By RICHARD E. GEIS (Essex House; 1969)
An ambitious exercise in science fiction themed smut fiction, and, I’m afraid, not a very successful one. It was the second of two novels written for the late Essex House adult fiction imprint by Richard E. Geis (the first being the counterculture romance RAVISHED, while a prospective third, THE ARENA WOMEN, ended up published by Brandon Books after Essex’s mid-1969 demise), a renowned sci fi fanzine editor who found time to crank out a reported 110 smut novels.
Geis often claimed that RAW MEAT was one of his personal favorite novels, yet, interestingly, he published multiple reviews of the book in his Science Fiction Review fanzine, all of them negative. As summed up by fellow Essex House author Hank (now Jean-Marie) Stine, RAW MEAT is “a good sex novel, a terrible science fiction novel…and a travesty of a psychological novel.” A pretty harsh judgement, if you ask me (as was Piers Anthony’s claim “One thing about Geis: you never have to wait long for the next erection”), but not wholly inaccurate.
Initially titled THE PERVERTS, RAW MEAT takes place in a future America not dissimilar to that of another Essex House release: TERMINUS by Michael Perkins. As in that novel—and William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s LOGAN’S RUN, initially published in 1967—this one is set in a future America where wealthy folk have moved into tightly regulated enclosures while penniless “perverts” reside outside. TERMINUS, of course, was intelligent and realistic, while RAW MEAT is neither of those things.
Its protagonists are Jim and Delia, residents of a dome lorded over by “Mother,” a supercomputer not far removed THE TERMINATOR’S Skynet. Mother keeps her human charges distracted via elaborate virtual reality sex tapes in which they spend their days engaged, and which Geis, who had an impressive talent for erotic description, describes at great length. Jim and Delia, like many a sci fi headliner before them, come to question their circumscribed reality and rebel against it, leading to an extremely bleak finish.
The TERMINATOR comparison is apt (despite the fact that the film took another fifteen years to arrive), as are BRAVE NEW WORLD, 1984, the aforementioned TERMINIUS and LOGAN’S RUN, and quite a few other sci-fi dystopias. In short, nearly everything in RAW MEAT has been done before (and since).
Yet the book isn’t entirely uninteresting. The sexual passages, as the above-quoted Hank Stine observed, are strong and imaginative, with a propulsive energy the novel as a whole lacks. The first third, in its unabashed glorification of sexual congress, is also interesting, suggesting a utopia, something you see very little of in modern science fiction, rather than the more clichéd dystopia the novel becomes.