Supervert - Astronaut de Sade

Best hitchhiker's guide to sex with aliens! Also the only one!

Supervert, Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, 2001.

"Through its profile of Mercury de Sade, a computer programmer obsessed with the erotic potential of alien life, Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish introduces a new perversion into the lexicon of sexual pathologies: exophilia, an abnormal attraction for beings from worlds beyond earth.

Unlike other fetishes, whose objects may be difficult but not impossible to obtain, exophilia is a sexual desire for something that is literally not to be found on earth. The necrophile can rob a cemetery, the foot fetishist can steal shoes, but where is an alien sex fiend to find the objects of his desire? A basic inability to satisfy his fetish inspires sadism in Mercury de Sade, and though obsessed with extraterrestrials he is thus compelled to victimize a series of "ninfas" or young girls...

But can a human, however alluring, ever compensate for the fantastic sexuality to be expected of extraterrestrials? If aliens are more intelligent than man, then might they — must they — not be more sexually advanced than man too?

Written in a style that ranges from documentary to satire, Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish draws a portrait of sexual obsession through interrelated series of short texts — pornographic visions, narrative fragments, philosophical speculations, diary excerpts, parables, parodies, syllogisms, snippets of computer code — which may be read either in sequence or in various collage-like patterns.

From the appendix Statement by the Case Historian:

I would like to say that I expect ETSF to cause much consternation — not because it is intrinsically polemical, like an abortion debate, but because it defies genres in a way rarely done before. (Sade and Kierkegaard wrote similarly recombinant works, but who else?) Many will reject ETSF as pornography. Pornographers will reject it as philosophy. Philosophers will reject it as literature. Litterateurs will reject it as science fiction. Sci-fi readers might accept it, because they tend to be more flexible about these things — and yet, in spite of my enormous respect for science fiction, I don't think ETSF is that either. "Science" means knowledge, and knowledge by definition is true; "fiction" means counterfeit, and counterfeit is by definition false. The term "science fiction" is thus an oxymoron meaning something like "truth falsified." This is probably an accurate description of certain classic works of the genre: Philip K. Dick really had a way of fucking with reality, and is "fucking with reality" anything other than falsifying truth? Conversely, I think ETSF falls in a weird bastard category more like "pseudo-science non-fiction," by which I mean falsity — the belief in UFOs, Martians, grays, Little Green Men" — exhibited and analyzed.

'What intrigued me about the book,' wrote Annalee Newitz in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, 'was Supervert's seductively nasty way of showing the dark side of hopeful Carl Sagan-ite speculations about our celestial cohorts... Mercury de Sade isn't hoping that enlightened beings from the Crab Nebula will teach humans to live in peace. He'd rather see outer space as a version of earth: packed with abused children, desperate prostitutes, subjugated peoples, and dupes of ill-concealed manipulation'."