On Thu, 12 Jun 1997, Shana Yunger wrote:
> I'd like to respond to that. Personally, I don't want to have steamy
> sex scenes in the novels that I read. I like a lot of science fiction and I
> think it ruins to the story to graphically describe the scenes. yes, it's
> part of life and books should reflect that. However, I feal that the kind of
> depictions really take away from the impact of the book.
NH: Well, to each her own. Certainly, excellent fiction need not have
explicit sex in it. Me, I make a point of looking--among other
things--for sf and other lit that explores human interactions and
sexuality. I try not to divorce that from other sensual experiences
described in fiction. I resist doing so precisely because we're always
being told that sex is dirty and vulgar, and undeserving of having art
made about it, and I don't buy it. I adore Delany's fiction in large part
because of the explicit, often (I dunno, trangressive? Depends on your
pov) sex and the way that his writing makes me think about sexual mores
and conventions. I spent many years hooked on Tanith Lee's voluptuous,
necrophiliac prose. Jeff Noon's _Pollen_ was gummy with snot, which made
me squirm, but I appreciated his take on it. I loved that the romantic
interest in Nancy Kress's _Beggars and Choosers_ was provided by an old,
toothless, uneducated white guy with a bad heart and a fat, irritable
black woman (when I look in my mirror, I feel a certain fondness for
large, cranky black women). I loved that they actually had sex on stage,
as it were. And that the black woman doesn't die nobly in the end, but
continues to be her fat, cranky self; only now in love. Nancy was in
Toronto a few days ago, reading from her novel in progress; part of the
excerpt included a sex scene between an old married couple. She told the
audience that people in her writing group found that scene distasteful,
not so much because it was sex, but because it was *old people* having
sex, yuck! I think that when something makes you squirm like that, the
source of your discomfort bears paying attention to. And for me, that's
part of the function of art/literature (can you tell that I'm an arts
administrator during office hours?). I think Nicola has a point. Life is
goo (words not mine), whether that be juicy sex or or how exactly does one
pee in a space suit or how a kid eats ice cream, or the intimate
self-disgust that would lead a woman to find cause with and ultimately
love the Opera Phantom (hello, Ms Charnas). The sticky stuff is as much a
dilemma as a joy of human existence. It helps me resolve that dilemma or
luxuriate in that joy a little more every time I experience art that gives
me a little of another human being's take on it. I don't need my fiction
to be crammed with sweaty sex on every page, or at all, if that's not the
point of the piece. But if fiction can graphically describe a star
system, it need not balk at also describing sex.
-nalo
""Rat Korga...?" I said; and to say the name of your perfect
erotic object is always to say it for the first time, even when it is the
fiftieth repeated shriek and you are half blind with terror on the crags
of a world so far away its night is virtually without stars."
Samuel Delany, _Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand_
"He walked so far/On stilts of songs, of masqueraded story, that the
stars/Were near."
-Kamau Brathwaite, "Jou'vert"
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