His Slave, His Princess: Collared By The Billionaire Prince Review

The cover of His Slave, His Princess. You can buy the book here, at Amazon.com, at least until they start banning the books that made the kindle a success. And believe me, they and other online publishers are working on it.
Ever since the success of Fifty Shades of Grey I've read many comments to the effect that there are many erotic romances that are better than Fifty Shades of Grey. I figured it was mostly bullshit and sour grapes. But after reading “His Slave, His Princess: Collared by the Billionaire Prince” by Tanya Korval, I have had to change my mind.

Writers who deal with bondagelicious sexual fantasies in their stories have a tough line to follow. The fantasies work on a variety of levels, and staying on a level that will entertain and turn on readers is not an easy task.

“His Slave, His Princess” is a book that does a pretty good job of handling the divide, though Korbel sets the story up in slippery lands indeed. Despite the title, the story is set in modern Earth, however, in her modern Earth is the fictional land of Asteria. (Those who have read my review of “The Punishing of Jendri” will recall that it is set in the fictional land of Asperia. I thought I had fucked up, too, but I checked. Interesting coincidence, considering that pseudonyms and concealed identities are common among erotic romance writers. If the next book I review is set in the fictional land of Asleria, I'm gonna call shenanigans!)

Asleria, er, Asperia, er ASTERIA, is small kingdom in central Europe somewhere around France. Asteria is a different sort of European country … all the women in the country are enslaved when they reach 21. They are allowed to pick the man they are enslaved by, but if they can't find a man they like they get enslaved pretty quick, as any woman over the age of 21 without a slave collar on her neck can be claimed by any man just by grabbing her and saying, “You are mine.”

Lucy Snow is a UN translator who has a chance meeting with the crown prince of Asteria at a UN-related party that goes from “hello” to passionate kisses and groping in seconds. The animal magnetism was so intense that it wiped out hard drives for a three block radius of them. Shortly thereafter, Prince Jagor requests that Lucy be assigned as his translator. Although Lucy has been translating French at the UN, she is also prolific in Asterian, as she has a geeky feel for language and was intrigued by Asterian even though it's a very little-used language outside Asteria due to Asteria's extreme insularity.

The US state department is thrilled with the chance to get Lucy installed as Jagor's translator, because Asteria has rich deposits of palladium and they'd like to be a favored customer of Asteria's. Lucy's encouraged to take the job, and a few hours after she accepts, she steps into the Prince's limo, and scant minutes after she steps into the limo, the Prince has her panties off. He's just that dominating, and she's just that submissive.

Jagor and Lucy are soon engaged in a passionate romance, which they must conceal from the public as he is the Prince and People Will Talk. Oh, there are many hindrances to Jagor and Lucy's romance, including plotters intent on overthrowing the Asterian monarchy, a nobelwoman whom everyone had pegged to be the Jagor's princess/slave, and Lucy's misgiving about being a real life slave. The plotting is really well done here. Lots of thrills, action and intrigue mixed in with the romance.

The characterization was strong, but did have a few weaknesses which weren't enough to be a problem for me, just noticeable. At each erotic interlude, Lucy is not sure she can do the kinky and erotic things Jagor wants her to do, at the same time, she is overwhelmed with lustful desire to do it, and does it, much to her pleasure. After the fifth erotic interlude, it feels kinda formulaic. And Prince Jagor is a little too much The Hunky Guy. He's handsome, he's caring (even after he's gotten a collar around Lucy's neck) and he's smart and brave and of course, rich as hell. His character is very much female Sex Fantasy Fuel, even down to having a character flaw that he eventually overcomes (with Lucy's help of course).

That said, one thing I really liked about the book was that Lucy was neither a formulaic damsel in distress nor a formulaic Action Girl. When things get tough and dangerous, Lucy gets going. Furthermore, her bravery isn't manifested unrealistically in an ability to outfight guys twice her size who are trained and experienced fighters, or in developing a sudden ability as a dead shot with a gun, but in ways more suited to her abilities, which nevertheless demand great courage. Lucy is a very well-realized character.

Now let's get back to that tough line that His Slave, His Princess must follow with regard to sexual bondage themes. When you write an erotic romance, you want people to enjoy the sexual elements of your story. Now there are several ways to present these elements in any erotic romance:

1) You can tell a straight-up story of two people engaging in a consensual bondage. That's the route Fifty Shades takes, and I'd call it the safe route, and I'm not saying that disparagingly, you can definitely tell a great story that way. But there's no danger people won't enjoy the sexual scenes, if they are at all well written, since they are clearly consensual.
2) You can have real nonconsensual bondage/slavery as a story element but set it in a distant milieu (in time, like ancient Roman slavegirls, or set on another planet or another world, or a straight up fantasy setting) so that you can have nonconsensual bondage but with an element that reinforces the fictional nature of the sexual bondage. Since the nonconsensual bondage is set in a framework that is clearly fictional, it is sufficiently a product of fantasy that the nonconsensual elements are not so much a problem.
3) You can set it in modern times and have it be nonconsensual bondage. I don't know of a lot of erotic romances that do that, because nonconsensual bondage is not the stuff of romance and is threatening and unhappy-making when set in our current world. For example, imagine writing an erotic romance about Nazi sex slaves circa 1943. Think anyone at that time would have found it romantic – well, anytime, but particularly that time? Of course not, Nazi Germany in those days was straight-up horror. (I know, very few Americans knew of Nazi concentration camps in 1943, but pretend everyone did know all about them.) In a similar faction, a sexual bondage erotic romance set in a South American prison for political prisoners might work for uninformed Americans, but it might not work so well for readers in the South American country the story is set in.

His Slave His Princess takes the fictional milieu route, even though it is set in modern times. The land of Asteria does not exist, we all know that, putting it firmly in a fantasy milieu. If Korval had set the story in a modern country that practices female slavery, or something close to it, like Taliban-era Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia, it would rouse all sorts of unpleasant associations from the real world and make the sexual bondage much harder to accept as purely pleasurable.

But the fact that it's set in fictional Asteria makes the semi-nonconsensual bondage easier to accept. And semi-consensual is the right word. It's clear that in Asteria nonconsensual bondage exists – every woman is subject to collaring once she turns 21. But since the women get to pick who collars them prior to coming of age it's more like a peculiar form of dating. (Though it's hard to see how all the women find their true loves, or even a guy who APPROXIMATES a true love, prior to reaching 21.)

What's more, if the relationship goes sour after the woman is collared, she is not divorced but sold at a slave auction, which would result in some nonconsensual bondage. In fact, there are a couple of characters who are in nonconsensual bondage in the story. One is a palace slave that winds up as Lucy's personal maid. The other is a public relations specialist. In both cases the slavery does not seem too onerous, but there ARE differences between being a slave and an employee.

The maid, for example, can be sexually used by any of the palace officers. She does not do the picking, if they want her, they can take her. She is in fact seeing a young palace staffer, and sneaks out of the palace regularly to do so, to her great risk. I don't remember specifically what the punishment might have been, but it was enough to make her sneak out of the palace at night in a laundry cart and risk being smothered.

However, none of the nonconsensual sex was shown, in fact, all of it was Lucy and Jagor steaming up the chains, as the story is told strictly from Lucy's POV. And there are several slaves who were shown who were clearly deeply in love with their masters, or in some cases, master/husbands. So there's that.

The PR specialist seemed no different from a PR specialist on Earth who is dedicated to her job. So as far as the story FEELS, it's very much a consensual BDSM story, even though there is a certain amount of putative nonconsensual slavery present in the story. The nonconsensual stuff just gives an edge to the kink, much as the fact that the sex slavery in John Norman's Gor novels was nonconsensual, but was almost competely offset by the fact that all the slavegirls just LURVED whatever was done to them.

Of course, all works of fiction are fiction, and you can make that defense for enjoying bondage imagery in any fictional work, consensual or not. But I personally find the nonconsensual stuff only a turn on when it's part of a story line that leads to a consensual relationship of some kind. Like the pirate and kidnapped wench that is the basis of so many romance novels, except you know, with more and better kinky sex. Or the Gorean master and his slavegirl he bought at auction just to use, but they develop feelings for one another.

I think most people who read erotic romances are like me in this respect.

Now as to this book being better than Fifty Shades, it's better written. It moves along smoothly and has an engaging plot. You never feel the story lag, as happened quite few times in the first book of the Fifty Shades trilogy. Ana and Lucy are both well-developed and engaging characters whom you enjoy reading about. However Prince Jagor has it WAY over Christian Grey, who's been damaged by childhood mistreatment. Jagor may be too much the Hunky Guy, but his lust for Lucy is simple and straightforward, he wants her as his slavegirl/wife because that's the way he was raised to respond to women, and that's who he is. His direct, natural lust for Lucy is just a lot cleaner and more fun to read about.

His Slave, His Princess is by far the best erotic romance I have read. It isn't the hottest one, however. That honor goes to The Punishment of Jendri, which, while it was not as well written as His Slave, His Princess, was in a fantasy milieu I like better, and had a much stronger feel for the dominance/submission dynamic than His Slave, His Princess. I think this may be a gender thing to a certain extent: I think most female readers would find His Slave His Princess sexier than The Punishment of Jendri, and I think most male readers would fine The Punishment of Jendri the sexier read, and not just because Jendri is pure-D pussy-lickin' lesbianism (though to be fair, that would be an issue too). His Slave His Princess, for all its kinky explicit sex, is very much in the tradition of romance novels, while The Punishment of Jendri is more like porn for guys.

I do think Korval has missed a trick with His Slave, His Princess. I think the Asterian society she has created is fascinating, sort of a mini-Gor on Earth. I think she should set a whole series of books in Asteria, detailing the problems of a small country that has retained government by aristocracy and chattel slavery, to survive in the modern world, and the people in it to find love. There are many more stories to tell in Asteria than the story of Princess Lucy and Prince Jagor, and Korbel is capable of doing a fine job of telling them.

In the meantime, buy this book. It's worth it.


When touring Asteria, the friendly locals will talk to you happily ... if they can! Image source: Public Disgrace.com.

Prize of Gor: Gender Feminist Turns Sex Slave!

What am I bid for this prize gender feminist?
Prize of Gor is the most aptly named novel in the entire Gor series. It is the novel in which John Norman reached for the brass ring and actually had a member of the group he so despised, i.e., antisex feminist academics, kidnapped and taken to Gor to be a slavegirl.

This is the second book written after the long hiatus after DAW dropped him and before he started publishing via Amazon. (it is preceded by “Witness of Gor” which has much less going for it). And throughout the Gor series, Norman has been fuming and fussing about those horrible, antibiological sexual frustrates back on Earth who Ruined Everything for men and women by denying that a woman's place is at her man's feet, in chains, generally in paragraphs-long rants that cranked up whenever a sexy scene started to happen. Or sometimes the rants would just crank up out of the blue, stopping whatever plot or character development was occurring dead in its tracks.

(I'm not calling Norman's rants “rants” not because I disagree with his ideas (though I do disagree with them) but because of the way they are organized. They are repetitive, forceful restatements of the same ideas over and over again with no added depth or background, the very definition of a rant. If you want to find some ideas about evolutionary biology stated as arguments, with lots of background and support, I suggest you watch a Girl Writes What video. She's also a thorn in traditional feminism's side, but a much more subtle and effective one that Norman will ever be.)

This happened a LOT in the Gor novels, but interestingly, Norman never had a feminist academic kidnapped and brought to Gor for some immersive slave training of the sort Earth women tend to get on Gor. So when I saw that the protagonist of Prize of Gor was going to be a professor of gender studies, I was hoping that Norman had finally decided to go full-bore at the issues surrounding feminism and his viewpoint that women are natural-born sex slaves to men, and I was glad, because even it produced a novel that was full of pedantic arguments about the true nature of sexuality, they would at least be (I hoped) different and deeper arguments, and I could handle that. Just no more repeating the same old complaints over and over, please.

What's more, Norman added a delicious twist to the story when he had the gender studies professor, Ellen (it's just her slave name, no real Earth name is ever provided) be old at the beginning of the story. The Greens of Gor, you see, have figured out, not only how to render everyone young and beautiful for a thousand year lifespan, but they've also figured out how to wind one's age backwards in ten-year increments. And so 58-year-old Ellen (let's just pretend her Earth name is Catherine MacKinnon) is transformed into a woman who is physically an 18-year-old slavegirl hottie through four such age-reversing treatments.

And there's a recuperative period between each treatment, in which she's given increasingly strong doses of slavegirl training, or as it would be called on Earth, molestation, assault, torture and brainwashing.

I thought, “Wow, what an opportunity to explore these topics in depth, combining and contrasting youth and age with discussions of sexuality and gender, autonomy and submission, all in one tremendous package. This book is indeed a prize!”

Those who have already read Prize of Gor are laughing their asses off right now,because Prize of Gor contains no such things.

Instead, it had lots and lots of the same exact stuff we've seen in all the OTHER Gor novels, which is to say, lots and lots of exposition about how bad evil old Earth sexuality and how liberating and free good old Gor philosophy is, being 100 percent more natural and all.

I've been describing these rants of Norman's but the rants themselves do more than any mere description ever could. Read this, and imagine it going on for page after page after page:

Someone, you see, may be watching you, you entirely unsuspecting, unaware, unwitting of this so significant a surveillance. Someone may be thoughtfully considering how you might look in sirik, that striking custodial device with its collar, the connecting chains, the wrist and ankle rings, or conjecturing, taking notes, on your likely value, as he watches you, what you might be expected to bring on the slave block, first, and then later, after having been suitably informed and trained. All your laws then, your politics, your ideologies, your legal remedies, your petty threats, your thousand devices to obtain power, to control, reduce, tame and destroy men, would be useless. Remember them, such seekings, such devices, when you are chained naked in a Gorean dungeon, collared, with other slaves, a mark burned into your thigh, waiting to be brought to the auction block.

But with you, on the same chain, perhaps prized even more highly than you, their collars locked as securely as yours, their chains clasping as perfectly, their bodies as bared, may be other women, they selected as carefully as you, quiet, gentle, loving, needful, natural women, women less removed initially from their sex than you, women who disdained to strive to be facsimile males, such monstrous transmogrifications of human reality, those to whom grotesque propagandas could not speak, those who could never bring themselves to believe the catechisms of negativity, horror and hatred, those who had no difficulty in detecting the unsatisfying special nature and hollowness, the idiosyncratic party-serving nature of diverse bromides and slogans, the lies that others would impose upon them, but who knew themselves female, even from the beginning, despite all the propaganda and conditioning, female radically and profoundly, those who even on Earth have longed to fulfill their femaleness in the service of men, men who will understand them and treasure them, but will nonetheless give them the domination they crave, who will supply the masculine to their feminine, the yang to their yin, who will see to it that they are, as they desire to be, let it be stated explicitly, mastered, wholly, and beautifully, and uncompromisingly mastered.

Imagine that going on for page after page after page. Now you have some idea of the effort it takes to read Prize of Gor. To tell the truth, after the first couple of instances of this, I just skimmed the pages looking for unusual words or short paragraphs or quote marks indicating that something interesting might be going on, and then backed up til I was at the start of the non-rant portion of the text, and started reading until I encountered the next rant.

Now I'm not saying that Prize of Gor is an epic fail. I am saying that it was not a fail because Norman never even tried. Instead of working a little deeper on the topic, he just larded in lots and lots and lots of his usual rants into the book. I'd say it's about fifty percent rant, by volume, and I'm being generous. Some of the rants do relate to what's going on around Ellen, since she's a slavegirl and gets molested, furred, whipped and switched and bound and gagged and hooded a lot, and Norman very deftly and thoroughly describes how she feels about anything relating to sexual bondage and slavegirliness, though he continues to avoid explicit descriptions of sex to keep things PG or soft-R rated, even though you know EXACTLY what is happening.

(For example, there's a scene where some captured enemy soldiers are tied up and naked and Ellen is ordered to give them blowjobs and swallow it all so there's no spooge revealing that they've been blown. And she does it, with her hands tied behind her back yet, and apologizes nicely to the soldiers since they are free and she is a slave, explaining that she HAS to give them blowjobs because, hey, slavegirl. And though Norman would never use indecorous language like “blowjob” or describe what she feels like with cocks in her mouth, but he uses much more, um, refined language to let you know exactly what she's doing.)

Anyway, point is, the descriptions of Ellen's slavish activities slide easily into rants about how good sex slavery is and how bad things on Earth are, and if you wanted to be strict about it, you could reasonably say that “Prize of Gor” is 70 or 75 percent rant.

But the sheer amount of it is not really the important thing about all the ranting, in terms of the Gor series. The important thing is, it's a demonstration that Norman has either no ability or no interest in really taking on the issues raised by feminists about his books. (And to be fair, a lot of feminists really hate Norman and the Gor novels, and have raised many objections to them, in terms both snarling and angry.)

I had envisioned … well, fantasized … “Prize of Gor” as a story about a feminist enslaved which would bring forth all the most powerful and cogent arguments of feminism against Norman's vision of sex slavery, and Norman gets in there and responds with his most powerful and cogent arguments FOR slavery, for a really interesting donnybrook of an argument.

Norman is a professor of philosophy, clearly he's CAPABLE of making a tough argument, but he sure didn't do so in “Prize of Gor” and if he were going to do it ANYWHERE, this would have been the place to do it. And Norman did not do it. The man has nothing when it comes to expanding or deepening his ideas. And yeah, a lot of people, especially feminists but quite a few of his fans as well, have assumed that all along, and after more than twenty novels, who can blame them?

The only counter-argument I can see is that the Gor novels are fantasy adventure novels and they're no place for intellectual donnybrooks. But if you are going to take that approach, the Gor novels are also no place for the lengthy, repetitive rants about the virtues of sex slavery, which frankly, could not POSSIBLY slow down the story and character development, such as it is, as much as an in-depth intellectual argument. You can't have it both ways, in short … if the intellectual donnybrook has no place, neither do the rants.

And on the issue of character development, that's where things get REALLY revelatory. Just think of this character, this Ellen, an aging, virginal professor of gender studies who has spent her whole life on Earth in a career as a successful academic suddenly finds herself in a prison on another world, reduced to slavery, and at the same time restored to her early youth and beauty.

This could credibly be a cause for driving her insane, certainly her psyche would have to make some major adjustments. And there are some interesting questions to consider – we know the brain is still growing and developing physically until you reach age 25, she gets aged back to 18. Does this truncate any of her intellectual abilities? Would there be different levels of hormones acting on her brain as a young woman that would radically change her emotional and physical responses? Would she be aware of them? Would her aged, finely tuned, highly developed mind experience these changes as some sort of alien experience forcing itself on her, or would she perceive it as changes in who she was? Would she be AWARE of what was going on?

As an academic involved in gender studies she probably should be aware of these things, but of course there's no mention of any of it in. There's no examination of what she goes through mentally other than the “I love being the slave of big strong men!” “I hate big strong men for enslaving me!” “Being a slave is wonderful!” “Being a slave is awful!” stuff … granted, whole rafts of it, but still, nothing that creates a real, living character.

Of course, if such character development were to occur, it wouldn't really be a Gor novel. Because let's face it, if the mental effects of being broken by Gorean slavers were unstintingly portrayed, it would make for something more like 1984 than a sexy barbaric fantasy novel. That's why Norman stays away from it. And that's why his rants are kind of a cheat: he keeps insisting that slavery is wonderful but he can't go into the real effects of nonconsensual slavery as practiced on Gor … his ideal, apparently … without making clear how brutal it was.

Instead there is just the occasional switching and whipping and of course, all the sexy, sexy bondage.

He also does not go into the innate wastefulness of using a woman whose mind is intelligent and detail-oriented enough to be a successful academic, just to prepare food, sew and suck cocks. Norman makes a lot of how fulfilling this feels to the enslaved Ellen, but he gives us no idea how a mind that can do research, read and analyze long, detailed texts and then write long, detailed texts in response can handle spending most of her time watching eggs fry, pushing needles into cloth and walking around a lot. And furring, of course. (“Furring” is the Gorean term for “fucking” as it is done “in the furs” most of the time. I like it a lot better than fucking.)

As is made plain at the beginning of “Prize of Gor” the manuscript is written by Ellen, so clearly someone (Bosk of Port Kar, who makes a cameo or two in “Prize of Gor”) has recognized that her mind needs something to occupy it. But as the book Ellen turned out is full of even more of the lengthy rants than the other Gor novels, it's pretty clear that Ellen's mind is not what it once was.

And the thing is, Prize of Gor has a pretty good story buried among all those rants. Ellen is kidnapped, exchanges owners several times, gets involved with the opposition to Cosian occupation of Ar and with the mysterious plotting of the Kurii and their human agents. There is much pleasing of different Masters, much intrigue swirling about, much danger and much fun.

Because here's the hell of it: underneath all that ranting, Norman is REALLY GOOD at telling an adventure story. He also has a genius for creating rich, detailed societies for those adventures to occur in.

And of course, he had the masterstroke of understanding that softcore bondage romance works BEAUTIFULLY with sword and sorcery fantasies. He even realized he could sidestep the necessity of dealing with the horrors of actual slavery in ancient cultures by placing the stories in an ahistorical setting (i.e., Gor).

Norman is a genius, period.

But he's a flawed genius. I'm not saying he's an idiot savant, but after reading a few dozen pages of his rants on sexuality you DO get the impression that you are reading the equivalent of an OCD disorder in text form.

If Norman had the ability to constuct halfway decent female characters and focus strictly on the softcore/bondage sexyfantasy and adventure elements of his story, while imbuing them with his normal excellent world-building skills, his books would be FREAKING popular. Maybe even “Fifty Shades” popular, because he writes a much more compelling adventure than E.L. James does and he has a better feel for the appeal of sexual bondage than James does.

Hell, if Norman even had an editor who would relentlessly trim the rants and push him in the right directions, that would do the trick, I think. But as “Prize of Gor” conclusively demonstrates, he does not have any such help.

Dreams of Control: Awakening -- Book Review

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Greyman Reviews Great Book, Does Other Stuff!

The Greyman has posted a review of my book Slavegirls on the Movies and On TV: The Hottitude of Servitude, and he has said some very nice and, in my opinion, completely accurate statements about my book, which to be fair, is the only book ever written on the subject, due to other people apparently having better things to do with their time. Heres' a link to the review, check it out, and of course, there may be other stuff on The Greyman's site worth looking at, although it's hard to do a second act after praising my book, there are some EXCELLENT posts on the upcoming movie “Uninhabited” which apparently features gorgeous Aussie bikini babes bound and gagged. Intriguing!

Feast of Souls Reviewed

“I said I wanted a Mai Tai, not that I wanted myself tied!”
We’ve got a double update this weekend, with a review of the C.S. Friedman novel Feast of Souls. It’s a high fantasy novel with an intriguing take on magical powers. It has no bondage or even maledom/femsub stuff, but it should, it really, really should. I explain how and why it should. The picture above is linked to that explanation -- metaphorically, not literally.

Image courtesy of Bondagerotica sponsor Public Disgrace.