Grade:B

There’s nothing I like better than a good Last Man Alive story. If it’s well-written and doesn’t take itself seriously, then I’m all for it. Imagine a planet with a bunch of Xena-types ruling the joint with whips and chains and using men as their personal love slaves. Sounds cool, right? Too bad that the heroine is a wide-eyed bimbo only looking to be saved by a big, brash All-American type named Joe Hero (yes, that’s his real name). This story just had this underlying message that all a strong, capable woman in power needs to want to exhibit her softer, more feminine side is a good deep-dickin’. What the hell is that about? Does that mean that a strong, capable woman would set aside her ambitions for the right man and settle for home, hearth, and babies? Fuck that! For once, however, I was glad that there was some lesbian lovin’ among the women. I’ve read Last Man Alive stories before where there wasn’t one lesbian coupling in the whole bunch. What the hell did these writers think that the women would do when it got a little lonely? Come on now!

Our heroine, Annie Wilkes (nice!) is a Male Slave doctor. In short, she patches up the sick male slaves, then sends them on their merry way, more particularly, back to their keepers. Annie, however, is miserable because 1) she’s not gay 2) she would like nothing more than to have babies, but she can’t. In this planet, only female prisoners are allowed to have children. In fact, it is how they are punished. The gravity of their offense is directly proportional to how many children they will bore for the guv’ment. That’s right, the women in this world are punished by the childbirth. Ouch. As for Annie, if she can’t have kids of her own, the next best thing for her is to land a job taking care of the babies born in prison and she will do anything to do it. She will even marry the Queen and the Queen’s lover–a total bitch named Cath– for it if she has to. And she doesn’t like women that way. Her salvation comes in the form of Joe Hero, an American astronaut who, along with his brothers, invented some kind of hyperspace thing and was sent by the American guv’ment to check out this planet called Paradise. Joe and his brothers land on this planet and split up. When the two of them don’t come back, Joe goes looking for them and gets captured by a band of Amazons intent on making him their bitch. Tough shit, Joe!

Annie comes upon a naked and squirming Joe as he is about to have his balls cut off by the women. Enthralled by his enormous dong, Annie uncharacteristically rushes to his rescue and stands up to Cath, a bad-ass female warrior who has always intimidated Annie. She manages to spirit Joe away by telling Cath that Joe is in no shape to be giving anybody a deep-dickin’ and takes him back to her clinic. What does Annie do the second she gets Joe alone? Well, she fucks him, of course. After that, Annie is pretty much led by Joe’s dong, is skillfully manipulated by Joe at every turn, and abandons her hopes and dreams as a sacrifice for the Church of Joe’s Dong. Who could blame her? That Joe, he must have some dong, indeed. Huh. I think I just like typing the word “dong”.

As I was reading this ebook, I was at first bothered by the fact that everyone on the planet was speaking English. Why would they be speaking English? Is English so universal that everyone in the universe speaks it? Before I could bitch about it some more, however, Joe the Astronaut starts questioning it as well. He wonders why the women have weapons that are similar to Earth weapons and why they seem to possess pretty heavy technology for a bunch of primitive-seeming people. His questions are never answered, of course, but I suspect that the ancestors of the people in this planet are actually Earth people… which makes zero sense. I mean, Joe and his brothers are supposed to be the first to discover this planet. After all, they were the ones who invented the very means to get to a planet that is so far away from Earth. Okay, okay, I’m thinking too much about this. Sorry. I did enjoy some of the mythology that Springer sets up for this planet. The women rule the world and the men are love slaves! As if that weren’t enough, only criminals are allowed to give birth and it’s considered a punishment! That just cracks me up. Oh, and the Queen is only allowed to marry women! But since she gets her own book, that’s probably not going to last very long.

It’s really too bad that I couldn’t buy the relationship between Annie and Joe. From the get-go, it is obvious that Joe will be the one leading Annie by her… nipple piercings. There are some blustering on Annie’s part when Joe first starts telling her what to do, but that pretty much dies out when Joe starts giving her more man-meat. I was fine with the character of Joe, as he portrays a parody of those GI Joe All American hero types, and mixed with the ridiculous guilty pleasure of a plot, it totally works. It was even okay with me that he had zero character development. My main problem was with Annie. Sure, she learns to stand up to the other females who bully her, but then she starts deferring to Joe for better judgment and it was like she just went from one master to the other. If that was the author’s intention, it would have been fine, but I just wish that it could have been clearer. As it is, we get this woman in Annie who’s all about finding her own path, but then Joe comes along, and all of a sudden, it’s all about Joe. I didn’t buy that at all.

All and all, if you’re up for a cheesy good time, check this book out. Since this is the start of a series, I wish the author had set up more of a mythology, but maybe I’ll find out more about how this planet works as I read the other books in the series (after all, Joe has two brothers). I think it would have made for a better read if Annie had been a stronger heroine, or at least a comparable foil for Joe, and I just couldn’t stand that she was such a baby. Still, the sex scenes are hot and the Last Man Alive plot device is really one I can’t get enough of. I can’t wait to read the rest of the books in this series and find out how this world will unfold. Definitely read this book if you’re looking to waste an hour or two on a quick, hilarious (though not always intentionally so) read.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 25th, 2006 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Books, Grade: B, Romance: Sci-fi/Fan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.