I bought this at a local library sale.

Yes, with that cover. Yes, at an innocent library branch.

Mostly I just wanted to make the old lady volunteer at the checkout table laugh. (She did.) But nowadays I’m trying to read more of my physical collection, and hey, it was 200 pages. Why not?

It was 200 pages of porn.

With a cover like that, I could have expected as much, but seriously, it was cover-to-cover orgies. I dare you to find a single page without explicit content. When they weren’t having sex, they were thinking or talking about sex.

Moreover, it was 200 pages of bad porn. So bad. It gave me the ick a million times over. I skimmed 80% of the book.

The worldbuilding though cracked me up.

These Viken aliens—a term used loosely, since Vikens are indistinguishable from humans—live on a planet divided into three sectors. The difference between these sectors? Well. There’s a scene where one of the heroes is eating out the FMC, and she comments that he’s really good at it, and another guy (remember, it’s all orgies) explains that “he’s from Sector One, where eating pussy is revered. But I’m from Sector Two, so I’m into exhibitionism.”

A society organized around kinks??? lmao???

There’s another planet where all the men are “dominant” (I will punch any man who describes his personality as “dominant”, do not fucking test me on this) and make their girlfriends wear collars and call them “Master”. Not just as a kink but as a constant rule. Like, they do this in front of their friends and relatives. And allegedly the human women there are happy with this. That’s so fucking uncomfortable I wanted to crawl out of my own skin.

On these various alien planets, time moves at different speeds. One day on Earth is two months on Viken or something. Are these planets all in an orbit around different black holes? Are they traveling close to the speed of light relative to each other? Wtf is going on here?

And yeah I know it’s a mistake to invest time in questioning the astrophysics of a porno, but the way it’s explained in this exchange from the epilogue is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read:

”It’s physics,” Mindy said. “Like that movie we saw a few years ago, Interstellar. Remember? Ten minutes for the people on the planet was like twenty-five years for that guy up on the ship.” “That movie was weird, too. And that’s impossible, right?” “It’s science.” Violet sighed. “My least favorite subject.”

(Immediately following this exchange they’re back to talking about her nipples)

I love that the author clearly watched Interstellar years ago, thought to herself, “Should I rewatch that movie? Or, like, Google relativity even once before including it in my book?” and then went with “Nope!” which honestly seems about right for the literary level this work is operating on.