Review Tuesday: The Induction of Satine by JL Peridot -- #SciFi #Erotica #ReviewTuesday

The Induction of Satine by JL Peridot

Muscoca Media, 2017

Satine Luna doesn’t believe the rumors about off-world prisons for people caught misbehaving on the main planet. Then she’s arrested for theft, hustled into a transport, swept off to a bleak installation on one of the moons and delivered into the hands of Warden Jet. The warden treats her with surprising respect, even as he strips her of autonomy and dignity. Expecting brutality and painful discipline, Satine is initially confused. As the process of her induction continues, she finds that desire is not incompatible with punishment.

I’ve been aware of J.L. Peridot’s work for many years, since we were both active during the golden age of literary erotica in the first decade of the twenty first century. I’ve always found her prose supremely arousing without being gratuitously explicit. She often focuses in on subtle sensory nuances and the corresponding emotional resonance, leaving the reader to infer the blatant physical responses.

Recent books of hers that I’ve reviewed (for example, Yet We Sleep, We Dream and Until We Met Again) have drifted more deeply into science fiction themes while retaining an undercurrent of eroticism. The Induction of Satine, in contrast, offers pure unadulterated sensuality.

We know almost nothing about Satine. Hints suggest she might have been a member of some criminal gang, planet-side, but that’s just an impression. The society in which she lives is likewise a cipher. The rumored lunar prisons might be instruments of oppression or tools to advance civilization.

The author does give us a sense of Satine’s personality: manipulative, rebellious, motivated entirely by self-interest. At the same time, she’s clearly young and rather surprisingly innocent. As Warden Jet begins the process of her “rehabilitation”, she struggles to hold on to her resistance in the face of traitorous desire and burgeoning pleasure.

This is pure erotica, luscious and compelling. There’s no real plot to get in the way. At the same time, The Induction of Satine has a depth that is often missing in ordinary smut. As I’ve often tried to emphasize in my own stories, there’s no such thing as “just sex”. JL Peridot understands and demonstrates this truth.

This is the first of a planned quintet of short tales involving Satine. I have the next one, The Manipulation of Satine, on my tablet already. I am looking forward to reading it.