding, you have to be able to think objectively about the Gor novels, something I haven’t seen a hell of a lot of.
Another good point. My feeling is that “porn” as most people understand it, is something that has little or no point to it beyond being wank material. If it can be enjoyed for its plot or its characterization or its humor, it’s not really porn, even if it does have scenes in it you can wank to. Thus, I don’t consider “Flesh Gordon,” the NOVEL “Story of O” and the Gor novels porn. They have wanking material aplenty, but Flesh Gordon is genuinely funny (and fun) in many places, “Story of O” the novel has some good strong characterization, and the Gor novels are generally fine heroic fantasy stories. Also movies in the “erotic thriller” genre frequently have strong sex scenes but also have a strong whodunit plot of some sort.
Yeah, but the reason for all the late night cable flicks using the same plot as Click! is cheapness more than anything else. All you need is a scene of a woman or a man at the controls of a computer and you have your rationale for a series of sexual vignettes filmed cheaply on cheap sets. Very appealing to the cost-conscious softcore porn producer, and they all are cost-conscious. That’s where adult anime have it all over live action adult filmmakers. For the a scene set in a space station’s loading dock is not more expensive than one set in a hotel room. It costs about as much to draw the one as the other.
I’ve got it also. I agree it’s not porn, not being fiction, but it fills the same niche as all those female sex fantasy books - for someone who likes Gor, that is. There are a few that don’t involve the woman being enslaved, but not many.
(I’ve got it because I collect all Daw books. 
)
Well… that’s why I included it here… it’s about sex… and Gor… that mixes the two, some may consider it porn just due to the subject matter and descriptive text. I’ll agree that it is not hardcore… but as for ‘wanking material’… I seem to recall Wifey used to be considered porn too… (just not sci-fi/fantasy).
I’ve got it becuase A) It was hard to find B) I used to collect all of John Norman’s writings.
I quite like the Druuna books, very European.
I once saw a Russian sci-fi hardcore porn movie.
It had quite a big budget as the key scene of the movie was the climactic zero-g sex.
It wasn’t a very good movie, and I fastforwarded through the boring story, so… I guess I don’t really have a point.
But there is at least one hardcore-porn sci-fi movie out there, I just can’t remember the name.
If anyone wants to write a script and produce one, I have 16mm, super-16mm and DV cameras, lighting equipment, some grip equipment, and experience working on low-budget films.
Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs series has some pretty steamy scenes. It’s an interesting post modern hyper capitalstic future vision where people can store their consciousness in a little bullet shaped chip in their spinal column and download themselves into new “sleeves” (bodies with wiped minds) at their whims or they can have themselves broadcast across the galaxy and resleeved, no need for cumbersome meatspace travel!
The sex scenes are graphic and they aren’t gratuitous. It’s a good series but my kids will have to wait a while before they get their hands on them:)
I could knock out a script for “Dancing Slavegirls of Mars” pretty quick and easy, but it’s that whole “Producer” thing that bothers me, since it’s all about producing money, and that’s the fly in most low budget ointments, from what I’ve seen.
Martian Desert - Night
The air is still, nothing in sight for miles but coral-like rock spires standing before the starry sky. A moment of silence…and then the ground begins to shake, vibrating so that the fine, red dust stirs and becomes a cloud at the point of vibration, suddenly bursting as a two steel doors swing up and open and a metal platform rises up quickly and raising into the sky like a pole. Behind, we can see more of the tall metal shapes lifting out of the ground.
The rounded tops suddenly roll open revealing beautiful, dark skinned women, naked, and chained to the platform by a collar; each curled in a ball on her knees. As one, they rise and begin to dance.
Ditto.
Yup. If it were free, I’d be making movies all the time.
That’s certainly not from Marauders, which is set in Gor’s equivalent of Viking Scandinavia (Torvaldsland) and doesn’t involve any trade caravans or unmasking secret agents. I don’t recognise the incident, suggesting it’s from one of the books I’ve read less than the others (I have read all of them), but it’s certainly a Gorean-type incident, at least from one of the later books.
In my experience Gor is not pornographic - I’ve read every one of them with the book held firmly in both hands - and I don’t think it’s intended to be. Also it’s poor-quality SF, insofar as Norman really needed a good editor and spent much of his career too out-of-favour to get one (Priest-Kings alone know what his phil lectures must have been like :eek: ), but you need to remember that they were mostly a vehicle for his unusual views, and only in the first few volumes an agreeable pastiche of “John Carter of Mars”.
I disagree however that
Regrettably, his worst stylistic fault (out of many) is to rabbit on about his pet philosophy instead of getting on with the darned action. It’s the main reason why in, say, Mercenaries of Gor, about as much plot-advancement happens as would have sufficed for about a third of the (infinitely more readable) Assassin of Gor. Still, he has some good days at the office, if you like that kind of thing… and one of my great surprises on rediscovering Gor when I started looking it up on the internet was how many women do.
I’ve only read a couple of Gor books, but the wagons thing sounds familiar - it isn’t Players of…, is it? Tarl was fronting as a professionala chess(analogue)-player in that one, if it helps.
The Folsom Street Fair does it pretty well. http://www.folsomstreetfair.com/ (possibly NSFW)
Huh?
Oh, that SF.
On the nosey! This is exactly why the Gor books are shit.
Science fiction, fantasy, and horror… aren’t they all pornography of a sort? They all involve titillation of our most improbable desires (or fears). As a kids, didn’t Lovecraft get stuffed into that same dark place under the bed as the Penthouse Forums when we heard our parents footsteps?
They also have another thing in common: a small set of unique ideas that carry enough oomph to fuel a short story, but only rarely something substantially longer. Sure, there’s feature length porn, and enough Stephen King novels to fill a large dumpster… but existence isn’t the same as worth. These genres are often at their best when short, but evocative, foreplay leads directly to climax.
Suggestions, suggestions… here’s a couple new ones: escapepod.org – podcast science fiction short stories with more than a few that feature explicit sex. I rather liked My Friend is a Lesbian Zombie.
And one that isn’t short at all: Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series – a trilogy of full length novels featuring the adventures of a courtesan who favors pain and bondage.