(Vice is a news and commentary website aimed at the 'Millennial Hipster' readership; i.e., sample articles include 'how to make a gravity bong', 'meet the group urging people to stop calling the police', 'the midwest is about to have a weed revolution', 'I deal with grief through extreme makeup to make people look at me', etc.)
Becky Ferreira, a science reporter for Vice, writes that hipsters and news junkies are buying up copies of a 1973 sci-fi novel called 'Space Relations' by one Donald Barr who, it turns out, is the father of our current Attorney General, William Barr.
Ferreira is quite indignant over the content of 'Space Relations' :
By far the most disgusting aspect of the novel is its fixation on sexualizing adolescents, and its depictions of rape. Even the adult characters in the book are constantly infantilized. The novel is also rife with casually unsettling observations such as: “To me, pederasty seems utterly lacking in aesthetic appeal.”
For all its faults, speculators at amazon are offering 'Space Relations' for $998.
Over at eBay, other speculators are not only offering copies for exorbitant prices, but Donald Barr's other sci-fi novel 'A Planet in Arms', also has a steep asking price.
I think I might actually have a copy of 'Space Relations' that I picked up 7 years ago. It may be in a box in my basement. I've never read it. Maybe I will now.
If you have your own copy of 'Space Relations', and you're interested in selling it for a profit, well, you may want to sign up for an account at eBay.............?!
And if you have read 'Space Relations', let us know what you thought of it...........!
Should anybody be seriously interested in reading Strange Relations, there is a scan of the pages (but not the cover) at the internet archive. It is not a very good scan, but appears to be readable. Barr was an English professor, and the novel has three epigraphs, the first of which is a 16-line passage, in German, from Wagner's Tannhauser.
ReplyDeletehttps://archive.org/details/donaldbarrspacerelations/page/n3