Oh boy. I know it's been a while since I read bad erotica for your edification, but well, I'm back at it. It all started when someone on some other board I post on saw my excoriations of Fifty Shades of Grey and Bared to You and similar, and asked me a question I'd not really thought too much about, but which was this:

Just how bad are current year erotic romances compared to the great days of the 1970s and 1980s and the Bodice Ripper?

Well, I didn't know, so I inserted "Fabio romance novel cover" into Google Image Search and this looked promising so I found a naughty PDF of it and set to reading.

Ahem.

Warrior's Woman. Is a novel by a prolific author of bodice rippers called Johanna Lindsey which was published in 1990, which makes it fairly late in the lifetime of the classic "novel with long haired shirtless hunk on cover being leg clinged by raven haired temptress falling out of dress" period. After all, The Flame and the Flower appeared all the way back in 1973, and gave rise to a whole industry of spicy historical novels with heaving bosoms and breathless names like "Love's Fiery Imbroglio" and "Purity's Passion" and "The Very Virile Viking" and suchlike. So when I read this and saw that the cover did indeed feature Signior Lanzoni, and a panting virgin who is about to be led astray (not that it took much leading, I can tell you!) crawling all over his oiled body, I knew I was in the right place. Only I wasn't, because this is oddly enough, set... IN THE FUTURE!

Yes, that's right, boys and girls. This isn't a bodice ripper. It's more, well, a spacesuit ripper! Now to be fair I can see how this might work. Indeed "romantasy" is a buzzword in current year because of some author who did a series of bodice rippers set in fairyland that's big on ShitTok, so I was unsurprised that this hadn't happened beforehand. So I gave it a go. And I'm glad I did.

Executive Summary

Amazon Woman vs Planet of the Studmuffins!

And in a bit more detail?

It is the 24th century AC (After Colonisation) and our heroine, Tedra, is a Security Agent, or Sec, on a future world called Kystran where everything is provided, all scutwork is automated, there is no famine, want, or suchlike, and where even love is free and "Stress Clinics" are provided for people who get unnecessarily randy to relieve their carnal urges. However she's not like that. She is, in fact, still a virgin. We know this because her android housemate / servant and her AI powered smartphone Martha keep carping at her to find someone to "breach" her. She is a game girl though and speaks loads of languages and is skilled at unspecified future martial arts. Unfortunately the administration of her planet is subject to a coup by the current administrator's big rival, who hires a squadron of sword-wielding space barbarians to invade. Now you are probably wondering why these people pose a threat to a people who use energy weapons (hilariously and routinely misspelled as "lazors" and "phazors" throughout). I will tell you. Turns out they have shields made of "Torano steel" which is completely impervious to all energy weapons whatever. So now you know. Once he's taken over, he proceeds to offer to his space barbarian mercenaries as a payment a percentage the women of Kystran as wives, concubines, love slaves, whatever, and unilaterally fires all women from employment across Kystran with a click of a mouse. This perturbs our dauntless heroines somewhat, who with the aid of a friend gets a fake ID, and uses a box containing a snarky AI called Martha to steal a spaceship and claim to be a "World Discoverer" and to explore strange new worlds etc.

This brings her to an uncharted planet in a far off star system.

Beaming down to it, sorry, transferring to it, she finds new life and new civilisations, but the new life is distinctly well muscled, macho, and, well, basically a space barbarian, and the new civilisations are robustly medieval (but with magical things like permanently luminous crystals for light and libido-numbing wine that can make a warrior last in bed indefinitely). Unfortunately her martial arts skills don't quite prevent her from being wrestled to the ground and captured by an example of this new life. And deprived of her AI smartphone and so forth. However not to worry, because the new life who captured her is a 10/10 gigachad wammicker with no shirt and egg-cracking biceps. And he kind of fancies her and feels challenged by a woman who isn't just a cringing maiden like all the women of his planet supposedly are. Romance then ensues, which oddly enough is notable for its lack of gratuitous banging, but still has lots of tops and fingers and has the narrative breathlessly explain how he slides his finger into her and this makes her very excited and want to be "breached" but he won't!

It then occurred to me the incredibly insistent terminology in the book was really sticking out. Further than Challen Ly-San-Ter's (the new life love interest's name) spam javelin when he sees the heroine's perfect peachy yet large bewbs. Everything is in Call a Rabbit a Smeerp territory. Even on her previous Star Trek planet, there's weird future names for everything. While on Challen's planet, the wildlife and customs are all given insistent terminology. Like "claimable women" or "hataar" which is some sort of large riding beast, or similar. And then it occurred to me. I get the impression this book wasn't written as a spacesuit ripper, or an erotic romance set in the future. Rather, it felt like it was originally another historical romance of some sort, which was then retrofitted with the trappings of Star Trek as sort of a reskin to make it new and exciting and unusual. After all, the classic bodice ripper elements are all there. Raven-haired beauteous and virginal yet spirited heroine runs away from unpleasant forced marriage to distant land on grand adventure, where she meets a man of a culture totally different to hers who sees women even more as object or chattel, but with her gutsiness and genuine nice niceness reforms this handsome and virile and threatening yet secretly kind hearted rake into a husband who wants her for her. If this was set in the 17th century she would have been an Eastern European minor noblewoman and he would have been a hot gypsy. If it was set in the 18th century she would have been an heiress to a British landed aristocratic family and he would have been a tight trousered privateer captain. In the 1970s she would have been a dull, boring secretary and he would have been an Arab Oil Sheikh. You get the idea. Indeed, the whole setting feels like it was originally a historical romance but was hit with MS Word's find and replace to make it all vaguely like something from Star Trek. I mean, her home world has replicators and holodecks but which are called something totally different, and her housemate / servant is an android who gets horny from time to time in an awkward way, like Data on Viagra or something.

Which is a pity, because the idea of a bodice ripper IN SPACE! is actually not a bad idea. However it would need to have its setting created from the ground up in order to work properly, and sadly, our erstwhile author didn't think this and attempted to simply retrofit the set dressing of a few Star Trek episodes into a historical romance template.

But I digress. The middle part of the novel revolves around Tedra, having lost a martial arts battle to Challen the Very Virile Space Viking, being required as a forfeit for this to serve him in the bedchamber for a month. This bit really drags. On the one hand, it gives an excuse to try to have them come to terms with each others' cultures, as utterly different as they are. But on the other hand, it's really interminably boring. They seem to spend all their time arguing in a contrived way but with undertones of wanting to just shag. But they don't, because... reasons? It feels like just endless fucking verbal sparring in a way that feels unnatural. Well, until they do. You will be pleased to note that Challen is hung like a mule, and Tedra is of less generous proportions, and a virgin as well. As a result, this happens:

There was no stopping him after hearing that, but he also heard the scream that ripped from her throat as he plunged to the hilt. Never in his life had he drawn such a sound from a woman, but instantly he knew the reason for it, had felt the skin as it was carelessly breached. Breaching—her word. If he had only known its meaning was literal. And now he understood her unusual smallness, not abstinence because of a long journey without a man at her side, but abstinence her whole life. She had been untouched, a woman of her bold looks and words, a woman, not a young girl. It was the one thing he would never have imagined her to be.

“Forgive me,” she said, breaking into his thoughts, her voice not quite steady. “That—that wasn’t as bad as it sounded.”

Ain't life glorious. However despite such a mauling Tedra becomes perfectly able to accommodate Challen's blue veined custard chucker without hindrance from here on in and the rest of the novel is punctuated with banging. A bit here about the language. Johanna Lindsey thankfully avoids the purple prose of some of the erotic romances I've trashed on here, and also avoids the beigeness of tab A being inserted into slot b. No "something as thick and hard as the handle of the Great Broadsword of Harn" or "and then love's sweet lava flowed" here, thank fuck. Instead there's an almost suffocating coyness about things. Nobody mentions cocks, for once, or even euphemisms for them. Instead we get a bit where Tedra "cupped him where he was soft" and so forth. I don't know what to feel about this. On the one hand, I get that we don't want to unintentionally create memes like the infamous "lady-softness" and "he's my very own Christian Grey flavoured popsicle" or similar. And I get that we don't want to be unintentionally vulgar so cunt is right out; as a wise man once said of excessively graphic language in erotica, "like farting on a cake, you have defiled something lovely." But then again, in for a penny, in for a pound. Come on. We're all adults here. We're men and women of the world. Just bloody say it already. You don't need to be all, ooohh, isn't this naughty.

Also, can we leave this whole hymen as virginity flag in the past. I know this was written in 1990 but that was known to be bollox even back then.

So on we go. There's then some additional drama where Tedra goes back to the town Challen is from and finds that he's actually the shodan, or manorial lord, of this place, and that the whole town is basically inhabited by well build drop dead gorgeous shirtless hunks and their very grateful womenfolk. They have a whole code of claims and customs relating to said grateful womenfolk and when you can lay claim to an ostensibly unattached woman. It's not quite Gorean tier but it's a bit excessively involved. They also have a servant class (male and female) who are treated almost as a separate ethnicity who do all the real work while the warrior elite go and do their thing. They also seem to be in a constant state of warfare with other towns but none of them can gather together the manpower to truly conquer another so they settle for raiding and stealing each others' shit and womenfolk. If you're thinking that this is a societal model that doesn't seem to come about naturally or make much sense, you're right. But then it doesn't have to. This isn't intended to be a properly thought ought setting. It's Johanna Lindsey's magical realm, isn't it. Think about it. A theme park where all the men are REAL MEN who have six packs, are seven feet tall, and have eight inch cocks, and the women are all preternaturally beautiful and don't need to really do any actual work because there's a whole caste of skivvies who keep society running. Yeah. It's like a theme park for bodice ripper enthusiasts. The men are all barbarous and dangerous and in theory capable of rape but in practice would never dare. And they all have access to this magical wine that lets them last indefinitely in the sack. Think about it. You're a bored housewife, you've probably got a husband who's getting older and you don't fancy him so much any more and seems to have difficulty rising to the occasion or not making a mess before you've even got your baps out, a bunch of ingrate offspring demanding endless sodding attention, and keeping everything in order at home feels like an uphill fucking struggle. Being the kept woman of Challen "Studmuffin" Ly-san-ter or one of his retainers is probably an upgrade.

However there's still another 100 pages or so to go, so time for more contrived drama about our lusty protagonists' seemingly incompatible values. Followed by wild make up sex. Christ. All they do is hump and want to punch each other. There's also a bit where Challen finds and talks to Tedra's AI machine and discovers evidence that she's literally not of this world. This is resolved by a plot tumour that makes up the rest of the book where she persuades him to load all his warriors into her spaceship and go and take back her home planet from the usurper, before going back with him to have his children and be his lovely yet spirited wife (against the judgement of said AI, as on her world IVF and cloning vats are normal to the point at which "son of a cracked vial" is an insult.)

And that's it.

To be fair, it wasn't as bad as some of the stuff I've read. I actually felt invested in the characters at some points, but the plot makes no sense fundamentally, and the setting is incredibly deriviative. The author, as I said, seems to have had a template which she had made a career out of applying to various historical time periods, as her previous works set out. And it feels like she basically rented a stack of Star Trek episodes on VHS tapes, and plundered them for set dressing before applying it to her master template. Which is a pity, because there are some actually good ideas here. The idea of a bodice ripper IN SPACE! isn't a bad one. The idea of her heroine having to adapt to a completely alien culture to survive on her wits and charm is also a fairly compelling hook. Unfortunately it is undermined by the fact that by its own admission, the AI on her stolen spaceship could rescue her by beaming her up at any time if it wanted to. Also not particularly worthy is the fact that the plot really is exactly the same as your standard historical romance but with Star Trek set dressing (but being cautious not to accidentally get sued, so it's not dilithium, it's "crysillium", it's not a holodeck, it's a "Stress Clinic", and it's not a transporter beam but a "transference." Yeah.) The fact that Challen's planet is basically a theme park where men are REAL MEN and women are grateful doesn't ring true as being particularly believable either. Also, that fucking deflowering scene.

But either way, it sold enough to get a sequel in 1993. In 1995 she apparently wrote something called Until Forever, which was a time travel bodice ripper. I have this horrible, horrible urge to seek out a copy of this, because that prospect alone could make it a true fountain of memes. And to finish, in answer to the question, how bad are current year erotic romances compared to the glory days of the bodice ripper, I think the answer is that more research is required, but there's nothing yet that is as dreadful as some of the stuff I've seen. Yet.

So, yes. I don't recommend this. But it's better than Fifty Shades. At least this has some actually interesting ideas in it, even if they are hamstrung by the need to fit a template and rampant plagiarism.