The Annex Reviews, January 2000
1/31/00 Sketches, Part 1 (Dragonprince); Passenger (Sidney Durham); Asteroid, Mine, Chapters 1 - 4 (Dino Dave); DS9: The Ambassador (ALurker8192); Present for Janeway (Boadicea12); Porno 101 (Morgan Preece); Slaves: The Capture of Elise (EZ Riter)
1/31/00
I also realized I did not give my commentary on the current state of amateur porn on the net, so I'll rectify that now. Well, things are just getting better and better. ASSM has been revived, and so has the ASSTR website, which acts as host for many talented writers. Website archives have become more cleanly designed and are easier to use, and more people than ever are visiting them. With easy-to-use message board software there's been a trend for many sites to include message boards now, and some have chat rooms too, or rooms within IRC networks where like- minded people can connect in cyberspace. There's also more sites springing up everyday in a variety of fetishes. On the down side, recent criminal cases involving meeting minors for sex via the internet (one culprit a Disney executive) may lead to cracking down on the net freedom of adults. But, probably not. As I've come to realize, when there is big money to made in some media, people usually look the other way as regards regulating the abuses. Look at the handgun industry. A-hem. So, I think the 21st century bodes well overall for all of us. As a side note, I'd like to say that some of these reviews, present and past, are appearing monthly in excerpted form in Cleansheets ezine (http://www.cleansheets.com). So you can say I'm a columnist now, though I doubt I'd ever get into Salon. Not that I'm worse than their writers are, just off-center and irrelevant. I also want to remind everyone that if I have given your story or site an A+ rating, you are entitled to display the candy box sticker/gif on your site. You can see it on my site but must email me for it; it doesn't come automatically. More than a few of you have asked me for it in recent months, but I'd lost the original in a computer crash, and had to redesign it to make it available again.
A young man stops at a state park during his bicycle ride to use
the facilities. He is surprised to discover the men's lavatory
features all sorts of creative graffiti by men, for men:
The narrator also sees pictures, the sketches of the title. He makes
a habit to stop in every day to see what's new, masturbating and
fantasizing all the while. One tragic day the walls are painted. But
soon an exceptional sketch appears:
Naturally, who should walk in then but the artist...though not soon enough to spare the narrator the embarrassment of shooting his cum all over the wall. This was a very sweet and enthusiastic story, and the voice of the narrator (and perhaps the writer) comes off as that of an authentic teen experiencing his first stirrings of lust. An enjoyable beginning to a longer tale.
One of the most popular subjects for female exhibition stories is that of a sweet young thing who exposes/masturbates herself in a moving vehicle for the enjoyment of other drivers on the road. As this is difficult to do while driving, sometimes there's two wanton females, or a whole carload of them. The appeal of the idea for both men and women is that if a gal's gonna do something like this, it's better to have maximum anonymity (the open highway) with maximum exposure (the open window or sunroof) to maximum maleness (truck drivers, bikers, frat boys on vacation) with maximum safety (speed up and you're out of danger -- but oh, watch out for that state trooper!)
This story handled the subject matter very well and made it fresh
again. A middle-aged man picks up a gum-popping blonde
hitchhiker in her early twenties with proto-Riot Grrl leanings --
she has blue fingernails, a toilet mouth and the New Age name of
Indigo -- who dares him to push his aging Lincoln Continental up
to the 120 mph it was built for, and as long as his foot stays hard
on the pedal, he gets to fondle her breast. But soon the fondling
becomes exhibitionism on her part:
More horny truck drivers follow, and then she says, "Now I blow you while you pass them again." An arousing and well-crafted story, and, in its beginning stages, an interesting character study.
Susan Rytell is a miner in the 23rd century, operator of the
heavy equipment needed to extract ores from rocky asteroids in
deep space. She is also interested in BDSM, often while working:
My hand reached down to finger the controls of the operators
chair to deflate and harden the seat cushion while I rocked my
hips forward, pressing my clit down, letting the vibrations of the
digger work on me.
However, she is naive about real-life BDSM, so when some vacation time comes up she decides to spend it on Crydon, an earthlike planet renowned for its hedonism. There she has a number of erotic adventures: a solo in a vibrating mud bath; a three-way with an older couple that involves bondage; and a BDSM workshop she attends where a woman is flogged, then bound. The narrator comes to a gradual awakening of her desires, so that when she meets Mark and Judy, a magnetic dom male and his female sub, anything could happen. Unlike Jim Thompson's "Blue Planet" (reviewed in the November 99 Reviews) this story did not have an adventure-based plot along with the sexual awakening stuff; it was all about relationships, and having a good time on vacation. This did not make it less of a story; and though the writing tended to be decorative at times, the sex scenes shone. The story also evinced a fetish for bare (female) feet on the part of the author and a love of Pink Floyd, though I doubt they'd still be pressing vinyl records in the 23rd century. Recommended if you like science fiction and BDSM, with the traditional plot structure of a published BDSM book.
Although I am not a *huge* fan of Star Trek (in fact, I snigger at it for many reasons) I enjoy reading Star Trek fanfic, the erotic kind, for the attempt it makes to humanize the contrived, awkward characters of the newer shows. Like the newer shows, the stories don't always succeed at involving me either, but I find them all very interesting, in part because of the investment the authors make in them. The writing is very polished and sincere, perhaps mulled over for ages during the downtime of workday commutes and boring meetings, or poured out at white-hot speed after being struck by a particular idea. The two-dimensional Starfleet officers and aliens become symbols, a means of exploring the limits of human desire, that RL men and women can't. Unfortunately, this story had none of that. The major clue was that it was posted in ASSM rather than ASCEM (alt.startrek.creative.erotica.moderated), and though it started off with the requisite stiff tone ("Capt. Benjamin Sisko stood waiting at the airlock. Dax and Major Kira were standing beside him ."Tell me again why we're doing this?" Sisko always hated diplomatic functions and he was pulling at the collar of his dress uniform") the story soon turns into the sort of mindless porn one sees all too much of on the net, as an alien ambassador introduces rogue pheromones which cause the crew to have rabid sex with each other. (Sample: "Dax lay back on the table as Sisko fucked her. Her long black hair fell off the edge of the table. O'brian quickly positioned himself at her mouth, she sucked him in as Sisko continued to work on her pussy. She couldn't believe it as O'brian started to fuck her mouth, she tickled the underside of his prick with her tongue. She felt him jam his prick into her face and spewed his load down her throat.") There's much more, in a similar vein. Yawn. Double yawn. Now, there's nothing wrong with having the crew of DS9 have sex with each other, but by god, make it interesting, and throw in some of the relationship issues, D/S elements, and homosexual leanings of the Real Thing on ASCEM, and not the standard male trilogy of male-female vaginal/anal/girl-on-girl, in that order. Oh, and Dax has brown, not black, hair.
This story, in contrast, was more satisfying for me, even though it was shorter and more cryptic. Captain Janeway finds a tape showing her bondage encounter with a man named Kashyk (not named in the story, but in the foreword) and replays it in her mind. I guess Kashyk was up to no good with both the Captain and her crew, but left before he could be apprehended, leaving the tape as a gift, for, as the Captain thinks, "There's no point in hiding a file on a ship you are about to impound. Or leaving it for a woman you mean to kill. " I didn't quite "get" this, but the writing was good and conveyed a good sense of frustrated desire and a relationship left unexplored. In the foreword, there's a note that this story has different endings on the author's home site, enabling one to choose a different ending through the magic of hypertext.
I enjoyed the author's website the last time I visited, so I thought I'd check this out. This story was as brief as the one above but more straightforward: A college boy talks about his breast obsession and his first girlfriend, who has a 42DD chest. The first class they take together is Modern Erotic Film Appreciation, where the professor is a looker too. During one particularly stimulating film boy, girlfriend, and professor get so turned on they all start masturbating. You might too. Lively writing, funny at the same time, and not meant to be taken seriously at all -- a giggle on the pillow.
EZ Riter has been around for a while now, and this story showcases some of his finest writing. Elise is a middle-aged, but still hot, housewife captured along with her two teenage daughters and their friends on the soccer team when their school bus blows a tire. As is hinted from the title, they're to become sex slaves. But not the bubbly, silly kind you're probably thinking of. Their heads are shaved, they're tied and put in bondage gear and shoved into kennels, all this for the Master who will use them and breed them. The story starts off on a harsh tone that is almost too realistic for porn, as Elise is captured and thinks desperately on her fate:
"Doctor!" It was a different voice, a cold, commanding, male voice.
"Yes, Master," the woman replied.
(She called him Master. Who could be master of that devil woman?
Oh, God, what's happening?)
"Have you identified the ones we've sold?" the male said.
(Sold? Someone's been sold? No. I didn't hear that. Not slavers!
Not in this day and age! Not in California! I can't be living this.
It's a nightmare.) Later the girls are taken to their new home where lives of endless degradation and physical punishment -- along with, some admit, pleasure -- await them, and Elise is destined for "special" treatment at the hands of the master. But towards the end the story leaves Silence of the Lambs territory to land with a light thud into PornoSillyland, where it's revealed poor Elise has been a raving slut all along and that she just needs to release her "natural passions" to enjoy the hellish situation she's been put into, and there's an interesting, ironic twist at the end. Although I like slave fiction, this wasn't exactly an arousing to me: it was, as I've said, perhaps too realistic and complex. But the author handled it very skillfully, and I did love that touch of cynicism at the end.
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