Dear gentle persons,
Times have changed a great deal in the past 63 years. What was once relegated to under the table is now seen in full detailed view. In full focus. Unashamed. I am proud to see into print for the first time since a limited run in 1956 the groundbreaking Sex Robots at the Edge of Infinity. It is a labor of love. Here, for the first time, the full and uncensored text.
First, you may know me by my previous works: Tragic Stories Disguised as Jokes; Scenic Cesspools; Perils of Free Thought; or At the Existentialist Sandwich Shop. But this is something different. This is a novel by my father, with whom I share a name, a general likeness and a passion. A work so ahead of its time it could only be seen now, after America’s fitful sexual awakening. Yes, he was known throughout the sixties and seventies for his string of low budget yet high quality eight and sixteen millimeter films. Some of the first and some of the last films to be shown at Times Square peepshows and X-rated theaters throughout America showing film. Entertainment shot on film. Those were the times. He spanned the golden age of films in this genre, evolving from hard documentaries, such as Sexual Freedom in Finland: cold truth exposed to the simple naturist themes of the nudie-cutie Nudes Go Holiday Bare to the later, harder edged modern western Blow Out at the O.K. Corral, which won best film shot on film, 1984 from SCREW magazine.
But this book. This. Erotic. Masterpiece. My father wrote this, his only novel under his own name, just to see it rejected time and again by a publishing industry which did not understand the evolving tastes of the general public. Refusing to be licked, he published a small sought-after run himself, numbered at a scant and unjust 150 copies. One was sent to the library of congress. One was found in the private collection of Barney Rosset, who sent letters from 1969 to 1973 begging my father for the rights to the book for Venus Library, the classic erotic imprint of the well-respected Grove Press. My father denied him because he felt I Am Curious–Yellow1 should have been more explicit in its direction. Father was always pushing society’s boundaries toward that future edge; from the inherent modernist Marxism of Sexual Freedom in Finland, partially funded by the Communist Party of Great Britain, to the vegetarianism of Nudes Go Holiday Bare to the transgender barkeep of Blow Out at the O.K. Corral. The copyright to this book was always lovingly kept up to date, even as copies grew scarcer than ever and fetched even greater prices.
It is now that this story is ready to be told. Now this can be accepted as a modern work of literature. Not so far from my own work. Are you not, as a modern person, lonely? Alienated? Do you not wish, as we all do, for betterment? Solace? Dare I say, for love?
This book is designed in the following way: Sex Robots is on this side, and on the flip side is an adult book written in 1977 under the nom de plume Jacqueline Haze titled Cuddle Party. Cuddle Party, published twenty-one years later, is included here for it serves as a prequel to Sex Robots while also expanding the themes and providing an alternate ending to the saga.
Cuddle Party is head and shoulders above other works of the time in its genre. Its theme of longing and human decency in a world made mad with alienation share some similarities with Dostoyevsky’s master work The Idiot. While most of the genre at that time was written on the cheap, in writer sweatshops controlled by the mob, eight writers to a wooden table bent over typewriters, grinding, churning out text, I remember my father’s office: the smell of paper. The old pock-marked mahogany desk. The world book encyclopedia from 1957. The typewriter. The poster for the 1976 film The Opening of Misty Beethoven, for which he had assisted in the writing though his work went uncredited. Always at the left of the desk a worn copy of The Russian Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg. Her quote, “You foolish lackeys! Your ‘order’ is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will 'rise up again, clashing its weapons,’ and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!”
As I said the other day to some people in a park, “I personally believe Sex Robots at the Edge of Infinity is the best novel ever written about sex robots adrift in a lonely universe populated by highly advanced fungi. And it would be… hard… to shake me from this conviction. Thank you for inviting me to your bible study.”