Electra Galaxy's Mr. Interstellar Feller

Thank you to the anonymous benefactor who sent me this book.  This is a great example of the reason why I enjoy reading bad books.  I ripped through this one so fast because it was fun bad not facepalm bad.  It was an unintentional laugh every other page.  As one might guess from the title, this is a (very) light sci-fi romance novel.  A story of two space cops finding smugglers, love, and so much more in the middle of an all-male beauty pageant.  How can I fail to enjoy that?

A non-artist's version of what the love interest looks like.

The book is set on Earth, in an undefined point in the future.  Humans can travel between the stars and have encountered numerous species of aliens.  Earth has kind of a Special Snowflake quality — though we are new to the interstellar community, we have big brass balls to throw around in our negotiations with other races.  Not only do we all speak English, we refuse to use translation chips in our brains and insist that aliens that visit our planet all speak English too.  We also have a reputation for being dull, imperceptive, and intellectually lazy.  It’s not all bad for the Earthlings though, we are known as the only planet that will take in refugees from other species, and thanks to one Ms. Electra Galaxy we control interstellar pop culture.

So we start out meeting our heroine, Sagan Carter.  Now if the author meant to dedicate her fiesty, passionate character to Carl Sagan, that’s kind of cute.  It’s also kind of unfortunate.  She never uses her last name, so when a couple of pages pass without mention of how Sagan is a totally hot lady, my hold on the vision of her as a hot lady starts to slip and I start imagining her as Carl Sagan.  This reached a breaking point for me when the Jolly Green Giant over there started thinking about how much fun it would be to make babies with Sagan.

Anyway, Sagan is perfect.  She’s Barbie’s brunette friend, with violet eyes and a penchant for wearing skin-tight bodysuits.  She’s also incredibly smart, fast, cunning, and ruthless when the situation calls for it.  She is overflowing with passion for any and every subject and has a fiery temper.  Due to her Tragic Backstory she suffers from a deep hatred of liars and a conviction that everyone she loves will die and leave her all alone.

Her counterpart, from the planet of Oceanus, is Keirstrandst T’raskchrdtniq’, or as he decides to go by on Earth, Keir Trask.  His race has a common ancestor from ours, and we are told that they are exactly the same as us except for their skin color.  This is a damn, dirty lie.  Keir is over 7 feet tall and impossibly muscled, green with a blue star on his cheek and has black hair down to his waist.  We later find out that the enormous size of his genitals would make sex with a physiologically normal human woman impossible, and that his testicles are the size of tennis balls and hang in perfect symmetry, so I imagine he walks around in a buffalo stance all day.  Also, at full arousal he has a helicopter dong which is all kinds of what.

Oceanuns are apparently a very proud race and they especially dislike humans.  Keir has come to earth because he has tracked some people smuggling banned weapons and mind control jewels to our planet.  They entered the Mr. Interstellar Feller pageant because our puny Earth security was so lax for the event that they could easily get the weapons on land.  So he has to come and also pose as a contestant, along with his best friend who looks like an angel. Sagan is coming along as a representative of Earth and to pose as their manager.  Keir is Very Not Happy with his task and is afraid that his family will shun him for showing off his manflesh for screaming throngs of women.

So Sagan and Keir immediately hate each other and want to have furious sex as soon as they meet, right there in the spaceport.  They spend the next couple of days fighting over who knows more about their mission, with a little hate-smooching thrown in every once in a while.  As they begin to get to know one another they start to turn into Perry and Walter.  Everything one of them likes, the other likes too!  They’re both vegetarians, they both love old Earth cowboy movies, they both wet their pants over chocolate cheesecake!  Keir starts to realize that his rage when he first met Sagan really meant they were both meant to be together forever.

So they have to keep their cover stories consistent, so Sagan takes both the boys to the Man Salon to get trimmed and waxed before the contest, which all culminates in her arousing Keir with hot wax before ripping the hair off his previously mentioned perfectly symmetrical balls.  Then they head home to pick the outfits they will be wearing the evening wear, pose-off, and swimsuit competitions.  The results can easily be described as “not much” except for the angel’s evening wear look which is, and I quote, “a somehow-very-masculine-looking brown halter top.”  I suspect the emphasis is on the somehow.

Blahdeeblah Keir easily wins evening wear and when they come back to their suite there’s a deadly desert viper waiting to kill them.  A desert viper… with a rattle.  That rattles. One might almost call it a rattler.  If one wanted to be more descriptive, one might call it a, I dunno, rattlesnake.  But it’s a desert viper.  Anyway, it corners Sagan, Keir uses a stunner on it but Sagan gets hit too.  She begs Keir not to kill it because while there is no anti-venom for its bite, the venom from the desert viper can be used to make a cure for Space Flu, which is what killed her parents.  Reluctantly he agrees to release it into the desert, and on the way the idiots who released the snake follow him.  They have a really dumb chase scene in hovercars, which ends in Keir tricking them into slamming their car into a boulder and dying.  He releases the snake and then cuddles Sagan all night because he’s sooooo sad about stunning her.

So now everyone knows who the bad guys are, they are some more aliens who come from a race that is known for being thieving, raping pirates.  Their leader, Burl, was related to one of the idiots in the hovercar, so he swears a blood oath to kill Keir and ritually removes a testicle to prove that he means business.  This gives the author the freedom to not have to write the villain of the piece as being intelligent since he no longer cares about the weapons or the gems or being stealthy; all he wants to do is publically humiliate and kill Keir Trask, and the dumb beauty pageant will serve as his field of battle.  This also leads to a lot of freaking hysterical lines about his balls.  “He could only pray to the Goddess that his one remaining testicle held true,” and, “He gently massaged his genitalia, hoping to make the swelling diminish,” were two that especially made me cackle with glee.

So derp derp derp, they have more dumb run-ins with Burl and his cronies as the pageant progresses and Burl becomes dumber and dumber as his wound grows septic.  Keir has to compete in a mock-advertising competition where the entrants have to make Pluto Pillow Mints seem delicious and sexy, but they taste like decayed flesh and swamp water.  Keir overcomes his disgust with the mints by making out with Sagan on camera because she’s so hot he can’t even register the taste of the mints, so he wins that competition too.

So all this time, Sagan has been clinging to her professionalism and her fear of losing loved ones to keep from sleeping with Keir.  Then he goes to a special private dinner with Electra Galaxy and stays overnight with her, making Sagan determined not to get involved.  Then the next night they have sex, she somehow is not ripped in two and finds out about his helicopter dong, and is totally in love.  Keir wins the pose-off contest and in a shocking turn of events, his angel buddy wins the swimsuit contest after Keir kisses the angel’s heart-shaped butt tattoo on stage.  Along the way they have made friends with two other of the contestants, a sharkman named Gilly and a redheaded logger named Clitus and YES I am too much of a twit to ever not find that funny.

Oh yeah, at some point it became clear that there was a leak in the human police department so they stopped giving them updates on the case. SPOILERS: The leak is her boss.  His name is Lement Snarl, kinda hard not to see that “twist” coming.

Anyway, Keir finally gives in to his “I MUST BE WITH HER FOREVER” feelings and decides that he’s going to seriously try to win this dumb pageant because one of the prizes awarded to the winner is getting to live on Earth for a year.  He thinks that would give him and Sagan enough time to bond and get past all the lies he has told her that then they could travel the stars together and be happy forever.  In the meantime, Sagan is plotting how to wrap up the whole case and then disappear.  As so often happens in this book, Sagan has the upper-hand and she manages to take down the pirates and her boss with some trickery and only a couple of illegal weapons.  It turns out that Electra Galaxy, Gilly, and Clitus are all also undercover cops, all working the same case, which started with the death of Sagan’s old boyfriend.

As they are all interrogating Snarl and Burl, Burl suddenly seizes Sagan and sprinkles some of the crushed mind control gem on her face.  The way the mind control gem works is that once inhaled, you will forever obey the voice you first hear afterwards. Now I made the assumption that the author was gonna go with the lame-ass Sword of Truth method: Keir would speak first and Sagan would already love him so much that the effect is negated. Instead, Burl tells her to pine for him for months and then commit suicide because she will never have him, thinking that would be the best way to torment Keir.  But Sagan closes her eyes and holds her breath, then kicks him in his septic crotch and throws herself into a fountain before she breathes, saving herself.

So after all that, she disappears.  Keir decides that the only way to get her back is to win the talent portion of the contest by singing a piece from an opera that he knows she loves instead of something from his home planet as he had originally planned.  Before going on stage he watches another competitor, an orange octopus, fart out some New Orleans blues. For real.  Anyway, he gets on stage but before he can open his mouth Sagan has already arrived, having made her decision without his dramatic overture.

He wins Mr. Interstellar Feller and assumes that he’ll have to quit being a space cop and won’t ever be able to go home because he will be so shamed in the eyes of his people.  Instead, Electra Galaxy informs him that he gets to have a year vacation and then he, his angel friend, Sagan, Gilly, and Clitus can all be space cops for the Oceanuns and be happy forever.  In celebration they blow up the weapons and mind control gems.  Keir and Sagan get married and as they are on the ship to Oceanus, Keir whispers terms of endearment in his native tongue to her.  He assumes she doesn’t know what they mean since humans are too stubborn to learn another language and human mouths (which are supposed to be identical to Oceanuns, remember) can’t make the right sounds, but then they rip off Rush Hour with the whole “You never told me you could speak Oceanun!”  “You never asked!” bit.

So Keir then tells her that he has one last lie he has to reveal, SURPRISE, he’s a prince.  Sagan gets all pissed about how she doesn’t want to wear a crown and blahdeeblah when he points out that he has 3 older brothers and 4 older sisters all in line before him, so it’s unlikely to happen.  Then he reveals that he’s been doing research and that they can have babies so he has had his birth control inoculation undone.  She is delighted and takes a final spin on the whirlypeen as the book draws to a close.

A bad book?  Definitely.  But a fun book.  If it weren’t for the fact that the author is a confirmed nutcase who got all her posts on Amazon deleted after she went ballistic about bad reviews for this book, it would be easy to envision her sipping a fruity cocktail and giggling in a light-hearted manner while working on this book.  I will say that I did like that both the main characters were competent, even if they were hyper-competent, and that despite Keir’s conflicting desires to have Sagan as she is and to tame her, she never undercut her heroine to boost her hero.