Subject: Review of SCORPIANNE by Emily Devenport

From: [email-masked] (Bruce J. Gaede)
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 1994 06:56:17 GMT

SCORPIANNE
			by Emily Devenport
		   a Review by Bruce Gaede

Lucy Cartier is a video prostitute.  In a future Earth sexually
transmitted diseases have become so rampant that commercial sex is
accomplished through the medium of the Machines, electromechanical
devices that allow remote sexual stimulation without physical contact.
Psychologically unable to stand being touched without becoming ill,
Lucy has spent the last thirty-eight years in this business.   She is
looking forward to retirement when a customer subverts the safeguards
and causes her Machine to attack her in a bloody, slashing rape.
Forced to run from a cyborg assassin bent on finishing her off, Lucy
enters a regeneration process to change her appearance and wait for
things to cool off.  Awakening from the process on Mars she finds
herself with a woman having the body of an eleven-year-old girl who
claims to be her three-hundred-year-old mother.  Lucy's attempt to sort
all of this out carries the reader across the face of Mars and out to
orbital colonies.   The action continues non-stop with an exceptional
amount of violence, gore, and explicit sex.

Devenport has written a brutal look at the dark side of future sex and
bioengineering.  The technology incorporates surgical and genetic body
alteration, youth technology, and terraforming, as well as the
cybernetic sex of the Machines.  It has the tone of cyberpunk but with
enhancement and alteration of the body instead of the mind.
(Somapunk?)

_Scorpianne_ is not exclusively about sex.  Exploration of Lucy's
sexuality is certainly a major theme, but if I were to classify this
book it would have to be futuristic-erotic-psychological-mystery-
action-thriller with particularly good setting and characterization.
(There, that about covers it.)  Since Devenport is almost unknown on
the 'net I will venture a comparison with George Alec Effinger's Marid
Audran books and some of Pat Cadigan's more technological stories.
What sets this book apart from much of the darker side of sf is the
quite good writing and the female point of view.

Emily Devenport is perhaps not the most original writer in the galaxy;
there is little in the technology that has not been written about
before.  She has developed the technology in her previous books,
_Larissa_ and _Shade_, which are similar in tone but set on an alien
planet where humans are a minority group.  Larissa is a gladiator who
fights professionally before crowds of jaded aliens who come to a
planet dedicated to decadence.   Shade is a street thief who has
avoided entrapment in the Baby School, a sex service for pedophiles and
child abusers.

Devenport's images are disturbing, especially those that center on
ritualistic sexual violence and sex with children (or prostitutes who
have altered their bodies to look like children.)  With that
truth-in-labeling warning, however, I found many of the other sex
scenes in _Scorpianne_ to be erotic rather than merely pornographic or
disgusting.  It is the job of literature to hold up a mirror to
humanity, and for too long sf has avoided the sexual side of human
nature.  That the sexual side has some disturbingly dark corners is not
the fault of the writer who holds the mirror.  Perhaps our reluctance
to deal with the darkness contributes to the denial which so often
accompanies our encounters with sexual violence or child sexual abuse.

Emily Devenport may not be to your taste, but she produces something
that is at least different and competently written.  Such finds are all
to rare on bookstore shelves.

%A  	Emily Devenport
%T	Scorpianne
%I	Roc
%C	New York
%D 	August, 1994
%G	ISBN 0-451-45318-2
%P 	250pp
%O 	paperback, US$4.99