Books
Rhapsody in Blue Bodies
“Primitive” Desire in Ruby Dixon’s Ice Planet Barbarians
If you’ve spent more than five minutes on BookTok (the bookish subculture of TikTok) in the past month, you have very likely come across some mention of Ruby Dixon’s Ice Planet Barbarian series. What may have started off as a joke post, in the vein of describing an almost implausibly ridiculous concept has quickly evolved into a loving embrace of the bizarre erotic.
Because of the memes.
These wonderful, hilarious memes.
The series is about human women who get stranded on an ice planet with blue alien lovers. Although the first book came out in 2015, The books have topped the Amazon bestseller list for most of 2021 and feature covers that delightfully play with romance tropes, inserting blue aliens into the role of Fabio. Their sudden surge in popularity can be attributed to TikToker Emma Carter, who was one of the first to make a video about the series.
And because I am ultimately desensitized to the bizarre erotic, I too jumped in and am (proud?) to say the I have binged through most of the original series (22 books as of its current count) and started the spin-off series (IceHome, currently at 15 books).
Let me first reassure you that while the elevator pitch sounds pretty ridiculous, which I will describe below, that it’s a good series. It’s really good. Its got all the ingredients of a great romance series: spunky lead characters, an overwrought but surprisingly engaging premise, male characters that are so good-looking they may as well have been generated in a lab (or out-of-this-world as the case may be), exotic locations, pre-destined love, and lots, and lots, of sex. (1)
Like any great trend, we are now moving away from strictly meme-ified cultural awareness to one that will inevitably be studied to death. So before we start seeing academic papers on Dixon’s extensive series popping up on college campuses, I thought it would be worth noting where exactly Ice Planet Barbarians sits within the scope of its subgenre, and how it tries to wrestle with some of its problematic elements.
****SPOILERS AND DISCUSSIONS OF ADULT CONTENT AHEAD****
Romancing The Book Industry
Bar none the most lucrative publishing genre is romance. This category can then be divided into a number of different subgenres, spanning from the familiar and popular subgenres, like Romantic Comedy and Regency Romances, to the more niche ones, such as Reverse Harem or Amish Romance.
Romance as an industry tends to cater to heterosexual women (2), and likewise, is often derided for its appeal despite being an almost comically robust money-making industry, and having a wide variety of literary merit among much of its works.
Erotic romance is a deeply interesting study in the many facets of desire and how that manifests. This is an industry largely by women and caters to that audience. It has also grown a contingency of LGBTQ+ persons that have reshaped that landscape. The rise of independent publishing means there is a lack of commercial oversight that can re-frame desire in ways that are beyond a lot of other contemporary media.
That is not to say that this genre, or these books in particular, completely reject traditional masculinity or disvalue it, but it complicates the image. In many cases, Romance books reorient typical masculine or heteronormative images, symbols, and concepts, into something that is sexualized and exotic for a primarily non-male audience.
Ice Planet Barbarians excels in that in interesting, and at times problematic ways.
Welcome To Not-Hoth
Here’s a down-and-dirty summary of the series to give you some context if you haven’t read it and don’t mind spoilers.
A bunch of women wake up in a spaceship cargo hold having been abducted by little green men and their orange assistants. They crash on a strange planet, and during the crash, the little green men and their assistants die, as well as a few of the women. It appears to be an arctic planet. These human women, now stuck in the wreckage, send Georgie (our lead in the first book) to find supplies or help.
She ends up accidentally captured by an “alien” (3) named Vektal, who instantly recognizes her as his mate, and he introduces himself via cunnilingus.
Yup. I am not making that up. Typically people get tongue-tied when they meet someone they like, but not Vektal I guess.
Vektal is part of a whole race called Sa-Khui who live on the planet. They are blue-skinned, seven feet tall, horned, have tails, glowing blue eyes, and other interesting parts of their anatomy to be discussed later. Vektal & Georgie manage to pantomime some communication until they are able to use some tech to teach them each other’s languages.
They still get rather affectionate before and after this while traipsing around the tundra.
Vektal reveals that there is a poison in the atmosphere and that in order to survive, the women must get a symbiote to help their bodies adapt. This symbiote, called a khui, or cootie as the women call it, can also detect your mate for you, through a process called resonance. Vektal’s village experienced a huge plague years prior, leaving them bereft of most women, leaving them with no chance to resonate, until now.
They bring a bunch of them male Sa-Khui to the wreckage, save the women, and implant them with a khui.
Each book looks at a different pairing, and they tend to be formulaic. Woman and Sa-Khui begin to resonate, woman denies resonance, woman gets abducted, “plot,” sex, “plot,” and woman and Sa-Khui settle down and start making blue babies.
They are not all like that, but the alterations to this outline are small. This description is also selling the series short. Dixon’s world building, her use of gruesome elements, the adventure aspects, are all quite impressive. But we aren’t here to discuss that, we’re here to talk about big blue hunks and the women who love them.
Cave Women Have Needs Too
It’s been almost a decade since Dinosaur Erotica took the internet by storm, prompted by the quick meme-ification of the Christie Sims and Alara Branwen books. For those who need a reminder, Sims and Branwen were two college friends who started rapidly self-publishing monster erotica short stories on Kindle. They eventually stumbled into the sub-sub-genre for Dinosaur erotica.
Thanks to their (purposely) poorly photoshopped book-covers and cheesy titles, they went viral spawning parodies of their work. Most famously, Chuck Tingle, who still enjoys a certain amount of notoriety following his Hugo nominated work Space Raptor Butt Invasion.
The runaway success of the series seemed to be motivated by both humor and curiosity.
The very concept of Dinosaur Erotica is meant to spark our curiosity, our humor, and for some, outrage. The premise, on its very face, is deliberately ridiculous. That type of outward oddity can easily tempt a reader just to see how on earth someone could accomplish this story. You might ask “how does a T-rex seduce a human woman?” and feel the need to read it just to assuage your curiosity.
Turns out the T-rex is telepathic and has magic genitalia.
Some of us have just become unbelievably calloused to a lot of romance and erotica. We’ve become thrill-seekers, striving for even the most macabre of the erotic. Sometimes we look at books with absurd concepts and kind of go “okay then, let’s get weird,” in the way that some horror fanatics are always looking for more gore or fright. No one actually wants to have sex with a dinosaur, we just want to see how transgressive Sims and Branwen can get (4).
Some people are also just into the un-typical, be that zombies or krakens or what have you. Whatever tickles your pickle.
I bring this up because the meme-ification of Dixon’s series has familiar overtones to the Dinosaur Porn phenomenon. People are pulled in by the outwardly ridiculous premise and the hilarity of the covers and titles.
Flow like a harpoon daily and nightly”
Despite these outward similarities, Dixon’s Ice Planet Barbarians is far less transgressive and instead is more determined to explore common desires rather than humor readers with taboo ones.
They Did The Monster Mash
When it comes to monster romance, there are “monsters,” and there are monsters. There are light monster romances where the romantic monster leads mostly resemble regular humans in most aspects. They might have a few extra features over the original model, fangs, tails, ect. Or they may be shape-shifters or their monstrous attributes may be more malleable, like werewolves, dragon-shifters, or aliens in disguise.
In many of these scenarios, the physiology is similar enough that sex in the books is functionally familiar to the way two or more humans might have sex. It’s rare that intimacy scenes take place while the shifter is in their monstrous form, for example. Or the minor physical discrepancies are evocative of traditional eroticism or they serve to enhance the other-worldly “beauty” of the monster.
The vampires in Twilight are a good example of a monster romance at this end of the genre (5). Vampires already have pre-established erotic contexts in the modern consciousness. Their abnormalities simply heighten and highlight pre-existing, common ideas, concepts, and images of the erotic. Vampires are mouth-centric, and their fangs bring attention back to how they feed, and rather than this promoting a singular fear response (although it does and can in much media) it also brings attention to and reinterprets orality in sexual encounters. The ways in which vampires feed is reminiscent not just of kissing but of oral stimulation, and how the mouth is a sexual body part. They also tend to feed on or from common erogenous zones, the neck, the wrists, collars and breasts, thighs, etc.
As vampires already exist in the common sexual imagination, Meyer’s addition of the much-maligned sparkling skin is meant to both enhance their other-worldliness, their non-humanness, in a way that is in line with our already established popular concepts of beauty.
Then there are the more transgressive forms of monster romance wherein the monstrous object of fascination or desire is particularly, physiologically distant. Such as the aforementioned Dinosaur erotica books, wherein the draw and curiosity is more about the distance away from humanity as much as possible. These monsters do not necessarily evoke a common sexual response the way that Vampires, Elves, or bipedal Werewolves do. These are the thrill-seeking and curious corners of erotic monster romance.
Tiffany Robert’s Ensnared and Ann Aguirre’s Strange Love are good examples of this section of the spectrum. The monstrous object of desire in Ensnared is a slightly humanoid spider-creature that is more akin to a spider-centaur. In Strange Love, it’s a bipedal, armored alien reminiscent of Predator from the Predator movies. Both of these have romances with typical, human females.
Both of the heroes are sentient, do communicate (and are also wildly sweet and considerate), but there is less stress on evoking the erotic from common imagery, instead it is about expanding and creating the erotic through the enhancement of foreignness and strangeness. It is a challenge in taste, and an exploration of kink that is familiar to many subcategories of the erotic.
Both works seek to challenge the reader, and push the boundaries of what is erotic. Ensnared goes out of its way to note how its lead uses his mandibles and additional legs in sex. And while aspects of the leads’ sexual encounter are consistent with human sex with complimentary genitalia, (penis-in-vagina sex), or is evocative of some human practice, such as the use of webbing as a stand-in for shibari-style rope bondage, this will be undeniably strange and challenging to many readers.
Aguirre’s protagonists don’t have complimentary genitalia, to begin with, and they have to invent new sexual practices in order to express their desire. In some ways, the sex in that book is reminiscent of lesbian sex, with the use of manual stimulation, but Aguirre’s writing focus was less on maintaining the familiarity of sexual practice and instead on expressing how different it was to our common ideas about sex. There is a lot of talk about spores and the chemical reaction occurring than just the descriptions of the physical interaction.
hitsujiwarui …Blurred for the Medium Censors. 18+
Horns In All The Right Places
While the outward appearance of the “aliens” or Sa-Khui in Ice Planet Barbarians may seem jarring at first, we tend to find that their difference of appearance is less about enhancing strangeness, and more about evoking pre-existing, common images of eroticism and generally acceptable forms of sexuality.
Yes, the Sa-khui have blue skin, horns, and a tail, but they are also described as heavily muscular and athletic, in a way that is easily akin to any human male romance cover model.
Other physical differences are meant to enhance traditionally sexual norms. Their skin is fuzzy and reminiscent of “velvet”. They have ridged foreheads and chests that come into play when describing nipple stimulation. Even the aforementioned horns and tails end up serving a purpose. The horns are for holding on, and the tail is sometimes used to apply other stimulation.
Then there are the alterations that turn the Sa-khui into walking sex-toy catalog entries. Their tongues and penises are ridged (6). They also have size-appropriate equipment to go along with their 7-foot-tall stature.
And then there’s the infamous spur. The spurs a is a small, blunt horn projection above the penis that ultimately serves as a clitoral stimulation and anal stimulation in some positions.
Even the alien symbiote all the humans and Sa-khui have is meant to enhance the sexuality of the series. The Khui locates an ideal mate with “resonance,” when that mate is located and there is a period of corresponding fertility. The khui causes a frenzied sex drive in the resonating pair, and it denotes resonance by vibrating in their chest. Aside from the enhanced sex drive, the vibration itself is described as its own aphrodisiac, often providing subtle nipple stimulation.
Ultimately, the “alien” features of the Sa-Khui are less alien than enhanced versions of common objects of sexual desire. The described sexuality in the book is also largely, socially-accepted, non-transgressive, and heteronormative. Dozens of abducted young women end up crash-landed on a planet and not a lesbian among them. Outside of the Sa-Khui, the overwhelming majority of the cast is white.
The sex acts are also patterned and normative, varying between penis-in-vagina insertion, oral sex, manual stimulation, masturbation, with some mild anal stimulation. The majority of the positions are missionary.
There is nothing wrong with any of this, in particular in a romance series which has garnered some cross-genre appeal. But I want to make it clear that it is not the actual sex that is transgressive or challenging in the series. It’s also not the aliens either, whose outward appearance does not fully disguise how they are conventional objects of desire.
Dixon further separates any lingering dissonance by making the mating a result of the symbiote, effectively removing choice, and therefore some discomfort or guilt with this cross-species copulation (7).
It is the setting and the set-up of the series that belies its taboo concepts. Rather than the objects of desire being the vehicle for subversion, it is the way in which Dixon takes barbarism and tries to remove it from its problematic history in a way to explore the exotic.
Leather, Loincloths, and the Exotic
Romance readers (sex-positive activists, and the kink community as well) have long known that our sexual longings, our desires, our attractions, will not always line up with our ideologies. And that while that even the imagined desire is something altogether different than what would even pursue if given the chance.
This tension, between what some of us find pleasure in and the way it contradicts our principles, is an interesting space. Dixon makes Not-Hoth terrifying, but it also serves as an escape. Sometimes the human women complain about the loss of creature comforts, they still in large part, manage to adapt very quickly. It is akin to other power- fantasies, such as those that have typically been tailored to male readers.
What does deserve some scrutiny is the use of “primitivism” and “barbarism” in this series in reference to Sa-Khui society. The ways in which the Sa-Khui are portrayed, their social norms, habits, and such do not exist in a vacuum and draw heavily upon portrayals of “primitive” societies.
Tha Sa-Khui are clearly based on depictions of prehistoric peoples. Past that, I could not help but notice the ways in which their necessary survival habits were modeled after the real survival habits of other contemporary indigenous groups. Just on the surface, their use of dung as fuel is used in nomadic groups in Mongolia. The ways in which Dixon describes clothing including the use of stitching as decorative onto leather and fur, brings to mind Northern indigenous groups, (Inuit for instance, Ainu as well). It’s a rich set of world building, and it helps ground a lot of the more fantastical elements.
To be clear, the Sa-Khui are not a parallel to any one indigenous group. They are clearly a chimera society modeled off of several peoples.
What may concern us is less the direct parallels but how this fits into an entire history of fetishism of non-European or post-European groups. Groups that are not only depicted as “primitive” but also “barbaric,” and how that barbarism exists to be objectified and sexualized. This objectification also gets thorny when we are talking about race in relation to this.
We can take Tarzan, for example. Edgar Rice Burrough’s eponymous hero may have existed as a power fantasy for male readers, he also had/has a stimulating effect on heterosexual women and queer consumers. He is therefore an apt example of the ways in which “primitive” behavior is at once, exoticized and fetishized, while still wholly distanced from people of color.
Steve Rose’s “From Tarzan to Avatar: The Problem With ‘The White Man In The Jungle’” notes how racial dichotomies have been formed in most jungle films between white Tarzan and his non-white counterparts.
“What’s missing from all these movies is the point of view of the people who actually live in the jungle — or rainforest, to use a less loaded word. Too often they are treated as exotic set-dressing, given nothing to do but stare threateningly at their European interlopers, do their manual labour for them and die by their weaponry — and if they get a single line of dialogue they’re lucky.”
In contrast to native peoples and their depictions, Tarzan functions as the fetishized “barbarian,” but in a way that for white women, gave them permission to desire him because of his whiteness. Tarzan’s primitivism serves as the desirable element, but it has historically been his whiteness that has allowed him to be an object of acceptable sexual consumption.
To be clear, non-white groups have had a history of sexualization and objectification, and it is impossible to separate this from a history of colonialism and genocide. But that objectification did not allow for even the fictionalization of love. Tarzan allowed white women to not only imagine a sexual partnership but an emotional and committed one because they had the same racial background.
Beyond whatever parallels might be drawn from the Sa-Khui and other peoples, their actions are supposed to be read as barbaric at times. Some of the Sa-Khui men are much better at communicating and respecting boundaries, but in almost every book, a woman ends up kidnapped. They are depicted as being sexually desperate and impassioned, driven to almost madness from resonance. Literature-wise, it makes them very compelling, and alluring in that very real Tarzan way.
Rather than painting her Not-Hoth natives white, Dixon, either deliberately or unintentionally, attempts to remove the Sa-Khui from this context completely by giving them a blue (paint) job. Removing the primitives from familiar racial groups, and even from the planet itself, allows readers to engage in this primitive fantasy without having to fully confront how it exists in their home-planet power dynamics. Whether or not this separation is successful is up for debate.
It is necessary that Dixon undercuts these associations even further by shifting the perspective in the books. The Sa-Khui protagonists get to tell their side of the story equally with their earthling mates. This does humanize them, although not all of the books are equal in how it applies barbarism.
Perhaps The Monster (Lover) Was Inside Us All Along
I will confess to finding my own, let’s say interest, in the Sa-Khui uncomfortable for this reason. At the end of the day, there is something internally desirable about fictional blue aliens that hunt in an arctic wilderness with stone-age tools. Maybe it’s because it is so far removed that it softens the discomfort with the colonial history of depictions of the “primitive”. Maybe I watched Disney’s Tarzan too much as a kid and now have a thing for loincloths. The jury is out on that one.
At the end of the day, most of the kitsch monster elements do little to challenge the way a reader might feel about desire, as much of their anatomy or society already exist in the public praxis of desire. That is including the problematic elements. Perhaps I am also too desensitized to see this as transgressive.
Perhaps it wasn’t challenging, but any book series that allows us to interrogate our internal desires is pretty hot. Even on an ice plant.
Notes:
(1) Tad Williams once said this about writing genre, “I can do anything I want …. as long as every 5 or 10 pages something really horrible tries to eat my main character.” Dixon took a similar direction.
(2) There is a ton of writing on how Romance is perceived and its market power, but I suggest Maya Rodale’s Dangerous Books For Girls: The Bad Reputation of Romance Novels, Explained.
(3)Yes, the women are technically the “aliens” since they are the foreign entities but that distinction is not corrected.
(4) And if you are one of those people that gets hot and bothered over Cretaceous creatures, know that you can go watch Jurassic Park on your own.
(5) Twilight is easily the most accessible example here and this is not an endorsement of the series.
(6) Insert “for her pleasure” joke here.
(7) There have been studies as to why women often have non-consensual or forced sex fantasies, and some of that may have to do with blame-avoidance in a society that typically shames women for sexual desire and removing choice in a fantasy setting can alleviate that. None of the women who fantasize about that actually want to be raped or have forced sexual encounters. Moreault, D., & Follingstad, D. R. (1978). Sexual fantasies of females as a function of sex guilt and experimental response cues. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 46(6), 1385–1393.
Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” We use affiliate links and Patreon to pay our writers. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
