Re: Just a little way into _Spiders_, and...

I personally share your position.

However, this begs the question, should literature have a "target audience"?

Is the narrowed focus of such book, with its emphasis in mechanical
details, even if supported by a larger ideological intent, not
restricting it as "genre"?

I always agreed with Chip's desire to do for pornography/erotica what
in a sense he and others did for space opera, but may this be actually
be reductive instead of expanding or challenging boundaries?




On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 8:16 AM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <[email protected]> wrote:
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> ...I've realized that I'm no longer (if I ever was) the "target audience" for Delany's fiction.
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> I've only read one major sex scene -- the mini-orgy in the truck stop -- and I realized: this not only doesn't turn me on, it doesn't even turn me _off_! It doesn't bore me, exactly, but it has no emotional or erotic effect on me. Granted, I'm about as straight as they come, but some of Delany's previous scenes (I mind me of one in the third Neveryon book...) have done it for me.
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> This one was ... mechanical? Perhaps that's too harsh; but certainly _choreographed_ would not be far off the mark. There is nothing that seems spontaneous about the scene, and nobody seems to be doing more than going through their motions -- even Eric, to whom this scene is new.
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> I'm going to continue, but if the whole book is like this, I think I'm out of Delany's fiction (unless he miraculously produces _Splendor_). Which is a damn shame, because I thought his last few books, and especially _Dark Reflections_, were the best things he's ever written.
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