Aye, and Gomorrah

This one was a bit odd to me. It was written by Samuel Delaney in 1967 when everyone was experimenting with sex and psychedelic drugs. Essentially mankind has developed the technology for extended trips or colonies in space. I'm not sure whether it's interstellar travel or not since the author chooses to focus not on the interesting aspects of life in space, but on the sexuality of the spacers in question. More to the point, the asexuality, since apparently in this odd adaptation, the spacers are required to be have all sexual reproductive organs removed - essentially rendering them sexless. And how do these sexless space traveler's choose to spend their free time on Earth? Why, whoring themselves out to "frelks", people whose fetish it is to be with people they can't really connect to. The word he chose to make up seems awfully close to "freaks" being that it's only one letter off. I don't know why he bothered to change it at all if that was the case and ends up making me think he was simply lazy.

It just seems to me that this novel was written more as an exploration of sexual fetishes than any real interest in science fiction. Yes, the story takes place in the future and yes, there is space travel involved but the author chooses to ignore his setting and instead focuses on his characters trying to hook up in different parts of the world. He also never explains why these people needed to have their sexual organs removed or what purpose it serves - other than as a vehicle to drive his exploration of sexual amorphous characters.

 Overall, I found the writing incredibly lazy and the story not at all interesting. I was more interested in what mission these people might be tasked with or the particulars in how they "went up." None of that was explained, or even lightly mentioned, which gives me the overall opinion that the author was likely in a drug-induced orgy exploring his own sexual exploration with this story being his recording of whatever hallucinations accompanied the experience.