By JACQUES STERNBERG (Berkley; 1967)
A very accurate (not!) portrayal of the year 1995 was offered up in this novel, one of two available English translations by Belgium’s Jacques Sternberg. Like the other, the collection FUTURE WITHOUT FUTURE, SEXUALIS ‘95 is over fifty years old, and serves as a potent demonstration of science fiction’s limitations (it being a genre that shows its age more dramatically than perhaps any other) while also showing what’s been lost in sci fi publishing (it being a rare-by-modern-standards genre novel that isn’t 500-plus pages, wasn’t part of a trilogy and doesn’t follow any known templates).
The subject, as the title indicates, is sex. It’s the defining element of this novel’s future society, which after years of war and economic anxiety has taken refuge in “a product which, though as old as the world, could be exploited from a new perspective…sold at high or low prices in infinitely varied forms, imported, exported, rented, dissected, embellished, lent at interest, repossessed and resold.” In this “liberated” yet quite repressive environment, casual hookups are the standard while long-term relationships are strongly discouraged, prostitution is state sponsored, the bulk of peoples’ taxes are paid to the “Sexual Finance Bureau” and cinemas are clogged with titles like DRACULA VERSUS THE NYMPHOMANIACS and SODOMY ON THE BOUNTY.
The first-person protagonist works in an advertising firm whose campaigns naturally all pivot on eroticism. He nonetheless finds himself at sea in this society, and becomes even more isolated when he falls under the spell of Michele, an enigmatic seductress who’s repeatedly likened to a vampire. So befuddling is Michele’s effect on the narrator that “in a world where no woman has the slightest mystery, how can you become attached to one face rather than another? No, it was impossible. Yet it was true: I wanted to see her face again, and no other.”
Even more shockingly, Michele causes the narrator to forget about sex for a time. This is an unheard-of aberration in this future, where “If I’d told (my friends) that I’d just spent an hour in a young woman’s bedroom and that I hadn’t dared do anything more than put my hand on her belly, they’d have hurried me off to a doctor.”
Sternberg, of course, was providing a dystopian satire of the sexual permissiveness that took hold of the western world in the late 1960s. SEXUALIS ‘95 is a far-from-isolated example of such; see THE “F” CERTIFICATE by David Gurney, which contained a far more reactionary (and much funnier) depiction of a sex-mad future, and David Meltzer’s BRAIN PLANT tetralogy, whose approach was overtly pornographic.
SEXUALIS ‘95’s most interesting element is its approach to sex. Mainstream literary standards in 1966 were obviously far stricter regarding erotic detail than they are now, and are reflected in the frank yet curiously reticent descriptions provided by Sternberg (translated by Lowell Bair). Poetic bombast is leaned into quite heavily, as in a description of a vagina that’s “both shameless and reserved, swollen with surging sap yet still closed in on its secrets.” Penises, in case you were wondering, are left undescribed.