Ice Planet Barbarians (🌶️🌶️🌶️)

Amazon advertised discounted access to their Kindle Unlimited program (not to be confused with their Prime Reading program, which is like Prime Video or Prime Music, but for books and magazines) to me in August 2023. Paying $5.29 got me three months of subscription access. When I bought a new Kindle in October 2023 (after ruining my old Kindle, showing off at the pool), I got three additional months at no added cost. When March 2024 rolled around, I forgot to cancel and was charged at the regular rate. I ended up keeping the service until my final charge in July 2024.

While subscribed, I read the first in Ruby Dixon’s popular “sci-fi romance” series Ice Planet Barbarians. Dixon’s twenty-one book series follows a kidnapped group of young women crash-landed on a harsh planet inhabited by strikingly fit beings seeking mates. It’s hugely popular online, both as a source of pleasure and derision. I heard about it while watching a YouTube review of the Boox Palma e-reader. While reading Barbarians, I also bought Edgar Rice Borrough’s collected Barsoom series (on sale for $4.23 after tax).

Dixon’s and Burrough’s books bear passing resemblance to each other. Barsoom’s hero, John Carter, finds himself transported to Mars where he engages in one of the earliest instances of interplanetary romance in a story that debuted in serialized form, sandwiched between pulp magazine ads for Campbell’s Soups and Colgate’s Shaving Lathers. Dixon’s sensational story follows this narrative tradition and finds a large audience on a website selling soups and shaving cream.

With discounts, my 9-month dalliance with Kindle Unlimited cost me $68.84. In all, I read four full books, averaging out to a $17.21 cost per title. In addition to Ice Planet Barbarians and the previously discussed In Praise of Shadows, I read Frank Norris’s McTeague (a 19th century novel about the misadventures of a weird dentist) and Vernor Vinge’s Hugo Award winning A Fire Upon the Deep (which happens to also feature a bit of interstellar intimacy).

I should have just “purchased a license” for A Fire, which took me five months to finish. The same for McTeague, whose ebook version is sold for $0.99. Barbarians took no time to read and, for those readers, the Kindle Unlimited program does make sense, which probably has the effect of incentivizing more authors to write in that style.