Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex edited by
Ellen Datlow, St Martin鈥檚 Press, $22.95,
ISBN 0 312 14019 3
THE dark interfaces of sex, disease, technology and things alien still
fascinate us: the history of science fiction is littered with enthusiastically
daring anthologies that grappled with the once-forbidden subject of sex. But in
the permissive vacuum of space, surely there鈥檚 nothing for taboo-breakers to
push against? Certainly, it鈥檚 harder to be simply shocking.
In Off Limits, Ellen Datlow has collected a group of stories in
which darkness predominates. This book鈥檚 most genuinely light-hearted
contribution, Robert Silverberg鈥檚 report of a disguised alien observer pursued
by a determinedly loving New York poetess, dates from 1970. The theme of loving
the alien is taken up by Susan Wade, who manages to justify the opening line 鈥淚
want you to tattoo my penis鈥�. Other stories in the same vein come from Roberta
Lannes, who entangles a serial-killer protagonist with a fallen angel; and Joyce
Carol Oates, whose repressed heroine discovers a brutish partner in ambiguous
dreams which have a magic-realist intensity.
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Loving the alien soon leads to the notion of becoming the alien. Martha
Soukup鈥檚 heroine takes charge of her life by growing a hormone-assisted
beard; Mike O鈥橠riscoll鈥檚 enhanced transsexuals play out their tragedies in a
near future ravaged by something worse than AIDS; and Lisa Tuttle offers an
insubstantial woman-grows-penis dream, or should that be nightmare.
New slants on prostitution include Brian Stableford鈥檚 bleak view of female
modification allowing the production of addictive secretions, which ultimately
mess up both the women and their customers; Bruce McAllister鈥檚 relentless
first-person account of a Malaysian boy鈥檚 enforced prostitution in New York, so
grim that the alien deus ex machina triggers sighs of relief; and
Sherry Coldsmith鈥檚 strange tale of paid women and repellent men in the Spanish
Civil War, whose central scene of sexual horror remains enigmatic.
Other stories in Datlow鈥檚 collection are less easy to classify. Scott
Bradfield鈥檚 fine, brief biography of a maddeningly self-destructive woman ends
in perplexity. Neil Gaiman offers a verse screenplay that eats like acid at the
porn-movie scenarios which it parodies. Simon Ings鈥檚 idea of female
meme-sabotage of laddish events like Formula Zero racing is fun, but his writing is
just too good for the first-person narration of his thick, cyber-boosted
champion driver. Gwyneth Jones presents role-players in virtual reality, acting
out characters from famous fantasy novels with anything-goes escapism . . .
subtly sabotaged by conflicting fantasies of power and control.
There are 20 pieces altogether. A few are mere froth, but I found the
standard to be generally high. Datlow has a good editorial eye鈥攂ut should
have resisted the temptation to preface each story with a little introduction
telling you what to think about it before you鈥檝e had a chance to read the piece
itself.