The Copulation Explosion by Gardner F. Fox

It looked like a cross between a man and a grizzly bear.  There was keen intelligence behind those grey eyes that stared at me so steadily.

I held out my hand, palm up. 

"Wait, please, I must talk to you, it's very important."

He ignored me, turning to run lightly off toward the woods.  I ran after him, slipping and sliding in my Palizzio pumps. 

Recently our man tarbandu pointed us to a 2024 interview of Betsy Wollheim by Darrell Schweitzer.  One of the many individuals subjected to withering assault in the course of the interview is Gardner F. Fox, a man perhaps most famous for his work at DC comics but also a prolific writer of unprestigious paperbacks.  This brought Fox back to mind; you may recall I read one of his science fiction paperbacks, Escape Across the Cosmos, back in 2015, and one of his sword and sorcery books, Kothar and the Wizard Slayer, in 2018.

Then, just a few days ago, bopping around twitter (AKA X, the everything app) looking at posts (I call them tweets) by people of whom Betsy Wollheim would no doubt disapprove, I saw the cover of a Fox novel written under the penname Rod Gray that featured a half-naked girl brandishing some kind of futuristic pistol.  This intriguing artifact was one of the two dozen or so The Lady from L.U.S.T titles, which I guessed was a series of sleaze paperbacks spoofing The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and James Bond and The Avengers and Danger Man and Secret Agent and all those hip fun 1960s espionage properties.  I decided to sample one of these silly-looking things, curious as to what extent their pages consisted of broad humor, hard core pornography, and actual SF or thriller content, and wondering how much much effort Fox put into them, where they fell on the range from terribly shoddy to somewhat credible.  Most of the Lady from L.U.S.T novels seemed to have as their foundational material stuff I find boring, like cops chasing drug dealers or motorcycle gangs, so I settled on volume 14, The Copulation Explosion, which promised to deal with the kinds of science fiction and horror themes I find engaging.

I read a scan of an edition of The Copulation Explosion printed in 1974 by Belmont Tower that bears number 50678 and a blonde model gripping a long-barreled pistol.  The cover that enticed me to read The Copulation Explosion, however, is that of what I believe is the first edition, printed by Belmont in 1970 and featuring a man in a gorilla costume and a blonde model wearing a revolver.  I found my free scan of the real life '74 BT paperback at the Gardner F. Fox website, where they sell electronic versions of all the The Lady from L.U.S.T. titles and piles of other Fox fiction besides.

The Copulation Explosion begins as legit science fiction with a prologue in the third person about a guy waking up in a dark room, his memory almost entirely gone, his body very unfamiliar.  He realizes his body has been radically altered, and we readers realize the red cover edition of The Lady from L.U.S.T. #14 that convinced me to read this thing was selling us a bill of goods.  The scientists didn't turn this guy into a gorilla, but gave him the powers of a multitude of animals, like superior sight, hearing and smell as well as great strength and agility, and he doesn't think about rape even once, just uses his animal abilities to escape the facility he is in without seriously harming anybody.

The text of The Copulation Explosion is punctuated by several short chapters like the prologue in which we see things more or less from the point of view of the altered man.  But most of the text is a first-person narrative delivered by Eve Drum, secret agent of the US government agency known as the League of Underground Spies and Terrorists.  The childishly silly name of the spy agency is, like the lame pun title of the book, one of the rare pieces of broad humor in the novel.  The Copulation Explosion is light-hearted and silly, but there are relatively few jokes and Fox's book doesn't feel like a satire or a spoof, but a poorly constructed but sincere science fiction story, one with both a Frankenstein theme and an alien invasion theme, to which long gratuitous sex scenes have been bolted on.  When Fox engages in social criticism, it is not with sarcasm or irony or righteous passion but with straightforward lectures or statements about how pollution is a problem, overpopulation is a problem, a modern society should embrace homosexuality, and religion is hypocrisy.  We also get weak but sincere science lectures.

As for the sex scenes, they depict casual sexual encounters meant to be sweet and life affirming; the sex in The Copulation Explosion is not edgy or perverse or fetishistic, but tame and even wholesome--there is no rape and the only bestiality is in a dream.  Fox gets into a lot of sex philosophy, referring with specificity to the erotic techniques of the East and suggesting sex represents healthy human efforts to achieve spiritual connection.  The sex scenes are also totally gratuitous, being totally divorced from the plot--Eve doesn't seduce a guy to get the secret plans or anything like that, and none of the characters' actions are determined by their desire for love or sex or reaction to a sexual encounter.

The Copulation Explosion is poorly constructed and the pacing is not good; there is little tension, the narrative doesn't build up to much of a climax, and in addition to the gratuitous sex scenes we get a lot of superfluous visual description of clothes, landscapes, rooms; maybe Fox is trying to emulate or gently spoof the high fashion and high-class and exotic locales of cool spy fiction like the James Bond novels and films.  Of course, endless images of women's curves, expensive attire, autumn foliage, a muscular monster and a shiny spaceship work better in a visual medium like a film or a comic book than in a novel.  

The action scenes are perfunctory.  The sex scenes are OK, though sweet vanilla rather than nasty or raunchy.  The plot is full of holes and reminiscent of a comic book or children's TV show--when a monster is on the loose or aliens attack, the government and society just kind of look on as two or three main characters handle the situation.  The plot doesn't feel like it was outlined beforehand, doesn't feel like a coherent whole that pursues some theme or makes some argument, but just a bunch of stuff cobbled together.  Characters  are introduced in the beginning and disappear without having played any role in the plot and new characters arrive near the end to occupy necessary roles as required.  

I can't recommend The Copulation Explosion, but it is not terrible; I didn't find it annoying, just bland.  I found the novel's idiosyncrasies, like all the references to brand name clothes and to women's bodies, faintly amusing rather than irritating, though perhaps anti-consumerism and feminist types might find this exasperating.  I certainly don't regret exploring another cranny of the vast field of genre literature.  We'll call The Copulation Explosion barely acceptable--I didn't find the experience of reading a The Lady from L.U.S.T. novel painful, but I doubt I'm not going to read any others.

For a blow by blow summary and additional criticism of this tepid and forgettable sex and spy and sci-fi novel, read on.

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Eve's case officer is apparently her boyfriend, and in Chapter One he briefs her on the next phase of her career at L.U.S.T. while they are on a date at a fancy restaurant and then at her place having sex in at times unusual positions ("el keuruchi" of the "Arab erotologists" and "love glove...a position we'd stumbled into quite by accident.")  Eve is being transferred from International to Science because some researchers have lost their prize specimen, a man named Kenneth Frost, AKA the Un-human, and asked the head of L.U.S.T., a guy called "The General," for the aid of their best agent--Eve is of course the General's top operative.

(Even though we are given the idea that Eve and the case officer are going steady and in love, we never see him again--when Eve interacts with HQ in the future, it is directly with The General, and when she celebrates the salvation of Earth from space aliens and mourns the self-sacrificing death of Frost it is with some other guy with a joke name whom she just met.  A conventional novel would provide some kind of resolution for such a relationship after devoting several pages to setting it up.)  

Frost had been given only six months to live by the doctors, so he consented to being a guinea pig for experiments involving injecting humans with the glands and hormones of animals, an exploration of the possibilities of providing astronauts with abilities that might facilitate their survival on other planets.  When Frost died they put him in cold storage, but it seems he was only in a coma--one benefit conferred upon him by the injections was great durability and he woke up after some kind of transformation and escaped into the nearby wilderness.

As perhaps we might expect of a comic book guy, Copulation Explosion is a very visual novel, with many descriptions of people's bodies and attire, and not just all the sexy women but also the men and Frost the Un-human, his golden fur and pointy ears and so forth.  In Chapter Two, when Eve starts her investigations up in Pennsylvania at the Bionics Research Institute, we get full descriptions of fall foliage and 18th-century buildings as well as of female scientist Rhea and a mysterious woman who claims to be Mrs. Frost.  We get science lectures as Rhea and the male scientists explain to Eve and Mrs. Frost, whom Eve and Rhea suspect is some kind of imposter and spy, the Institute's work and what they did to Ken Frost.  All through the lectures "Mrs. Frost" is flirting and showing off her body, trying to manipulate the men, who suspect she is just a gold digger trying to get her hands on the Frost estate, which is worth a pretty sum, Frost himself having been a successful scientist.           

One of the male scientists is a thirty-something virgin, and Chapter Three is devoted to Eve and this guy having what amounts to a pleasant date; they eat a nice meal and then Eve introduces him to physical love, basing their activities on a Chinese pillow book.  (I recall a pillow book playing a prominent role in You Only Live Twice, and wonder if Fox was inspired by Ian Fleming to include so much pillow book material here.)

The morning after his first exposures to the joys of sex, that scientist is murdered--Eve suspects the mysterious "Mrs. Frost."  There is a car chase, Rhea behind the wheel of her Mustang (this book is full of fashionable brand names) with Eve in the passenger seat and the purported wife of Frost and suspected killer in her Camaro.  The bogus Mrs. Frost tries to shoot our heroines but Frost the Un-human himself bursts out of the woods and joins the car chase--he can run 80mph on clear ground.  Frost kills the imposter in the brief fourth chapter, one of those written in the third person.

(Later it is revealed that this Mrs. Frost was an alien spy.)

Eve tries to communicate with Frost and the seven-foot tall man-beast, whom Eve describes as being like a giant teddy bear, grabs her and carries her off to a cabin.  Then to a nuclear power plant, which he sabotages with a ray gun.  Frost can't speak, but through gestures he tries to tell Eve something important, apparently that space aliens or a meteor shower are threatening the Earth.  They go to a cave.  Fox describes the cave, as he did the cabin, in superfluous detail, and Eve works at teaching Frost how to speak.  But then hunters catch up to the couple (the text suggests that Fox and his editor think a rifle and a shotgun are one and the same thing, tsk, tsk) and Frost flees, leaving Eve behind.  

In Chapter Six, Eve hitches a ride from a hunter back to where she is staying, at Rhea's house, where she has lesbian sex with Rhea.  As with the male scientist, the tone or theme of this sex scene is Eve generously educating and comforting a sex starved individual, and Fox again throws around italicized foreign terms for body parts and sexual techniques.  Fox takes the opportunity of a lesbian tryst to tell us that due to its familiarity with science and greater intelligence, today's society is more sympathetic to homosexuality, and also to take a cursory swipe at religion.  

Having telephoned him before getting busy with Rhea, Eve returns to New York to talk to The General face to face.  While she is in his office the biggest news event in history occurs--an alien spaceship approaches Earth!  Fox namechecks "Hugo Gernsbach" and Thomas More as Eve wonders if the aliens will create a utopia on Earth.  But then she remembers that Frost the Un-human was trying to warn her that the aliens were dangerous!  The chapter ends with the huge silver cube that is the alien craft landing in Washington D.C., with Eve and the boss of L.U.S.T. among the teeming crowds gathered to witness the event.

In Chapter Seven the aliens emerge to meet the President and they are just like humans, the men looking like Hollywood actors and the women looking like Playboy bunnies.  Frost, who after all can run at 80mph, bursts onto the scene, mauls one of the male aliens and is shot by the Secret Service but manages to run off.  Brief Chapter Eight is one of those the third person chapters, and in it we learn that the Un-human wrecked the nuclear power station because the aliens were drawing energy from it to their cube ship because the cube's power source was temporarily down.  

In Chapter Nine, Eve finds Frost in his hideaway in the Pennsylvania mountains near the Bionics Research Institute, wounded.  Through pantomime, somehow, the Un-human explains to Eve everything she needs to know about the aliens of the silver cube.  These jokers are are not in fact human at all, but able to manipulate their "molecular structure" so they look human.  Their home planet is overcrowded ("same as Earth," thinks Eve), so they plan to colonize ours.  The silver cube includes the equipment to alter Earth's atmosphere so it will kill us and more comfortably suit them.  

Frost's injuries fester and he lapses into delirium and then a coma, but not before the sight of Eve undressing gives him a colossal erection, the biggest Eve has ever seen--and she's seen quite a few!  Eve resists the powerful urge to relieve the Un-human's sexual tension, but having sex with the seven-foot tall, six-hundred-pound hairy hunk of muscle is certainly on her mind--she dreams about just such a coupling at night.

Eve gets the unconscious beast-man to the Institute and she watches as they operate on him.  Then she saves him by shooting down with her Belgian Bulldog revolver an alien, disguised as a human doctor, who is trying to poison Frost.  Dead, the imposter reverts to BEM form.

Chapter Ten is another Frost chapter, a longer one.  Frost, inspired by the sight of Eve's naked body, remembers his last sexual encounter and we get a flashback sex scene featuring a lonely five-foot-three scientist and a lonely overweight waitress, a sex scene into which Fox integrates musings about "the Eternal Plan" of which we are all part, how all men and women are lonely and seek through love and sex to reunite with a missing part of themselves, and how the sex act represents the male desire to return to the womb.      

In Chapter Eleven, Eve convinces her boss to assign to her a man to test the air around the spaceship.  Sure enough, after some misleading readings and a lot of time spent flirting, the technician, who bears the name Ted White (one of Fox's little jokes), discovers the aliens are trying to poison us.  The alien command team is staying not in the cube but in a fancy hotel, and Eve goes there and shoots them down with her revolver.  Eve also figures out the mystery of how Frost learned about the aliens' plans--his injections somehow conferred upon him telepathic powers and he fortuitously picked up the aliens' own psychic transmissions.

In Chapter Twelve the military tries to destroy the poison-spewing silver cube, but it is impervious to all Earth weapons.  Frost the Un-human appears and with the alien ray gun boards the cube.  He proceeds to fly off with it and dive right into the sun.  The novel ends with Ted White and Eve eating a meal at a fancy restaurant and then having sex, but we readers are denied an explicit sex scene with Ted.