Title: Silver
Author: Darcy Abriel
Publication Date: October 18, 2010
Genres: Erotic Scifi
Protagonist Gender: Female
I originally published this review back in December 2012, when I was an editor at Frock Magazine, and it's the one I had to revisit for this year's #TransRightsReadathon.
I said it in my review of The Secret Self and I'll say it again - important books stick with you. It's not just about the story or the characters (although they clearly matter), but about who you were when you first read the story.
Silver by Darcy Abriel is one of those books.
12 years ago I was in a comfortable place. I'd come out to my wife, and we'd not only found a level of comfort and happiness with my gender expression that I had never dared imagine possible, but we finally had a baby, work was going well, and I'd been promoted from a contributing book reviewer to an editor at Frock Magazine.
While there were books we were sent for review at Frock, I had complete freedom to feature any books that I was reading, which I felt our readers might connect with. Darcy had reached out to me for a review, offering me a copy of Silver, and I knew within the first few chapters that it was going to be one that I had to share with that wider audience.
Silver is a big, intricate, plot-driven work of science fiction, complete with a diverse cast of well-developed characters, and (yes) a whole lot of kinky sex. In terms of sheer eroticism, this may be the most imaginative novel I've ever come across, but what's truly exciting is that Darcy Abriel does it all within the context of a powerful dystopian sci-fi thriller.
Here we have a future city by the name of Quentopolis, a place where cybernetic augmentation has become so commonplace that a 50% augmentation threshold has been established between citizen and property. Ruled by the human members of the Politico, the city is facing a violent rebellion from the Metallitionist Resistance, who argue that no amount of modification should reduce one to a life of slavery. It's a story of the fight for justice, but it's also a story of the thirst for revenge. Ulterior motives abound (on both sides of the divide), and appearances most certainly are almost always deceiving.
Lel Kesselbaum is not just a high-ranking member of the Politico, he's also part of an erotic, BDSM-driven segment of the nobility known as the Dominatae. Cold, distant, and cruel at first glance, he's a man with genuine complexity beneath the surface. Watching him develop through the course of the story is utterly fascinating. His rival in the tale, the protagonist to his antagonist, is Entreus, a mechanized Orictian warrior who now leads the Metallitionist Resistance. Mechanically augmented to be the perfect warrior, and trained in the fine arts of killing, he's at odds with his own cause in seeking a peaceful means of driving change from within the system itself.
Connecting these two men is the character of Silver herself - and she is where the story gets really so very interesting. One of those citizens who crossed the mechanical threshold, she has been further modified by her owner, Kesselbaum, into a creature of impossible beauty. Silver is a humanotic, a genderfluid sex goddess with a silver-tipped phallus. She has been conditioned to both give and receive pleasure, and is trained in the arts of both dominance and submission, making her an effective tool for his political maneuverings. She is still human at heart, however, which complicates matters when she's assigned to master the secrets of Entreus, and finds herself falling in love with his reluctant submission to her trinex charms.
Alternately violent and erotic, Silver is a story that more than delivers on its promise. There is a stellar sci-fi thriller here, with enough twists and surprises to keep even the most jaded reader entertained, along with a truly inventive erotic romance, with each new sexual innovation topping the one before it.
Silver as a character endeared herself to me, becoming someone whom I admired, adored, appreciated, and even envied. Check your expectations and your inhibitions at the door, because Silver as a book is a story that will take you to some strangely exciting places, and make you think along the way.
Rating: ♀ ♀ ♀ ♀ ♀
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