A review by breezie_reads
Ice Planet Barbarians by Ruby Dixon

1.5

I added half a star because the sex scenes were well written (which was really the only aspect of the book that was well-written or thought-out) and I thought the "my resonance" pet name was adorable. But other than that, this review from this point on is just going to be complaining.

My issues at the beginning of the book were with things that "weren't the point" as some people might say. But if you're going to write a sci-fi book regardless of if it's just an excuse to fuck aliens or not, at least bother to get the space aspects of it correct. Because that entire cargo dropping and re-entry scene was wildly incorrect and as someone who lives and breathes sci-fi and loves space, it bothered me a lot more than it probably bothered most other people.
  • Things don't just plummet through space. Not without some kind of propulsion, and the cargo hold area the women were trapped in was just detached and dumped somewhere. But yet they still had power to keep everything on and working despite having absolutely nothing connected to it to sustain power (I'm looking at you, stasis pods).
  • They crash landed on a planet that apparently had the same gravity as Earth, and yet they all somehow survived. They would have been incinerated on their way down or pulverized from the force of the re-entry plus the actual pull of the gravity, not just banged up a bit. Why do you think asteroids do so much damage when they hit planets? The longer something has to fall, the faster it falls, and it generates more heat the longer it falls. It's the laws of gravity. We learned this in middle school, guys.

I was also annoyed that the author used the word "opaque" incorrectly. I couldn't stop thinking about it the entire time I was reading, despite being viciously aware of how insignificant that detail should be. Something being opaque does not mean it's see-through. Please stop thinking that. Don't use a word if you don't know what it actually means, I'm begging you.

You also don't have to make a Star Wars reference every two pages. We get it, you like Star Wars and that was probably your influence in some way or another. You don't have to keep reminding us. Another thing we also didn't constantly have to be reminded of was a scene that took place IMMEDIATELY before we were told that that scene had happened. And the example I'm going to use for this is when Georgie gets caught in the hunting trap. The scene is described in enough detail that we understand she was caught in a snare. She's hanging upside down from a tree, okay? We don't need a "I... I've walked into a snare of some kind" directly after describing being caught in a snare. It's redundant. The excessive use of ellipsis is also redundant. As well as that constant reminder that Vektal "greeted her" by eating her out and that he likes to eat pussy (why was it necessary to use the word pussy 6 times on one page?). We get it.

But that also leads me into the biggest issue I had with this book. "Dubious consent" was one of the triggers listed at the beginning - and I am grateful that trigger warnings were listed, don't get me wrong. It's a blessing to have them listed in the actual book instead of having to search for them online. However. Dubious consent is not performing sex acts when someone is unconscious. That is rape. And implying anything else harms real life victims of those circumstances. If someone is physically incapable of saying no, it is rape, not dubious consent. Them waking up in the middle of it does not change anything about the situation. Especially if Georgie herself is referring to what happened as rape during and immediately after it happens.

The cunnilingus scene also takes place immediately after a thought process of Vektal's that really shouldn't have led to sex acts being performed at all. Vektal compares Georgie to a child for almost an entire Kindle page and says "She will need to be treated as a child" because of how vulnerable and soft and defenseless she is (BECAUSE SHE'S UNCONSCIOUS AND FREEZING). And when I say immediately after thinking that he strips her and eats her out, I mean IMMEDIATELY AFTER. That's weird and gross. Don't compare grown ass defenseless women to children and then have them get eaten out while they're still unconscious. That's all kinds of ick and I'm giving anyone who doesn't see something wrong with that the hardest side-eye.

I was going to go on and complain about the inconsistencies in the details, like Vektal losing a finger and Georgie somehow impossibly changing clothes in the middle of a sex scene, but having to think about the "dubious consent" scene and the child thoughts prior to that scene pissed me off and grossed me out all over again so I'll stop here. I hated this, and I hated that it was the only thing I had available to read today.