It was totally worth the wait.
Word.
One of the things that impressed me about Ilona Andrews’s Kate Daniels books is the lack of gratuitous sex. Sexual tension there is a plenty, but the heroine still has not slept with the designated love interest (for a good reason). Kate specifically says that she won’t go to bed with someone outside of a committed relationship.
Otherwise, urban fantasy has become a steaming cesspit of R-rated romance. I usually skip over those parts, and try to avoid reading anything where the jacket says, “Stacy’s resolve is tested, not only by the rabid werevampires trying to kill her with extreme prejudice, but also by the dangerous, but strangely attractive brooding Steve Jones.”
And Piers Anthony has graduated from “skeevy observational ephebophilia” scenes to “full-on pedo” scenes in the latest Xanth book…
I don’t know about the other authors on the list, but I will speculate about Heinlein, Niven, and Moorcock.
Heinlein grew up in a straitlaced little town in the heart of the Bible Belt. He spent the early part of his career writing “juvenile” novels, and constantly fighting with an extremely puritanical editor. When the Sexual Revolution came along in the 1960s, he jumped on the bandwagon, along with every one else in popular culture.
Niven and Moorcock are Baby Boomers. When they began their careers, the Sexual Revolution was in full swing, and sex scenes were almost mandatory, to prove you were not a repressed Victorian prude like your parents.
A lot of written sex is bad whatever the genre. I think it’s particularly cringe-worthy in most older SF because it came from authors like Asimov and Heinlein (who I remember somebody telling me seemed obsessed with sex with his grandmother and I don’t like anyway) whose whole ‘history’ was hardline boys’ stuff SF and sex just did not exist in those days before you were married and turned the light out. When they came to write it, it didn’t fit because any sex except prostitution depends on some kind of characterisation and all their interest was things and situations. It was like they were trying to show that SF was not all for boys afraid of anything ‘girly’ or romantic - but doing it in a way to suggest just that! To be fair, Asimov was known as a master of the ‘filthy’ limerick!
The truth is that sex isn’t very important. We either know what goes on or we don’t and unless it’s important to show some character as peculiarly deviant it’s the relationships around the sex that matter far more than what they actually get up to.
You can write SF about sex - and wouldn’t it have to be a collection of French short stories that included quite a lot on that theme! But again it’s more about the reaction to discovering that your alien ‘girlfriend’ is actually one of a tri-sexual species and similar. Of late it seems to be becoming obligatory to include, not so much ‘sex’ as a character’s discovery that they are ‘really’ gay. Which seems to be quite different from discovering they are ‘really’ not that hung up on being exclusively heterosexual. Yawnorama!
Sex is part of life, so it’s strange to exclude it,. But that’s just the point, part so it’s just as strange to make an almighty big deal about it or to place it in a sort of adolescent boy context estranged from any sort of relationship or context. An odd thing that was around for a while but has mercifully got lost in the generations was how feminist writers felt obliged to write even more unromantic wam-bam-mam male sex (and women not really wanting but puttng up with it) than had been traditional in supposedly ‘male-orientated’ genres just so they could show how bad it was and how much women really didn’t like it that way.
They rarely thought to write instead what women preferred instead unless it was Lesbian. If anything they came out with even more stereotyped macho men and wilting women than the original just to condemn it instead of providing an alternative. Even Ursula le Guin fell sometimes fell into that trap. Jean M Auel does not (though 30,000 BCE is hardly ‘SF’)
The reason Phil Farmer’s name came up so often in this thread was that he did exactly this in the early 1950s when no one in sf wrote about sex - and revolutionized the field, though it took a while to catch on. Like until the time of Dangerous Visions, though Sturgeon clearly handled this well even before then. It is no coincidence that Sturgeon wrote “Amok Time.”
mbh said:
I don’t think that adequately describes Heinlein. I’ve read Grumbles From the Grave and his first unpublished novel. He may have grown up in Kansas City with the Bible Belt mentality around him, but he was pretty outrageous before he started writing. The man was a polygamist that kept a lid on it for the sake of polite society. It’s just in the late '30s and early '40s, society was pretty conservative. Then he started writing the juveniles. It wasn’t until Starship Troopers that he changed markets, and then came Stranger In A Strange Land, which set the tone for all of his works to follow.
Irishman called your writing on Heinlein “inadequate.” I think the better term for it is sheer, utter crap.
Where a person grows up is not a good predictor of future behavior, especially if that person was the sort who got the hell out of town at the earlier possible age. Which Heinlein did, going off to the Naval Academy and entering the Navy, not then noted as a sexually conservative hotbed. Nothing about Heinlein was conservative at the time.
You don’t understand the way the Depression framed attitudes, nor the way that WWII did, especially among some military men.
Hogwash. Heinlein started selling in 1939. Within a couple of years he was the leading sf writer in the country. He didn’t write his first juvenile until 1947. After that he spent the next decade writing two or three young adult novels on the one hand - an indication of how little money existed for the adult sf market more than any attitudinal proclivity - and an adult novel and short stories on the other. By the end of the 1950s, though, an adult market had finally established itself. You’ll find almost all the writers who had been churning out YAs in the 50s dropping them in the 60s.
Bilge. Apparently we are doomed until the end of time to repeat to the history-impaired that Stranger in a Strange Land was published in 1961, with parts of it written much earlier, and that no such thing as the sexual revolution existed in America in 1961. Pre Beatles. Pre hippies. The world of Mad Men. Heinlein did have the examples of true pioneers like Farmer and Sturgeon to look at, but he wasn’t jumping onto their bandwagons either. They didn’t have bandwagons, for one thing, and he made his own bandwagons, for another.
This is batshit insane. Niven was born in 1938, Moorcock in 1939. The first Boomers were born in 1946. Niven first started publishing in 1964, Moorcook - a prodigy - around 1957. There was no sexual revolution in sf writing when they started. Saying that the early Niven, of all people, included mandatory sex scenes in his Analog stories is as hallucinatory as anything Moorcook ever wrote for Jerry Cornelius.
Overall, an “F” for history, although it deserves an “F-” given how easy it is to look up any of these basic facts. Go take a few years and study the real sexual revolution, how and when it infiltrated popular culture in general and sf in particular, and the evolution of the sf and fantasy genres in regard to sex before you inflict another one of these posts on us.
Moderator interjects slight tangent:
Please note, that tracer has resurrected a thread after six months. That’s not a problem in Cafe Society, although it might be in other forums. However, I want to remind y’all of the situation: some of the people in the earlier posts may not be reading this thread, may not even be around, and so may not respond.
I now return you to the regularly scheduled program.