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From: LadyCyrrh@aol.com
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Subject: {ASSM} {REVIEW} The Annex Reviews, 8/26/03
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 17:10:04 -0400
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The Annex Reviews, 8/26/03
by Lady Cyrrh (ladycyrrh@aol.com)
Website: http://members.aol.com/ladycyrrh 



I am currently busy with another writing project, so I 
am straying from reading current newsgroup-posted 
stories for a while, reviewing instead stories I've read 
in the past. This posting will concentrate on slave 
stories, M/F, F/F, and M/M. It's a subject near and dear 
to my heart as anyone who's read me for a while can 
attest.

I will also be moving my website to the asstr-mirror.org site 
and it will be operational soon. (PSST! Anyone want to 
gift me with a copy of Dreamweaver 3 so I can make it 
more modern? Please email me privately.) 

So let the whips and chains mayhem begin!



The Stories:

Blondilocks, Parts 1 and 2 (Bookgirl): M/F, F+/F, BDSM, 
slave, ncon

THE FIRM I, Parts 1, 2, 3 (Bill Smith): M/M, BDSM, 
slavebiz

Earth in Chains, Book 1 (blinky): M/F, cons, femdom, SF, 
slave

The Forest in Spring (Mara): M/F, femdom, slave, fantasy

Slave Girls of Actaeon (Alyssa S.): M/f, F/F, slave, mc, 
tg, SF

Training Yamrah (Boris Ludamenko): M/F, mc, slave, 
fantasy




Blondilocks, Parts 1 and 2 [A-] 
Where posted: ASSM 
When posted: 6/13/03 
Author: Bookgirl
Type: M/F, F+/F, BDSM, slave, ncon

Adrianna and her husband are serious players in the 
local BDSM scene and decide to participate in their 
club's annual slave auction (the proceeds going to 
charity, of course -- bonk a slave, save an orphan.) A 
feature of such auctions are lengthy limits lists where 
would-be slaves list what sex acts they won't put up 
with. Feeling sure that her husband will buy her, and 
that it will give her an opportunity to safely indulge 
in many fantasies she felt hesitant about before, 
Adrianna edits her list severely. But lo and behold, her 
hubby fails to meet her bid, and she's sold instead to a 
group of three female roues who are sure to do various 
kinky things to her.

This was a pretty good story in the BDSM/slave vein, but 
the author never made it clear how sexually liberal, and 
therefore sexually threatened, the protagonist was. At 
the beginning of the story it's clear she's tried 
everything except asphyxiation play, making it clear 
she's pretty experienced... but then she freaks out when 
she is bought by the women (each having quirks, though 
not especially deviant ones) making it seem she isn't so 
sophisticated after all. Part of the fun of reading a 
story like this is seeing how a slave can get more than 
they bargained for from their new master or mistress, 
but here there seems to be no reason for her fear.

We'll just have to see where the author takes it. 




THE FIRM I, Parts 1, 2, 3 [A-] 
Where posted: ASSGM 
When posted: 2/2/01 
Author: Bill Smith
Type: M/M, BDSM, slavebiz

This story was in the tradition of lengthy, detailed 
slave fantasies done so well by gay authors like Peter 
Brown ("A Middle Class Slave") and Joshua Ryan 
("Christopher Enslaved."). All of them are basically 
alike -- as most het slave fantasies are basically alike 
-- concentrating not on the protagonists' struggle 
against their enslavement but on the mechanical process 
of it, the authors inventing an astonishing level of 
detail about how their pet operations work. For the 
reader, the enjoyment comes not from character or plot 
but from world-building of this sort. Or at least it 
should, if the story's done well.

This story was the most businesslike slave fantasy I've 
read, coming across at times like an infomercial written 
by a bored executive. Forrest and David are two dully 
persnickety yuppie types who are out to make a killing 
in the gay male slave trade, buying stock cheap and 
selling it high. They are soon approached by an 
organization known as THE FIRM (annoyingly capitalized 
throughout the story, and reminiscent of that awful 
Jimmy Page heavy metal band of the late 80s) and witness 
exchanges like:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
"THE FIRM has noted, as you'll not be surprised I'm 
sure, that both of you have bought considerable stock 
over the past few years - at least enough to get into 
the upper 10 percent of our customers. But we've also 
noticed that you have managed to resell a lot of that 
stock at considerable profit after further acclimation 
and training. Frankly, we're impressed. But I know that 
you can't extend yourself too much further with your own 
capital. So, right to the point, we want to extend an 
invitation and I'm sure you two will take it in the 
right way. We want you to consider becoming agents of 
THE FIRM, especially finding and buying the type of 
stock that would meet our very high quality standards 
and, with a lot of training once they're purchased, THE 
FIRM could guarantee fully. You'll use our money - 
you'll find our resources are almost inexhaustible - 
with no questions asked." 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I quote at length here because it's indicative of the 
rest of the story, most of which consisted of commercial 
banter... dialogue that was anal enough (sorry for the 
pun) and detailed enough to give rise to a new genre of 
sex story: slavebiz.

This doesn't mean that the story is no good, however. 
Most of the thrills do, in fact, come out of the 
droning, detached chit-chat about enslaved human beings 
treated like product, although the author is careful to 
say at several times that life as a slave is preferable 
to being worked to death in a diamond mine in Brazil, or 
life in prison ("But this was heaven compared to the 
constant abuse they got from those ugly old guards and 
even uglier warden in that filthy Mexican prison... They 
had to admit that since being enslaved they'd actually 
learned to enjoy having their bodies used and found 
significant satisfactions in pleasing their owners no 
matter what the demands were.") There were plenty of 
nice descriptions of the slaves, too, who are kept 
shaved with their nipples pierced, submissively 
presenting themselves for their masters' use while 
remaining unspent themselves -- sometimes for months -- 
until they are lathered into a sexual froth. What the 
slaves feel about all this isn't examined, though; the 
emphasis is on the executives of the trade.

An unusual story, majestically cruel in some places, 
dull and easy to mock in others. Recommended for its 
imagination, though I wish the writer hadn't capitalized 
THE FIRM throughout the story. Imagine how my reviews 
would read if I continuously capitalized THE ANNEX or 
LADY CYRRH. 




Earth in Chains, Book 1 [B] 
Where posted: ASS 
When posted: 6/23/01 
Author: blinky
Type: M/F, cons, femdom, SF, slave

This excerpt from an online novel was posted a while 
back on ASS. I found it in a Google search. The rest of 
it is "available in e-book format (pdf) for $2" at the 
author's site, which has long since blinked out of 
existence.

This story could be considered a slavefic, but one 
couched in more conventional science fiction frame. It's 
centuries in the future and an alien race known as the 
Ska'an have taken over the earth and decimated its 
population. Oddly, they don't do anything with it. 
Instead of looting or pillaging they choose to live on 
small landholdings with the remaining humans as their 
slaves, a quasi-feudal lifestyle augmented by technology 
such as aircars and electric fences. Not very exciting, 
is it?

That was how I felt about the rest of this story. It was 
cleanly written, the grammar was in place, and the 
author can reveal and carry forward an action/adventure 
plot. But it was just... dull. The style was competent, 
but never sparkled. The bad characters -- the aliens -- 
didn't evince the intense evil which would have made 
them hateable, and the hero, while sympathetic, was 
bland and blah. There weren't any of the piquant sadisms 
you'd usually find in a slave story. Even the unusual 
elements, such as aliens practicing a sort of femdom 
(Ska'an females are tall, muscular amazons, keeping 
Skan'an males as virtual slaves) didn't intrigue. By the 
time I got to the big escape and the sex (the male and 
female slaves finally get to mingle freely) I was 
seriously zoned out. If there was ever a perfect example 
of a B story -- one that isn't interesting and ambitious 
enough for an A, yet not poorly written and clichéd 
enough for a C or a D, this is it.

I don't know quite where this went wrong, but I'd 
suggest to the author, if they're still around, to work 
on his or her writing style, making it more lively and 
distinct. 




The Forest in Spring [A+] 
Where found: The Gorean Voice
URL: http:www.pantheus.com/TGV/archive122000/TGV/Guest.shtml
Author: Mara
Type: M/F, femdom, slave, fantasy

You can't talk about slavery without Gor, can you?

John Norman (a pseudonym) has written many slave tales 
about this barbaric world, which have inspired a 
fanatical following since being published in the 1960s. 
With the internet age its fans (known as Goreans) have 
discovered each other, creating websites where they can 
roleplay, discuss the books, or even pastiches of his 
style. This one was found on The Gorean Voice, an ezine 
devoted to all things Norman.

Unlike many Gorean-derived fics, it's pretty good, a 
serious pastiche attempted in the same writing style. 
(As with Tolkien, I've read quite a bit of Gor.) It's 
different in that it's female-centric, dealing with 
slavery not from the viewpoint of a slave girl but from 
one of the free women of Gor. These creatures, in the 
books, were rarely mentioned, except they all tended to 
get enslaved sooner or later, but Norman never made it 
clear what the proportion of slave girls to free women 
was, or what happens to slave girls when they cease 
being girls, i.e., when their hair goes gray, wrinkles 
appear, and their titties go south. This writer attempts 
to fill in that gap. Her character is a free female 
trader who does business with the panther girls, sly, 
forest-dwelling amazons who enslave any males they 
encounter. She comes into contact with a man who, 
unusually for this world, has had the tables turned on 
him and become a slave of the females:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I peered around her then blinked in surprise. A man had 
indeed been foolish enough to enter the forest. There, 
spread eagled on the ground, his limbs bound to sturdy 
stakes, lay the proof. A stripe had been shaved down the 
middle of his shaggy hair as testimony to all that he 
had fallen to women. He'd obviously been much abused, 
his body covered with welts from switches and quirts . . 
. and the unmistakable marks of finger nails and teeth. 
The earthy smells of sweat and musk, both male and 
female, radiated from him.

A personal capture, Ari boasted.

Looking at his broad shoulders and long, muscled limbs, 
one word came to mind, Warrior.

A coup indeed, I granted.

Well, Ari said, with a wink, even the most powerful 
beast must sleep sometime.

I see.

She crouched beside the captive and idly toyed with his 
manhood. To his obvious and complete fury, his body, 
that of a male in his prime, responded. Ari ran a 
lingering hand down his thigh, then stood with a sigh. 
If only the rest of him was as cooperative.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

This passage evinces a female sensibility towards 
slavery that any number of mistress tales, femdom 
stories, and even female-written slash stories doesn't; 
it depicts the mixture of pity and power so well and so 
succinctly, yet it's very to find. That to find it in a 
Gor fandom is even more unusual.

This was a short story, and you can probably guess the 
ending -- it's a noble one. But it was very well done, 
transcending its trashy pop-fic origins and becoming 
something profound.




Slave Girls of Actaeon [A+] 
Where found: Crystal's StorySite
URL: 
http://www.storysite.org/story/slacesofacteon~01.html
Author: Alyssa S.
Type: M/f, F/F, slave, mc, tg, SF

Here's a transgender take on Norman, and a very good one 
I'll add.

Though not quite Gorean it had many similarities in both 
theme and subject matter. Laurence Joo is an 
interplanetary surveyor sent to the planet Actaeon to 
investigate its culture, which is more advanced than 
Gor's (there are knights, lords, and castles) but keeps 
the caste of slavegirl chattels who exist as a sort of 
third sex, alternately venerated and abused by males and 
females both. The author adds a twist in that they are 
specially bred for that purpose, becoming over many 
generations small boned, passive, and obedient, with 
variations such as the "Archipelago small mouth girl" 
who is specially bred for oral sex with a mouth that 
approximates the size and shape of a female anus. Whoa.

The plot begins when an upstart lord makes off with a 
mind/body switching device brought by the surveyor, who 
he then proceeds to entrap in the body of a luscious 14-
year-old slavegirl. The upstart then proceeds to create 
havoc and leaves the now transgendered and transbodied 
surveyor to his fate, a fate made even more dire by the 
fact the slavegirls are fed a drug that makes them even 
more passive and sensually stupefied. And of course no 
one believes him when he insists he's someone else. 

Though it had an exciting plot centering on the 
narrator's struggle to regain his proper body, the story 
was really about his reaction to his reduction in 
status. And he does go on and on about it, evincing a 
take similar to, but told in more erudite and 
sympathetic words, than Norman's philosophy. Here the 
narrator is enslaved by another victim of the device, a 
male warrior thrust into the body of a slavegirl who is 
decidedly not as resigned as the narrator about it:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It felt natural to me, even satisfying, to have my 
helplessness demonstrated to me yet again, and though I 
knew that this woman, if confronted by a true man now, 
would break and succumb to the needs of her bodily 
passions, would show herself to be as responsive to 
direction as I; even though I knew her domination of me 
was relative and forced, a coping mechanism of hers, I 
responded with open thighs and open mouth as I would for 
any true master.
She fed me only enough to curb my hunger; the proper 
care of a slavegirl usually dictates the girl's wants 
are never quite satisfied - she never quite gets enough 
to eat; kneeling for hours at a time, she is never 
comfortable; certainly the methodical arousal of a 
slavegirl isn't so much to please her as to frustrate 
her, for she is rarely permitted to bring her arousal to 
fruition.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Most of the story, like Norman's opuses, does consist of 
philosophizing of this sort, told in first person rather 
than third, without all the he-man posturing that made 
the books so interminably dull. It evinces what may be a 
transgendered male's envy of the female slave's 
humiliating but sensual sexual rewards... although, 
frankly, slavegirl orgasms were few and far between the 
hours of callous treatment, boredom and frustration, 
which makes me think that if the author REALLY lived 
that life he'd be more than a little fed up with it. 
(The slavegirls transferred into the bodies of men lose 
no time in whooping it up with their newfound freedoms.) 
I also think the author pulled his punches by revealing 
the narrator had role-played being a slavegirl on his 
ships' holodeck, and gotten great pleasure from it, 
before falling into his fate; things would have been 
more dramatic if he had discovered his transgender 
inclinations by actually living them.

But the story was well detailed, had some excellent 
writing and plotting, and certainly delivered the 
slavegirl goods without the windy chauvinisms of the 
original. As the author of "The Forest in Spring" did 
above, it improved on the original product while adding 
its own spin.




Training Yamrah [A] 
Where found: JRParz
URL: http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/JR_Parz/www/BorisSlaveWorldTrainingYamrah.htm
Author: Boris Ludamenko
Type: M/F, mc, slave, fantasy

Boris Ludamenko, who has his fiction hosted on JRParz's 
ASSTR site, has come up with his own take on the Gor 
scenario: his "Slave World" series of stories features 
mind control in addition to conventional whips and 
chains. So not only are the poor slavegirls bored, 
horny, and perpetually frustrated ("She shivered: it did 
her no good to think about her lost Master. She was 
still bound to him: the thought of him, so far away, 
still aroused the slave-heat in her loins, a heat no 
other man could fully quench") they're enspelled into 
being perfect little pets as well. The spells to do this 
are applied through a ring piercing the septum of the 
nose, and transfers may be made to other owners as thus:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
She crawled forward on all fours and as her face reached 
his knee, his right hand reached forward and delicately 
grasped her nose ring between finger and thumb. A few 
whispered words left Kandolous' lips and a surge of 
magical energy flowed down into Yamrah's body. Her head 
swam and when it cleared she knew that the wizard had 
altered the enslavement spell so that she was now 
sexually and submissively focused on him. She moaned as 
his hand stroked her hair. The simplest touch made her 
instantly helpless with total lust for him, with the 
need to serve him.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Another good take on Gor that transcends the original.


____________________________________________________
Comments to: ladycyrrh@aol.com
Website--->  http://members.aol.com/ladycyrrh

-- 
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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