Space Relations: A Slightly Gothic Interplanetary Tale by Donald Barr
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This book came to my attention because it was written by the father of the sitting attorney general William Barr, one Donald Barr. The elder Barr was an educator and former OSS agent who turned his hand, briefly, to Science Fiction in the early 70's. Before I speak more, I feel like I should provide the stinger from the back cover of the book, which gives you a pretty good idea of what kind of book this is:
John Armbuster Craig, a rising young Earth diplomat is on his way home when he is captured by infra-space pirates and sold into slavery on the forgotten planet of Kossar
Kossar! Where boredom and absolute power have maddened the ruling caste into pursuit of vicious pastimes; where drugs turn men into gods and from where no one has ever been know to escape...
Craig is auctioned off to the exquisite Lady Morgan Sidney and rises by somewhat different merits from her hellish mines in Blindmarsh to her equally merciless bed in the towers of Treghast. And it is here, under the strange castle that he finds the secret that may mean the end of man in the galaxy..."
So with that orientation, you can easily see the wordplay in the title (i.e. the "relations" in question are both foreign and domestic). I start with that point because the pun in the title works as sort of a metaphor for the book: it's a too-clever-by-half mess.
The writing, as a technical matter, is quite good, nearly literary in places. The book is studded with allusions to classic literature, snatches of untranslated Latin, French, and German, and the dialog includes some authentically witty remarks. There are nicely turned stream-of-consciousness sequences that convincingly dramatize psychedelic drugs. There are even occasional epigrams that reflect a certain insight into human psychology. Most stunning, the book includes a fair amount of original verse (at least three sonnets and a heaping handful of fragments) and the verse is, while not of uniform quality, pretty good on the whole, and well fitted to the plot. Poetry in a Science Fiction novel is the proverbial dog walking on its hind legs: surprising when its done at all, much less when done passably well.
But the author clearly struggled to keep up the literary pace, and winds up retreating into platitudes and stale genre conventions periodically. This is more noticeable because of how well-developed the more literary sections are. The effect is a confusing alternation between shallow breeziness and deep rococo embellishment; some parts are entirely "overcooked" while others are underdone, the literary equivalent of a microwave dinner.
So that's the "clever" part, now to the "mess." As you can gather from the blurb, this is a book that engages deeply with both slavery and human sexuality. Bluntly, the book's treatment of sex, romance, and human affairs ranges from the gently confused, to the offensive, to the actually disturbing. As a comparatively mild example, the protagonist, who is from a non-slaveholding culture, is enslaved, falls in love with his abusive enslaver, escapes to safety, works successfully to incite a slave revolt, but then fights to save the life of his former enslaver from the slaves she tormented, and ultimately marries her despite the fact that she's, by the standards of his culture, a mass murderer and sex criminal. This is presented as a happy ending.
I can only stress that this sequence of events is one of the milder "WTF was the author thinking!" moments in the book, and readers who are put off by sexual violence in fiction should give this book a hard pass. Not that the author dwells on the details in a pornographic way (to be clear, there's no erotica here), but the sexual situations invented by the author, and his characters' reactions to them, are, at best, inadequately developed, and, at worst, genuinely offensive. The overall "sensibility" of the book has the vibe of a swingin' 70's bachelor who just discovered BDSM.
In sum, this book is like a badly plotted grindhouse movie with art house pretensions. If you can laugh at it, you may be able to enjoy it in a so-bad-its-good way, but the author probably wasn't in on the joke.