Hardcover, 496 pages
English language
Published Sept. 27, 2020 by Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom.
A science fiction parable about love and sex, wealth and debt, abuse and power, a challenging tour de force that at turns seduces and startles.
To be a Docile is to be kept, body and soul, for the uses of the owner of your contract. To be a Docile is to forget, to disappear, to hide inside your body from the horrors of your service. To be a Docile is to sell yourself to pay your parents' debts and buy your children's future.
A science fiction parable about love and sex, wealth and debt, abuse and power, a challenging tour de force that at turns seduces and startles.
To be a Docile is to be kept, body and soul, for the uses of the owner of your contract. To be a Docile is to forget, to disappear, to hide inside your body from the horrors of your service. To be a Docile is to sell yourself to pay your parents' debts and buy your children's future.
I loved this book (though I was definitely conflicted) until the very very very end šµ
Content warning racism, sexual violence
I decided not to finish this! I was too creeped out by the way the author writes (numerous, very graphic) rape scenes like erotica, and writes about slavery but making it "colorblind."
There's a brief hand-wave at ancient Rome as a model for slavery, which apparently justifies the story completely ignoring the actual slavery historically in the US, as well as contemporary prison labor? It's bizarre to me to write a book about slavery and capitalism in the United States and have it be totally disjoint from... slavery and capitalism in the united states. Even the aesthetics of social class felt off.
It's possible that something in the last hundred pages exonerates it, but frankly I doubt it! (I looked up the ending and it was as rape-apologist as I predicted).
If this was intended to be specific slavery kink erotica, or you want to read it for those ends, go have fun. But the way it was packaged and marketed seem to present it as an insightful dystopia about capitalism, so I'm reviewing it as such.
Content warning rape, sexual assault, drugging, non-consent/ coercion, abuse
Alright so.... because of this book I now know that "slave fic" is a genre. And besides that, we're given a narrative in which a trillionaire r*pist gets a redemption arc.
The sex was hot, but so many parts of this were just WTF for me that I canāt really recommend it. I called it like 50 pages in that the ābad guyā was going to be a sympathetic character by the end, and that is the worst, IMO.
Two stars because this is very readable and compelling.
