1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not a great sci-fi erotica, January 3, 2010
This review is from: Space Captive (Mass Market Paperback)
I am really hard pressed to refer to this as "erotica" as I didn't find this even remotely erotic. Normally I can at least reason out why someone would find this erotic, but this one has me incredibly confused. I suppose someone could, but this rates up there with the tentacle monsters in Hentai. I just don't understand that stuff. Luckily this has no such monsters. In any event, the whole reason I picked this up was because I am a major fan of science fiction. Most other erotica I've read has been set in modern times or around the 1700/1800's. So, being the sci-fi fan I am, I decided to see how this measures up.
Frankly, this book didn't do well for me. It's not because of the torturous aspects, because I've read Sade and loved that. I think it has more to do with the fact that basically no one is attractive and the story feels overly ridiculous. Basically Space Captive seems to derive its major influences from Star Trek. I'm not sure which iteration of Star Trek, but this totally feels like a Star Trek derivation. The name of the starship is even called the "Explorer". I've only really spent time watching "Star Trek: The Next Generation", but it has familiar elements of not letting the enemies get their hands on the starship because of its advanced technology. "Space Captive" seems to be centered on a conflict between Earth and a separatist group that is living in the Megellan sector.
Basically the Explorer is captured by these pirates and the entire crew is taken hostage. As I'm sure anyone can guess, the crew needs to be interrogated and since this novel is classified as "erotica" you can expect the method of extracting this information is through sexual torture. Well sort of. The second in command is a beautiful woman named Elizabeth Hartley and we basically journey with her through her misadventures. The pirates seem supremely focused on her rather than the captain, though they use her as leverage to get the captain to cooperate. Anyway, she's put through all sorts of sexual trials that involve bondage, being whipped, rape (from males and females), and even this bizarre maze thing they make her go through that involves being naked, freezing water, and rats. I was more perplexed while I was reading the latter, because I didn't find that erotic at all, nor did I find it a logical "final punishment" by the pirates. It was just goofy, in my opinion.
Now, the more mind boggling aspect of this novel is based on the fact that very few of the pirates are attractive. So just picture a bunch of ugly people committing sexual acts with someone beautiful. I guess some people might find this "hot", but I found it confusing how a whole community was like this. They had one beautiful woman in this one area, but all she did was fight with Elizabeth. The worst were the dwarves. These aren't the ones we encounter in real life, these are apparently mutated and strange, they are more trolls than dwarves. Apparently they were originally bred to work on the engines of starships, because those areas of a starship were too small for normal people, but now that the technology is better they don't need them. So a huge exodus of dwarves went to the Magellan sector because they couldn't find work on Earth anymore. I felt like this was a stupid idea. Anyway, these creatures get to have "fun" with the captives and what not. None of this was erotic.
I'm not entirely sure who would find this a good book. The excuses related to the sexual abuse and rapes are tiresome, because Elizabeth always responded favorable and secretly "liked it". I think that's absurd, frankly. Some of the bondage setups weren't bad, and there was one scene that I genuinely liked with one of her own crew members (again forced), where he took advantage of her chest and made her quite messy. But the "secretly liking it" thing got annoying after a while and typically ruined everything at how illogical it all was. There was also one scene where the male captain is pleasured by another man, but this was brief and quite mild in content, but as you can expect this is a pretty "liberal" community sexually. There were also a few scenes with Elizabeth and another woman, but the other woman was old and ugly, so that didn't work for me.
In the end the erotic science fiction did not work out so well in this book. There are vastly more creative things you can do in the realms of science fiction and erotica. I'll keep looking, maybe at some point I'll find a decent book that makes sense to some degree. Ultimately I can't say I recommend this.
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