The rise of dinosaur erotica

I blame Michael Swanwick.

Swanwick is an award-winning science fiction writer and the author of the excellent dinosaur novel Bones of the Earth. But in 1999 he penned an odd short story titled “Riding the Giganotosaur,” which concerned a man who had his brain transplanted into a Giganotosaurus, a predator even larger than T. rex. He lives the life of the dinosaur – hunting, defending territory – and everything goes swimmingly until he encounters his first female Giganotosaurus:

She raised her head and made a warbling noise. George felt a strange surging sensation down below, in his cloaca and penile nubs. Distantly, the human part of him felt a kind of repulsed horror. This is bestiality, it babbled, it's sinful, it's wrong, it's disgusting. But that was mere intellectualization. Waves of chemicals swept up from the brain stem and overwhelmed his thoughts, tumbling and drowning them in wild tides of a lust more pure and primitive than anything he'd ever felt before.

You can guess what happens next. If not, let Swanwick spell it out for you:

They screwed right there in the open.

So was one of the first literary examples of dinosaur-on-human sex. Well, at least as far as I know. I doubt it really was the first time someone had depicted dinosaurs getting intimate with people, given the long history of literature and the dirty minds of many authors. But I was surprised dinosaur erotica would go on to become its own subgenre, thanks to Amazon.com.

The online bookseller’s self-publishing program has allowed the release of many works of fiction that otherwise wouldn’t see the light of day if the writers went through traditional publishers. One of the more successful authors has been Christie Sims, who has published a series of stories about women getting ravaged by prehistoric beasts and other monsters. Here’s a “warning” that comes with Sims’ Taken by the T. rex:

This is a tale of beast sex. This story was written to unlock your darkest fantasies and innermost desires. It is not for the faint of heart and is not your mother's erotica.

And who is the person who dreams up this stuff? According to New York Magazine, Sims is actually two people, both Texas college students in their early 20s. Sims writes the works with Alara Branwen, and the business has been so lucrative they have taken up writing full time, as Branwen explained in a Q&A with the magazine:

Combined, Christie and I make more money than our friend who has been working as an engineer at Boeing for a few years and Christie's friend who is a five-year accountant in Dallas, Texas.

But where did the idea for dinosaur erotica come from? Turns out you can blame Jurassic Park:

I wrote a lot of dragon-erotica stories, BBW romance, a few other things. But after a few months of writing about dragons having their way with busty maidens, I started getting burned out… But one day, I was walking and I thought about the movie Jurassic Park. My perverse mind immediately went to my work, and I pictured dinosaurs having their way with women. I died laughing. I was about to dismiss these thoughts as the workings of my freaky mind, but then I had an epiphany. Dinosaur erotica was something new that I’d never tried before.

Now you may be wondering at this point: Am I going to start reviewing dinosaur erotica for this site? The answer is no. Sorry, just not my thing, not that I have anything against people who enjoy it. But with Valentine’s Day just around the corner, I didn’t want this small subset of paleofiction go without a mention. As it shows, there are some people who really love their dinosaurs.