Space Relations

A Slightly Gothic Interplanetary Tale

ISBN: 0-860-00024-9 Order from: Check out used book stores

An interesting, well-articulated tale of a twisted love affair against a space opera-like background, with somewhat self-conscious use of literary and mythical motifs.

Reviewed by David on July 12, 1998

Genre: Science Fiction (Slavery, Mild BDSM, Literary Quotations)

Synopsis: A mid-level diplomat from Earth is captured by space pirates and sold to Kossar, a splinter colony ruled by a slave-owning oligarchy. He subsequently adapts to the new environment, falls in love with his beautiful owner, and escapes home. His experience on Kossar changes him dramatically, and his subsequent career eventually brings him back to the planet of his enslavement and rebirth.

Full Review: John Craig, a Terran diplomat, is well known as a capable, solid, but hardly brilliant man, who writes mediocre poetry in his spare time. His uneventful rise in the political hierarchy is rudely interrupted when a ship carrying him from a conference is intercepted by a pirate, and he, along with the rest of the ship's crew and passengers, is brutally seized and transported for sale to the splinter colony Kossar.

During the transformation from a bureaucrat to a mine slave, Craig begins to toughen up and kills his first man. Craig survives the deadly mines, and during a visit of his beautiful owner, Lady Morgan Sidney, one of the members of the ruling council, saves her life from a calamitous flood and the treachery of the drug-dealing guards.

The lady is intrigued by the articulate and capable Craig, and takes him with her as a male concubine. Their subsequent intense relationship forms the main motif of the book. Morgan is an intelligent and willful woman, well realizing that her standard of living is built on the misery and repression of her slaves. Her behavior, composed of cruelty and compassion, is built on unstable foundation of guilt: as a "bad girl", frequently punished by her late father, and as a reprehensible slave owner.

Craig's behavior continues to puzzle Morgan: despite being an oppressed slave, he is clearly unbroken, and choses to love her. Her passion alternates in cruelty and tenderness—trying to prove his love is a self-preserving sham, and hoping that it is real.

Craig for his part, is in love with Morgan, and discovers masochistic tendencies in himself. While despising slavery, he is unwilling to escape his golden-haired jailer, until he finds the evidence of a militant alien civilization on Kossar.

Proving almost improbably capable, Craig escapes to Earth, and becomes a suddenly brilliant political force, crafting a self-defense treaty against the recently discovered aliens, getting most human-populated planets to sign it, and almost single-handedly forcing the only internal political provision into the treaty—the mandatory abolition of slavery.

Six years after his ordeal, Craig, the political rising star, returns to the backwater Kossar, this time as the Ambassador of Earth, the delegate of the treaty planets, and with a cruiser at his back. He comes back to his lost love—Lady Morgan, one of the slave-owners he came to destroy.

This novel is not your typical space opera. First and foremost, is the foundation of sexual plots, explicit but never graphic, and humane and compassionate while exploring domination and sadism. This is certainly a much more skillful exploration, then say, the Gor books by John Norman.

Second, the author is very explicit about using literary motifs. The text is sprinkled with quotations and musings: it doesn't help that the hero is a poet. The reader is both annoyed and flattered by the implied ability to understand German, Latin and French quotations, not to mention the sprinkling of obscure English terms (It took me two days to figure out cullions).

A number of the world elements seem rather far-fetched: the low technological level of Kossar and implausibility of its slave-based economy (partly addressed in the book), the sudden abilities of the hero as a seducer and warrior, the rather flat menace of the aliens. It also seems unlikely that the powerful Earth would tolerate the kidnapping and slavery of its citizens by the backward colony.

Nevertheless, at the heart of this book is an unusual love story, and as such it is told with skill, passion and humor. It is a pity that Barr's science fiction—he also wrote A Planet in Arms, a novel with similar style but more politics—is not better known.

Space Relations is out of print, but may well be in your local library or used book store.

Overall: 6; Plot: 5; Characters: 6.5; Style: 6.5; World-building: 5; Originality: 6.5;

ISBN: 0-860-00024-9 Order from: Check out used book stores