I originally published Karg in serialized form on my Jolly Roper website before Amazon existed. This was also before censorship existed on the World Wide Web, for all practical purposes. It was just for nerds, who cared what they said or wrote? The only major no-no at that time was child porn, because that was illegal generally, and it was the only thing that was generally illegal.
That was a good thing for me because Karg was full of stuff that is a no-no in modern terms. Like bestiality and scat. And rape and nonconsensual sex slavery – so MUCH rape and nonconsensual sex slavery, the book was awash in it (and it still is, check out the keywords).
I was able to publish Karg on Amazon without making any changes to it. Rape, nonconsensual sex slavery, bestiality and incest (incest was inexplicably left out of Karg, though) were all fine on Amazon at that point in time. This was a mistake in one respect: Karg could have REALLY used another thorough proofreading. When I was publishing from my website, I was doing it for the sheer joy of writing. I didn’t proofread nearly as thoroughly as I should have – proofreading isn’t innately joyous.
Over time, and not a hell of a long time, Amazon grew markedly more censorious. I never got a complaint about Karg on Amazon, weirdly enough, because it was by FAR the most censorable thing I have ever written. But when several of my books got banned (“blocked” was Amazon’s term, but it was censorship just the same) by Amazon for rape (most notably the “Riverbeast” sereis and the “President Slavegirl” series) I unpublished Karg on Amazon along with several other books that were bound to be blocked sooner or later now that the censors were on my trail.
Republishng on Smashwords now, I gave Karg another thorough proofreading and found way too many errors. I can’t guarantee the text is now error-free, being only human and all, but I CAN say it’s much less errored -up than it was.
My original impetus in writing Karg was to highlight how unrealistic the female characters in the Gor novels are. One minute, they’re feminist teachers and librarians and students and whatnot, then they get one thorough dicking down from a Gorean Master and they’re in full submissive slavegirl mode. It doesn’t work like that at all in real human psychology. It’s a straight up male fantasy and not a particularly sophisticated one, and it works fine on that low level I guess, if that’s all you are looking for. But I think it’s more powerful when the woman involved is more self-aware and resists more.
That said, the Gor novels have done a LOT better than anything I have ever written has, so taking my words with a grain of salt here is probably a fair idea.
But my critique of Gorean female characterization is why I conceived of Karg as being about a woman from an advanced starfaring society who is captured and enslaved by primitives. Her mind is different from theirs. She experiences things differently and thinks about them differently. She doesn’t become part of their primitive society from a single slave rape, or even a LOT of slave rape.
I tried to make my story generally more realistic. I’d read a number of accounts of how captured and enslaved people are and were treated by primitives in real-world Earth, and it was definitely Not Good. That influenced the way I wrote my story. I tried to maintain accuracy, though of course I leaned in the direction of nudity, bondage and sex as the book is erotica, albeit SF erotica.
Hence, the protagonist, upon being captured and clearly not from Around Here, was enslaved, stripped and gang raped. None of these things is done to every attractive female captured by primitives, but they were done to some female captives by some primitives in real-world Earth. And my reasons for choosing those options was to create a believable and realistic story. It wasn’t hard, if you read actual history instead of the sanitized stuff in textbooks, you’ll find a lot of stuff that will leave you stunned.
So I did have the astronaut beaten and tormented by women and children while bound naked to an altar at the center of the village. Historically accurate. She wasn’t sexually assaulted by them, that was the men’s prerogative, a prerogative they take later.
But nowadays you can’t assume censors are people who give a shit about your story. They’re there to protect their corporations from legal liability, and they do not give a rat’s ass about the quality of the stories they publish, one way or the other. Therefore, any mention of children in the vicinity of a naked woman in a work of erotica, much less children hitting and physically abusing said naked woman is close enough for any such corporate censor to ban it. So that scene had to be removed.
It wasn’t a big deal, it wasn’t essential to the story so I had no problem removing the scene.
But there was also the bestiality. Nothing to keep me from publishing the bestiality on Smashwords, except that I had sullen teenage girls as the ones who had a reptiloid rape her. When I published the story on Amazon, bestiality was starting to get censored. Like, you could have erotic stories about werewolves but they could only have sex while in human form. Never in wolf form. There were still stories about women falling in love with dinosaurs and dragons and having sex with them for some reason, though. I think the justification was that so long as the animal didn’t exist in the real world it was fantasy. (Like your average male character in an erotic romance exists in the real world. I mean, biker billionaires? C’mon! Tell me another!)
I could see the writing on that wall. Plus, the teen girls were going to be an issue, I knew. So I rewrote that portion of the story so that it was young adult women and not teen girls who were planning on having the reptiloid fuck Susan. And in the rewrite of the story, the reptiloid refuses to fuck Susan ,who is of course still tied up and gagged and helpless, So the scene would have been described by a censor as underaged bestiality bondage rape, which is probably the most awful kind of porn that isn’t snuff. (Which probably helps explain why Karg was so darned popular in the serial version.)
Susan doesn’t smell right to the reptiloid, or look right, so no go. The refusal is actually a pretty realistic depiction of how things might have gone. The Romans for example had to smear the vaginal fluids of female hyenas in heat on the genitals of virgins they had staked out in the arena to be raped by male hyenas for the amusement of the crowds. (Not making this up, the Romans really did that. As I said, real history is just full of stuff that will make your skin crawl.)
But by the time I was publishing on Smashwords I knew that scene would eventually get me in trouble from censors who do not give a shit about stories, so I nixed the entire scene. I actually came up with a neat way to resolve the scene so that it really highlighted the cultural differences between Susan and her captors, though it wasn’t nearly as dramatic as underaged sexual bondage bestiality rape. (But then, what is?)
But then there was the baby-smelling scene in the barn. Given what I have already told you about the scenes I have removed from Karg, your hair is probably standing on end right now. Calm down, this is mild stuff. Susan gets captured and put in a barn because her captors think she is a former hucow because her breasts are so large. She’s not lactating so they try to encourage that by tying her to a post so she can’t move then hanging a sling from her neck and putting a baby in it, forcing Susan to look at and smell the baby.
Afterwards, a couple of nursing toddler are brought in and encouraged to suckle at Susan’s empty breasts.
Susan doesn’t care for her breasts being gnawed on and orders her nanoset (you’ll just have to read the book to find out about the nanoset) to crank up milk production. It’s not an erotic scene.
But I knew damn well that censors would see it as as erotica, and hence the toddler sucking scene was going to be trouble. So I tossed the toddler scene out, instead having an adult male farmhand work her breasts. I also knew the baby-smelling would be trouble for the same reasons. So I tossed out the baby and instead had Susan forced to smell a big ball of baby swaddling that still had the smell of babies on it. (In hindsight, this represents a little more realism, since the farmhands regarded Susan as a wild hucow.)
I also tossed out a scene that involved forced piss-drinking, because urolagnia, i.e., scat, would be the call from censors, even though it was more attempts to induce lactation.
At this point I realized that any and all references to children were probably a mistake, even if they were just standing around in the background, e.g.: “The women and children went off to gather fruits and nuts.” So I did a global search for the words “child” “boy” and “girl” and removed almost every occurrence. As a result, the primitives in Karg live in those erotica villages which are inhabited only by adult men and women over 18 years of age, thankyewverymuch.
You are probably thinking, “Pat … have you got any story LEFT after tossing all that stuff out?” And the answer is, “Yes, I do.” The manuscript was over 120,000 words before I started editing, it’s over 117,000 words now. All the stuff I tossed was just a drop in the bucket. Karg is epic.
And no individual scene that I dumped/altered was essential to the story. But here’s the thing: though none of the scenes were essential, they arguably made the story more real. They may have been part of the background scenery, but they were helpful parts. Most people who read or even watch movies “knows” that if you visit a primitive village there will be lots of children swarming around. It’s not like they have daycare or schools.
Furthermore, the crude, ignorant cruelty with which Susan is treated by the tribe she encounters, and by the “civilized” Kargians she encounters makes the raw, primitive story more real. We “know” at some level that this is the sort of nastiness you might encounter from primitives if you are captured by the wrong ones. We need look no farther than the experiences of settlers captured by indigenous people in America to know this is so.
Still, if you like sex slavery and slave rape, you’re going to like Karg, you’re going to like it a LOT. And there will be a lot to like: 117,000 words, and in most of them Susan is either a slave being raped or headed for her next experience of being a slave who is raped. (Her travels are very eventful!)
I’m not complaining about “whatever happened to my novel?” here. I’m trying to make a more global point about the effect censorship has on erotica. When I wrote the serialized version of “Karg” I wasn’t concerned at all about censorship. I crossed a lot of what would now be considered red lines, without a care in the world, just because I thought the scene would make the story more real, more believable based on what I knew about how primitives treated slaves. And I think overall it did.
In the censored version, by contrast, I’ve got primitive villagers living in villages where there are no children in evidence. I’ve got a woman in a barn full of lactating women being induced to lactate via dubious methods.
It’s subtle, and I doubt if most erotica readers would note it consciously, because of course every OTHER work of erotica has to operate by the same rules. It’s what you get when you censor.
Note: copies of the original serialized Karg are stored in the same vault with the original Necronomicon and you know who guards that vault.
