reviewed by Cliff Winnig

In her introduction to the second edition of Doc and Fluff, Califia discusses some of the novel's elements that had, after the first edition was published in 1990, elicited letters of complaint from readers.

First of all, there's the violence. The title characters, both dykes, live as outcasts in the fringes of a collapsing society. Doc, a drug dealer and butch bottom, and Fluff, a prostitute and femme top, inhabit a violent world, and they sometimes act violently themselves.

Then there's the sex. Hot, raunchy, unabashedly hardcore queer SM. There's sex between women and sex between men, all of it extreme, with the rules of consent being a grey area in more than one instance. It's every bit as hot as the sex in her earlier short story collection, Macho Sluts, but unlike those stories, sex doesn't form the core of what this tale's about.

At its heart, Doc and Fluff is about surviving and thriving in a hostile world. As the novel progresses, past the hot and heavy sex scenes that introduce the characters, one gets so caught up in the plot, the characters, and the fascinating and all-too-believable dystopia that Califia imagines, one hardly notices that the sex has pretty much vanished. She snuck a novel in there, and it's a good one.

Doc and Fluff start off riding with the Hell's Angels through a collapsing America reminiscent of Roger Zelazny's Damnation Alley, a novel that features a Hell's Angel protagonist in a similar American dystopia. Soon they themselves are on the run from the Angels, forced to make their own way through the various fringe societies that have cropped up in what remains of the United States.

Through these encounters, Califia introduces other elements of the novel that would elicit unhappy letters. For example, an all-female society called Harpy Farm, far from the gentle culture envisioned in books such as Sally Gearhart's The Wanderground, has both internal political problems and behaviors of dubious morality. They practice infanticide of male babies born to community members. Instead of giving us an idealized vision of an all-female society, Califia presents a believable vision in which a community of women is struggling both to survive and to understand and define itself. That community is challenged externally by the Hell's Angels and internally by the sexual fantasies of some of its own members. Throughout the novel, Califia shows by example how much the outcasts can't afford to cast anyone out themselves.

The very elements that alienated some readers provide Doc and Fluff its greatest strength: it directly tackles issues that other people shy away from. Doc and Fluff is a relentlessly realistic extrapolation of human nature and still-current social trends. Ultimately, that's why Califia's vision of a possible future is so compelling.

If you like Pat Califia's fiction at all, you'll love this book. If you like good science fiction, you'll find this a well-plotted novel in a well-thought-out near-term future. If you can handle the book's extremes, expecially if you think seriously about the thoughts and feelings they evoke in you, you'll come away very satisfied.