Message-ID: <20924asstr$942235800@assm.asstr-mirror.org> From: LadyCyrrh@aol.com X-Original-Message-ID: <0.779511e4.254cfa4e@aol.com> X-Post-Date: Sat, 30 Oct 1999 21:50:06 EDT Subject: {ASSM} {GALAGO} The Annex Reviews 11/10/99, by Lady Cyrrh (review) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Wed, 10 Nov 1999 07:10:00 -0500 Path: assm.asstr-mirror.org!not-for-mail Approved: Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d X-Archived-At: X-Moderator-Contact: ASSTR ASSM moderation X-Story-Submission: X-Moderator-ID: assm-admin 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 -- If you enjoyed this work, take a moment to email the author. Your comments are their only payment. 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