It’s an ESP orgy, baby!
* smirk *
The 1960s was a time period in which Playboy magazine type humor, the counterculture, and the SFF genre intertwined. Looking to cash in on these various trends, publishers released an astonishing variety of “adult” naughty novels embodying this robust, exploitive stew. The humor ranged from martini-dry to crass (as in the above example) and featured voluptuous, come-hither women posing alluringly, go-go dancing, or in orbit, willing participants this brace new decade of relaxed sexuality and space travel. Dated now, these covers seem both stale and innocent.
ESP Orgy was energetic in flogging the trend, with its bodypainted go-go girls and topless rock guitarists whose guitars are way oversized for them, or else they’re jailbait. But the kicker is the lusty trio who are acting out a spanking fantasy with a rolled up newspaper. The male figure in the back is boring in comparison, even though his single open eye is about to pop in sexual heat, like the leering, whistling wolf character in the old Warner Brothers cartoons. He’s so heated, he’s about to inhale his cigarette in one puff! The artist of this pic is one Robert Bonfils, whose other work can be perused here.
After all that, I guess you want to know what the story is about, right? ISFDB.org lists it as “A college student develops psychic powers after receiving a bump on the head.” If you think the plot of this sounds similar to the 1982 Scott Baio movie Zapped, you’re right. The author was a pseudonym of Andrew J. Offutt, a prolific writer of the 1970s specializing in both porn and SFF, and one of the rare people to actually make a living from it.
As self-consciously hip as the cover of ESP Orgy was, this one gives it competition with its Little Annie Fannie lookalike in her barely-there negligee. Note that all the naughty bits are covered, just barely, as was usual for the time. In the 1970s these ladies were everywhere, from drugstore paperback racks to the movie sections of newspapers where they shilled XXX rated films. A review of the book is here. Unfortunately it’s not as salacious as the cover makes it out to be.
Well, okay. This one was likely written before the moon landing in 1969 as the spacecraft looks very much like the Command module from the Gemini mission. The blurb reads Reporter Gene Cross had done some pretty weird things in the course of tracking down stories, but retrieving a bullet from a shapely nude corpse floating in space seemed a bit bizarre, even for him… Even more bizarrely, the author’s byline is the same as the main character’s. It’s like reading a copy of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service written by James Bond, not Ian Fleming. The actual writer is ArthurJean Cox, and this was his debut.
The nude herself looks statuefied, not dead, or in a force field of some kind. Since the publisher is also Greenleaf we can infer there are sexual hijinks contained within, hopefully not with the corpse. The cover artist is Darrell Millsap.
This cover dates from even further back, I’d guess the Mercury mission days. (I’m going by the woman’s Ann-Margret style tousled hair which predates long, straight hippie tresses.) Again, it’s stale, but I like the saucy, knowing looks passing between the astronaut and his lovebird, which disappeared as the 1960s rolled on and the cover characters appeared trapped in their own passions, not communicating. Frankly it seems at odds with the book’s blurb, which reads: A rocketing, sensational expose of sin in space: a story about a drug deadlier than heroin, more vicious than morphine – this was the Martian narcotic that drenched a planet in crime and perversion!
Even more strangely, Cyril Judd was a pseudonym for respected SF writers Judith Merril and C. M. Kornbluth, who together co-wrote a series of novels about the colonization of Mars. Sin in Space is apparently a retitled version of one of these, Child of Mars, with a spicier cover and blurb. Did the publisher think it would sell better through that marketing niche?
The book’s accessible here so you can decide for yourself how sensationalistic it was.
Judith Merril and C. M. Kornbluth weren’t the only unsuspecting SF writers tarred with the smirking brush of “adult” marketing. Brian Aldiss, a SF New Wave British author who won a number of accolades, including an OBE, received a floating pink nude for the cover of this book and a gleeful male with that “I just got lucky!” expression on his face. The novel was more cerebral and satiric than the packaging suggests. In the vein of Brave New World, the English government declares all adults must have sex registers implanted on their foreheads that glow when they are turned on by another person, and society is turned upside down by such unreserved displays. This was the only book of this batch that I’ve found contemporary reviews on. Alternate covers, from the author’s website, are not so cartoonish. I particularly like the humor of the banana one.
I’ve gone down quite a rabbit hole here, my research on the covers leading me in unexpected directions. Expect more on this topic soon!
