Subject: Review: Alien Sex edited by Ellen Datlow

From: [email-masked] (Gareth Rees)
Date: 02 Mar 94 01:29:51 GMT

Alien Sex edited by Ellen Datlow
			 A book review by Gareth Rees
			  Copyright 1993 Gareth Rees

     `When men in sf films say `It's a strange alien life form like nothing
we've met before, and we can't possibly understand it'' says Gwyneth Jones,
talking about her new novel White Queen, `what I hear is `Women!  Who can
understand them?''  Well, that's Alien Sex deconstructed, right?

     Well, not really.  Ellen Datlow's new collection is full of sophisticated
and intelligent stories that bear this kind of analysis lightly.

     Of course there's fluff too, but even that is mostly delightful.  There's
Larry Niven's oft-reprinted `Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex', about the
problems of conceiving a child when your sperm are faster than a speeding
bullet and more powerful than a locomotive; Philip Jose Farmer wonders what
Tarzan would have been like if it had been written by William rather than Edgar
Rice in `The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod'; Geoff Ryman describes a universe
dedicated to fucking itself in `Omnisexual'; Roberta Lannes parodies the
anthology's theme in her hilarious `Saving the World at the New Moon Motel',
Harlan Ellison's rather disappointing dirty joke `How's the Night Life on
Cissalda' has a funnier introduction by Datlow, and Scott Baker pads out the
pages with the dull and unreconstructed `The Jamesburg Incubus'.

     Among the serious stories, two authors comment on the nasty side of
male-female politics using the human-alien metaphor, K W Jeter in `The First
Time' and Michaela Roessner in `Picture Planes'; there are variations on the
demon lover by Richard Matheson and Lewis Shiner; three stories take as a theme
the destructive effect of the cargo culture induced by the appearance on Earth
of vastly superior aliens; `War Bride' by Rick Wilbur, `When the Fathers Go' by
Bruce McAllister and `And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side' by
James Tiptree Jr.  The stories which approach the alien sex theme best are
`Dancing Chickens' by Ed Bryant and `Roadside Rescue' by Pat Cadigan which go
beyond merely sex with aliens to consider kinds of activity which humans might
have trouble recognising as sex.  Leigh Kennedy supplies `Her Furry Face', a
story about a failed relationship, Lisa Tuttle provides original and
interesting speculations on the role of gender in `Husbands' and Pat Murphy has
some kooky theories about the future of evolution in `Love and Sex Among the
Invertebrates'.

     The most challenging of the stories here, and worth the price alone, is
Connie Willis' controversial `All My Darling Daughters'.  In the story, genetic
engineering has produced a creature called a `tessel', which is essentially a
living vagina, whose attraction to the male characters in the story is not only
that it is incapable of defending itself, but that when penetrated, it emits a
scream `the sound a woman must make when she is being raped.  No.  Worse.  The
sound a child might make.'  You can see why such a story might prove
controversial.  Male critics, notably Orson Scott Card, have accused Willis of
being anti-male, and avowed that they could never find anything attractive
about the tessel.  Female critics have found more to disagree about.  Mari
Kotari, writing in Science Fiction Eye #9, argues that since the tessel reduces
sexual vulnerability to its essential form, the story provides a reductio ad
absurdam demonstration that vulnerability does not define or constitute
femininity; that it is something alien.  `Just as the tessel uncovered its
users' sexual politics rather than its own identity, so the textuality of `All
My Darling Daughters' unveils the reader's own political sexuality.'

     A book titled Alien Sex could have become an anthology of pornography, but
Datlow has instead assembled an almost uniformly excellent collection of
entertaining and intelligent stories.

%T Alien Sex
%E Ellen Datlow
%I Grafton
%D 1991
--
Gareth Rees