The Mating Center by Frank Belknap Long

"We are not sex-privileged, and the penalty for our rebellion, if we are overtaken by the savagery which the Monitors call justice, will not be a severe reprimand or even a long term of imprisonment. The penalty will be death."

Frank Belknap Longapalooza continues!  Today we look at a scan at the internet archive of 1961's The Mating Center, a novel brought to us by Chariot Books, who published Long's Woman From Another Planet in 1960, a book we read in 2022. 

The Mating Center has a pedestrian SF plot--people rebelling against the authoritarian government of the future which severely limits sexual activity--and an obvious if commendable message--that love and sex are good and give meaning to life--and these serve as a kind of skeleton upon which Long hangs a series of mediocre scenes of sex and violence that seek to appeal to the ordinary interests of thriller readers as well as a broad array of fetishes.  The book is pretty shoddy, with lots of typos and inconsistencies in the text that should have been ironed out during copy-editing and proofreading.  For example, early on we are told that the story takes place in 2061 and of our main character that "Theoretically all physical desire had been eliminated from his biogenetic heritage for four generations," but then that the current social structure has "stood firm for four centuries" and later a character notes that "for three centuries we have tried to eradicate the love impulse by rigorously controlled selective mating...."  Maybe "2061" is a typo, or maybe all those "centuries" were meant to be "generations."  Whatever the case, it is clear that Long and Chariot Books were not putting in the hours needed to provide SF readers and horndogs the best possible product.  (We'll leave to the cynics whether Mating Center is the product its readers deserve.)   

It is the tyrannical future!  The prologue and the first chapter of The Mating Center inform us that the current economy rests on a foundation of specialization--every man and every woman is genetically engineered and eugenically bred to fulfil a particular duty.  One in fifty people is given the task of reproducing; these lucky people are allowed to go to the mating center to create new citizens.  (Let's not do the math required to show if you can maintain a population for "generations" or "centuries" if only 2% of women of that population are giving birth.)  Everybody else is forbidden to have sex, and in general it is no big deal because these non-sex-privileged people, due to their genetic makeup, feel no sexual desire, can only understand it intellectually.

Until recently--it seems people are getting horny all over and the World State government is having to quash rebellions all over the place as people try to have sex with each other and fall head over heels in love.  (One of Long's failings in The Mating Center is that he never suggests why the anti-sex program, after working for "centuries" or "generations," is all of a sudden collapsing now.  Probably Long should have founded people's lack of sex drive not on eugenic breeding but on drugs in the water supply that have run out or were sabotaged by elite dissidents or something.)  

The prologue is set in an auditorium where a man with authority is giving a speech via TV screen to an assembly of Monitors, this society's commissars and administrators.  One Monitor, an attractive woman, suddenly starts yelling that love is essential and denying it is to deny joy and creativity and so forth; she declares that the people are rising up against the anti-sex policy and then she strips nude right there in the auditorium to ram her point home.  

Chapter Five (if you'll permit me to skip ahead) illustrates another act of rebellion.  The government maintains pleasure boats upon which people can relax and do healthy exercises, but everyone on this boat has become sexually aware, even the undercover security guard who has been sexually harassing the women aboard, trying to blackmail them into having sex with him.  The civilians murder the guard and then the couples all have sex; while they sleep afterwards, government aircraft bomb the boat, annihilating them.  As is his wont, Long overexplains and overdescribes everything and we hear about each plunge of the knife into the guard and each little move of the attacking aircraft, and are provided lengthy passages of dialogue from the lovers that I guess are supposed to appeal to reader fetishes and offer Long's theories about sex and love: there are descriptions of unwanted sexual advances, discussion of how virginity is more to be expected from a woman than a man, a woman's expression of her desire to be taught about sex by a man, etc.

The spine of The Mating Center is the narrative of our heroes, Teleman and Alicia, as they strive to evade the authorities.  Teleman, an engineer has inexplicably begun having erotic desires, and in Chapter One he stares at the women he sees as he rides the slidewalk to work, especially the women who are permitted to go to the mating center and who wear flattering or revealing clothes.  Alicia, "an emotional therapy specialist" who also lacks sex privileges but has started getting the sex urge, sees Teleman staring at women and she throws herself at him when there are few other people nearby.  They start groping each other and making out, only to be spotted by a security guard and a skinny old woman who turns out be one of the most senior of the Monitors in civilian dress, Monitor 6 Y 9!

"Unlawful love-making would destroy all specialization and without specialization we would all perish."

Through the first two thirds or so of the book we follow the adventures of Teleman and Alicia as they outfight the security guard and have an impromptu debate with Monitor 6 Y 9, Alicia using her psychological manipulation skills to humiliate her, and then take cover in a forest, eluding high-tech pursuit (scanners, airborne soldiers, fifty-foot tall war robots) bug finding time to do a lot of kissing and declaring their love for each other.  Eventually they lose their virginity.

In the forest Teleman and Alicia come upon a house or cottage to which two sex-privileged lovers have retired to have sex because they think having sex in the mating center cramps their style.  Teleman and the man have a fight, then agree to work together to evade the authorities--Teleman and Alicia take the sex-privileged couples' clothes and ID.  Melodramatically, a government bomb kills the woman and her man collapses into sobs and Long provides us talk about what it is like when you lose your beloved to death.

The Teleman-Alicia narrative is broken up by the extraneous boat episode and multiple chapters starring Monitor 6 Y 9, who is commanding the pursuit of Teleman and Alicia from her office.  She watches screens, issues orders, yells at her subordinates, that kind of thing.  A couple of lovers captured by her troops are brought in to her and she whips the naked back of the woman; her man jumps 6Y9 and he is shot dead by a guard.  Two gratuitous chapters are devoted to 6 Y 9's observation of an experiment.  The World State's scientists have created a hairy misshapen Neanderthal-visaged acromegaliac giant by taking a typical man and spending months messing with his pituitary glands and conducting upon him a whole battery of other surgeries; this man is intended to serve as proof of concept for a new population of superior citizens, people totally devoid of sexual desire.  As a test, the white lab coat crew brings in the most beautiful woman in the world, whom the government has trained in the ancient art of seducing men!  (Why does an anti-sex regime spend resources teaching the hottest chick in the world how to be even hotter?  I guess this is an example of that "gain of function" research we heard so much about a couple of years ago.)  This sex goddess does a striptease before the monster, to see if he remains unmoved--when he jumps up from his hospital bed to grab the girl and start kissing her and groping her the government flunkies know they have failed.

Teleman and Alicia in their disguise make it to a mating center where they sneak around, investigating, finding the huge nursery where the government raises babies wholesale.  When Monitor 6 Y 9 shows up we get speeches from a distraught mother about how the government has stolen from women the right to the joys of motherhood and a rebuttal from Monitor 6 Y 9, who maintains that sex is a disgusting necessary evil.  Alicia knocks 6 Y 9 out with a series of blows, and then the agonized mother explains to our heroes that the sex-privileged are also rebellious--they are permitted to have sex but are denied the ability to build relationships with their own kids--as well as a third of the guards in the mating centers; this dissident proposes to set up a transmitter so Teleman and Alicia, whom she immediately identifies as natural leaders, can broadcast a speech which will trigger an uprising.  The last two chapters of The Mating Center show us the ruler of the World State wondering what to do about the rebellion and then getting killed in an explosion and then Monitor 6 Y 9 being killed while in an aircraft--it is suggested that Teleman is at the controls of the aircraft that shoots her down, or, that in her insanity, she thinks it is him.

The Mating Center is better than the two Gothic romances we recently read by Long because it has an elementary conventional plot structure and a plot that is driven by the personalities and decisions of the main characters, as well as a clear ideology, all things that Legacy of Evil and The Witch Tree largely or entirely lack.  But The Mating Center is still bad.  It is poorly written and contains too much extraneous material--superfluous chapters like the boat and the science experiment chapters, and in the main chapters unnecessary descriptions of stuff like shafts of morning sunlight--Proust or Nabokov can get away with describing sunlight or a reflection in a puddle for a paragraph but Long is not in their class as a prose stylist and those sorts of prose poems don't contribute to the kind of book this is, a book that seeks to entertain with sex and violence and hopes to offer speculations about human life under an even worse government than the one we know.  Long thought of himself as an artist, as a poet, as we see reflected in Lovecraft's letters that mention him, and Long's writing is ambitious when it comes to style, but the text of The Mating Center suggest his abilities did not match his ambition, or that he didn't put in the time needed on this project to meet his potential.  Consider the book's stylistic nadir, this inexplicably inapposite metaphor:

His fist became a magnet and his opponent an iron robot with swiftly moving appendages and when the magnet crashed into the iron the appendages jerked convulsively and the robot figure went toppling backwards.

The whole point of a magnet is that it attracts something and/or sticks to it, but a fist in general does not attract or hold fast to things and in this sentence in particular we see the fist neither attract nor hold fast to something but actually violently repel it.  Embarrassing.

The pacing of Long's novel is also bad; the novel as a whole feels long and slow, and in the middle of individual scenes that should be fast paced, like chases and fights, Long inflicts long digressions upon us or has characters stop to give long speeches, so the reader gets no sense that the characters, who are in danger, feel any fear or desperation.

So, thumbs down for The Mating Center, though, as I have suggested, this thing is marginally better than the Long Gothics we read recently.  And don't think that Longapalooza is over--we've got more SF from FBL coming up in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!