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Not sure how long I should keep adding this disclaimer, but the following is just a tongue-in-cheek speculation as to what Xenoerotics might be about [as a way to make people read the book]. It is not the actual plot.

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Xeno = foreign/alien/other; different in origin

Erotics = not porn

I don’t really know David [the author], but I know of the books he has written for Schism Press [Snuff Memories and this one, Xenoerotics] and that he is a Lecturer in Philosophy [focusing on post-humanism, I think] at the same uni my mum went to, and, apparently, the writer of several Doctor Who novels.

Unless that’s a different David Roden?

[edit: it is]

I don’t think it is as The Nemonite Invasion comes up under his name on google, as well as in the space under this book [Xenoerotics] on the ‘You Might Also Like’ list on amazon. Maybe not the best barometer of relevancy as it also recommends the following novels:

Holo-girl: Evasion [Light Novel] // Iagan Loch

Renegades Volume 1: Rise // Shawn Frost

Nostalgia is Heartless: the Heartless Series Book 2 // Sarah Lahey

My Name Was Susan O’Malley // Michael J. Nercessian

Age of Vice // Deepti Kapoor

Does Holo-girl also deal with the coming-abject? Did Susan O’Malley get meshed with a graviton emitter? Is Age of Vice written from the perspective of a sexed-up ED-109? Is Nostalgia the name of a-

Xenoerotics…

Not sure if this is fiction or a collection of stories exploring a philosophical concept/theory, or a mix of both, but I do know that one of the quotes on the back cover explicitly calls it a collection of stories so maybe I’ll run with that.

What do the other quotes say?

‘The Marquis de Sade enters the decimal labyrinth and is immediately intoxicated by the smell of a rotten rose. The Medieval meets the posthuman on the operating table and a hooded woman listlessly drains you for some last scrap of pleasure. “It will be just you and me and a blunt instrument.” We are all bored with our biology, but unable to escape the eros-thanatos skinsuit. Roden’s scrawls from some distant outpost are like the tortured pornography of monks and philosophers, minds addled by abstraction, but labouring ever onwards in shrouds of grey meat. As do we all!’
—Nina Power

‘Sensation carries information, and through extreme sensation one can acquire an abject, alien knowledge – a wholly unique disease of faith. Tracing the symbols with your finger, accept from trepanned skull hallucination alighting synapse, to stir your loins and embolden your endocrine. “In truth, I only ever wanted to be vermin.” The story is a hole (O); a place to be buried in. Containment for the sheer sacs of us. Language blooms and coats us, making our skins visible, for what else would we be without? Here, in Roden’s cities, eroticism is a map, nouns as sex as chrysalis – a space from which to emerge permanently altered and forever unrecognizable.’
—B. R. Yeager

‘A dialectic between the abstract and the absurd. Roden aggressively refuses to provide any relief through emotionality. A fully detached perspective on humanity’s demise with the ascension of the posthuman (i.e., extinction).’
—Charlene Elsby

‘One way to read this story collection is to find its methodology in the work itself, as Roden says, “bukkake holocaust deep, interiorized, so when the load is shot, he’ll chain toxic shocks, vesicles bursting like pomegranates.” It is a work of deep readability, perversion, delirium, gothic romance and posthuman mutation, this is the weird fiction your mother warned you about.’
—Tom Bland

Hmm.

Philosophy is dangerous ground for me, the last one I did was close to a disaster, but this doesn’t appear to be philosophy in the academic suit, more like philosophy-tinged, abstract madness showing its extremes. I think. I’m pretty sure. If it’s published by Schism Press, it has to be at least close to that.

The cover is a bit abstract – if I squint, I can see a skin-skull-skeleton splice of Mandy Patinkin receiving a head massage from a pair of severed hands. But then, if I tilt a little, it looks like a pagan owl totem dripping live human flesh.

Torture porn?

As with Sea of Glass, shock is unlikely to occur as text just can’t do that for me. [Vitiators, a graphic novel, might, but that’s still in the post].

This could be the point?

The Nina Power quote implies that it might be that, along with the reference to post-humanism, which, as far as I’m aware, is Robocop with his dick ripped off, spinning into a vicious black hole, while the rest of us are shrunk to the size of LEGO toys and left to assemble R.O.T.O.R. costumes scavenged from plastic cups buried on the scrapyard set of Freddy 4.

Maybe our dicks will come off too?

Maybe the cunt will turn acid green and baulk balk at revenge? [some residue from my Fourth Industrial Revolution Slut De-con-struc there].

I’m prepared to go to some wild places in this spec.

There won’t be a plot.

Maybe the costume of a plot.

What level of sadism?

Must be more than hair-pulling and throat-gripping.

Eyes, dick, minge. Tongue. Toenails?

Snuff films are tedious for everyone involved.

Actually, David is writing something for Film Dada right now, a piece on Lost Highway. I can’t remember too much about the film itself as it’s been about fifteen years since I watched it, but I did recently see a video essay on YouTube that said it’s basically about Bill Pullman’s impotence, his inability to satisfy his wife [dark-haired Patricia Arquette], and instead of relief, he engineers a schizophrenic break, morphs into a younger man’s body, materialises a sultrier, blonder Patricia Arquette, and then metaphysically alternates between eros-indulgence and the cat o’ nine tails.

With that in mind, will Xenoerotics deal with neither?

Just a continued flogging of the Venezia horse [it moved].

The human body is disgusting.

Repellent.

Obliterative.

Best not to think about it too much.

Dream of cybernetics?

That nightmare.

One of the quotes mentions an outpost and there is the xeno- prefix so maybe this is set in the future.

A future where sex and torture have been drained of not only all feeling but all representations too. From scene to obscene to scene fatigue to what does the microwave think about all this?

Sounds plausible.

Okay, I’m heading in. Apologies to David for what’s about to unravel.

Spec: We start with a technician sitting not alone on the observation deck of an outpost near Eris [goddess of strife and discord], watching the distant lights of a nebula, dreaming of nothingness. Dreaming backwards. He may as well be alone. Humanity is subservient to the object now. The object doesn’t care. Everyone has accepted this without being asked. The other crew members are all over three hundred years old and cybernetically altered in order to better perform their outpost duties. These duties are done passively, the human worker plugging into a machine port and allowing the computer to utilise certain sections of their brain. Every now and then, they are required to say Teukhein as a form of approval for the machine to continue. Our MC, the technician, does this too, without feeling or sentiment [he is not centred in these scenes]. Then goes back to his quarters that he shares with genetically-enhanced plants and unwanted machine parts. Life in this region of space is dull. The future is dull. The prospect of more is exhausting. Yet suicide is rare on the outpost. On all outposts. It’s just too much effort, our technician tells his Yaqui Language Exchange partner. Language exchange is an archaic way of learning, a frustrating struggle, which is why our guy does it. Other forms of entertainment are visual and instantaneous. Can be instantaneous. It is up to the user/used to decide at what speed to ration out the episodes.

Apart from serials and holosuites, there is sex with the [untranslatable alien species]. They are from a distant star system [they won’t say which] and appear very unhuman-like. When it comes to sex with humans, they are ultra-passive as they do not feel pleasure or pain. You can do anything to them, they don’t mind. The MC tried it before but soon grew tired of the passivity. Or the ignorance. He suspects the [untranslatable alien species] do not understand that it is fucking they are involved in. They are physical beings simply out of convenience. Xeno-diplomacy demands this kind of etiquette. And humans are incapable of damaging them anyway. This is all explained in the first ten pages, with the MC going through his daily routine.

At this point, we reach our first insert-story. The technician is in the sodium bath with a padd, indulging in his hobby of reading old tales of sadism. The first one is about the Marquis of/de Sade ambling around a chemically-ruined arboretum, sniffing at all the malformed flowers, cutting off their stems, inserting some into the urethra of his penis and attempting to masturbate.

Finishing the story, the technician gets up and goes next door, asks the male worker staying there to pull off his overalls. The man is confused/irritated. The technician asks again, calm as a mortician.

‘Take them off and strangle yourself with the sleeves. I’ll stand over here by this flux capacitor.’

‘You’re unravelling, [insert future pejorative]. I’m not a fucking [untranslatable alien species].’

Annoyed, flustered, our technician takes the turbolift down to the promenade, propositions a blank-looking [untranslatable alien species] and together they head to the holosuites. He is tired of this kind of sex generally but now he is in a bad mood and wants to master something. In the holosuites, he has greater options. He can make the [untranslatable alien species] wear anything. Put his dick into holes and other parts that may not be holes. This time, he pokes a lower part of the [untranslatable alien species] mass for almost an hour, with no audio response. The [untranslatable alien species] could be plotting his death or thinking about the plasma relays on Deck 12, there is no way to know. Irritated at this lack of feedback, our technician conjures up a padd and reads another story out loud. Reaching the climax, he grabs a scalpel and slashes his waist, forcing the [untranslatable alien species] to finger the bloody wound. The [untranslatable alien species] has no fingers. They have seventeen limbs, nine redundant, all shaped a bit like a potato peeler. How do they pick things up? Their skin is triple-layered and the second layer emits a bitter adhesive when necessary. This is also used by humans during sex. Ingestion of this ‘sweat’ results in an ecstasy similar to a cold knife running its edge along the inside ring of your skull. Our technician has tried this before, but it was not as uplifting as he had hoped.

Post-sex, he returns to his quarters and reads another story [to the plants], this one about a defeated serial killer who starts to target professional fighters twice his size in a bid to end it all. The story overrides the tedium of the recent sex. It makes him ebullient. The idea of ending it all in a spectacular way becomes his new reason to continue. He remembers an old novel he read, written by an Indonesian lunatic from the 21^st Century. In that novel, the MC flies to a Lagrange point near Pluto, cuts off his own hand, fixes it into a rigor-mortis position and then uses that grip to violently tug himself off as he drifts naked into the predicted-at-that-time orbit of Planet X. This is now the technician’s plan too. Only instead of Planet X, he will drift into what Aziz predicts is a 30cm wormhole that leads to a more aggressive alien species’ home star system.

It would be a bold move, a lunatic move, and the ebullience is wearing off, so he decides to continue with his outpost duties during the day and read old stories of perversion at night in order to psych himself up for it. Not to overcome fear, but to instigate the energy needed to do such a thing. It’s gonna be a lot of hard work.

But then something happens. A new [untranslatable alien species] arrives and this one possesses an extra limb and a bellicose manner. They refuse to touch any human. If anyone talks to them, they will eviscerate them, and not in an exciting way.

Our technician is aroused. He imagines what violent exenteration might feel like. Will it make him cum? Will that cum be greyish-yellow? Blood-flecked? Will it feel sorry for itself?

He reads another story of perversion to calm himself down, this one about a Medieval Countess squeezing the last drops of blood out of freshly stripped peasant thigh, and then smearing that blood on her heavily scarred pussy.

It does not make him calm. Nor ready.

How about the cyborg who remembers their old family home, goes there, tries to insert the face skin of one daughter into the asshole of the other? Cuts off their wife’s head and uses it as a lamp during down time in the Kuiper Belt?

That’s just the fiction he needs.

After reading through it again three times, he gets up, takes off his overalls, walks over to the new [untranslatable alien species] quarters and jabs the keypad.

The door slides open and the [untranslatable alien species] is floating there, its entire mass soaked in the blood of another crew member [maybe the same guy he tried to fuck earlier?].

‘I’m tired of you,’ says the [untranslatable alien species].

Deflated, our technician watches the base of the door close…then remembers the cyborg tale, the con-joined daughters, the wife’s multi-purpose head…and reaches a hand out to stop it.

‘Can I watch?’ he asks.

The [untranslatable alien species] emits pale blue gas from what might be their skull and replies, ‘yes.’

‘Great.’

‘For a price.’

Our technician has half a second to facially express a ‘huh?’ before his hand [and a third of his forearm] is sliced off.

He looks at the blood spurt, then the blood dribble, and feels the tiniest, faintest spark of eroticism. Or the psycho-simulation of it.

‘You coming in or not…grey sludge?’

Our technician licks his wound, enters.

The door slides shut.

Almost.

Cos there’s the severed hand blocking it.

Inside the room, things are without sense or dimension, the [untranslatable alien species] slipping off a surface layer of skin, stretching out the extra appendage towards-

May have gone a bit overboard with that…perhaps lost track of the balance between tired of sex versus tired of sadism and desperate to end versus desperate to be ended…

It’s not actually my style to write that bleak [my characters are usually defeated/confused yet hopeful, and the hope is usually grounded in absurdity – see: Planet Rasputin].

I’m just trying to imagine what Xenoerotics might be about and, apart from the outpost and transgressive in-story stories, I think I…just ended up writing my own thing…not related to Xenoerotics at all.

What is post-humanism exactly?

The de-empowerment/decentralising of the human as subject? Gluing metal to your body and letting the metal win? A fatigue towards our own biological processes and, in effect, life as is? The lack of sexiness to everything so why bother?

I’m lost in the Oort Cloud here. As a winter-time anarchist, I’m unsure what to do with this kind of thinking. Whether it’s applicable to left politics at all. I might be mixing it up with trans-humanism/misinterpreting the definitions I’ve just read. Need to do more research. Or the basics of beginner research.

Or I could just read Xenoerotics.

Note: just seen a post by David on IG that says: ‘and to reiterate, don’t think posthumanism is an ethical or political stance or even an ontology. It’s not about saving forests, clams or koalas or deconstructing a subject that never was. It’s a viral abomination from outer space that co-opts philosophy as its evil sock puppet.’

I’ll leave that there without commentary cos any commentary I provide will be embarrassing at this point [though it does seem like bad news for the koalas].

Don’t know if this has been the best advert/seduction for it, but you can buy Xenoerotics here, and David’s other book, Snuff Memories, here. And the Doctor Who novel too, if that really was written by him.