Docile by K. M. Szpara (Tor.com, 2020)
★☆☆☆☆
(content warnings: rape, consent violations, attempted suicide)
Docile is an erotic sci-fi parable, set in near-future Maryland, about a man who sells himself into sexual slavery to a wealthy “trillionaire” patron to free his family from debt.
I… kind of hated it?
I appreciate the folks on Goodreads and elsewhere who have already written articulately on how:
the book is “a very by-the-numbers slavefic”
it perpetuates harm by not at all “acknowledging racism and the racist premise behind the concept of slavery [nor that] SLAVERY STILL EXISTS IN AMERICA RIGHT NOW TODAY”
its white fans and advocates also (generally) don’t reckon with why it’s problematic to have “yet another white author going ‘look at this thing that happened to Black people, what if something similar happened to my white main characters’”
So I’ll just add that, from a craft perspective, I also hated it?
Without even considering that the novel fairly ignores how Black Marylanders would react to this new form of slavery, I had zero reader confidence in the world that Szpara had created. Sure I buy the central conceit of the capitalist ultrarich preying on the poor, but…
The trillionaire is the scion of a large company; he is told he must have a partner or a slave on his arm to be considered fit to manage the enterprise.
A drug exists that renders slaves mindlessly obedient.
The slaves are given the choice whether to take it.
The scion’s company makes the drug. The scion doesn’t see slaves as people. But he wants to make a version of the drug that allows more creativity.
Yet he doesn’t understand that the “friends” he had as a child (who at the time were slaves being injected with the drug) were not his friends.
Because this individual representing the book’s ultrarich society didn’t make internal sense to me, a lot of the initial conflict around how the enslaved main character, Elisha, was received among ultrarich society didn’t hold water for me either. At odds with how seriously the book takes itself, and how the author clearly wanted me to feel about Elisha’s situation, the starting premise was too cartoonish for me to buy into.
And I’m therefore not sure if it was this perception at work, or if there was too much distance in the narrative voice, or if it was a quirk of Elisha’s character, but I connected with the story almost not at all. The “sexy non-consensual” sex scenes, and in fact all of it, read like a textbook; the last half, like a deposition. It didn’t help that the side characters were barely-there, and felt as undeveloped as the premise.
The one redeeming quality I see is that for someone who has experienced gaslighting, abuse, and brainwashing of the sort that happens to Elisha, Docile provides a playbook of sorts around how one might heal. A scene where Elisha considers his gender presentation was touching. But then a section on Polyamory 101 and Consensual Kink How-To was done so ham-handedly I cringed.
[Sidebar: Especially in light of my knee-jerk reaction to being hit over the head with a character’s asexual identity in Every Heart a Doorway, Docile does make me consider in what ways I would embrace representation/normalization of marginalized gender and sexual identities in fiction—because whether I want to embrace it is an unquestioned yes. I certainly connected with the gray-ace character Doodle in Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me. And with the normalized polyamorous relationships in the Elemental Logic series. Consider me continuing to seek out recommendations for adult spec fic where kink, BDSM, queer/trans/ace identities, and polyamory just are.]
So those are my ~feelings~ about Docile. Two stars because even clumsy healing narratives are important, but minus one star for being actively harmful.