Recently I shared with you one of the most jarring scenes of unexpected oral sex that I’d ever encountered in sci-fi. And the week before I mentioned that I used to scour my Science Fiction Book Club catalogs for books with explicit sex in them. One such book that crossed my path was The Last Ship by William Brinkley. Forget what you might have seen on the TNT show; this was a book about a US nuclear destroyer that somehow escapes a nuclear holocaust and has to find supplies, fuel, and a habitable place to live. It was originally published in 1988, and I think I got my hands on it in 1993 or 1994. It’s a pretty good book, especially if you like military fiction.

It also has a very unexpected scene of oral sex. It takes place on page 500-something (I used to have the page number memorized, because I was fifteen or sixteen and would read anything sexual that I could get my hands on), and it’s… well, it’s not great. The prose is very purple and flowery, although it is in line with the narration of the ship’s captain (the main POV character) and the way he has narrated throughout the book. At the time I was like “Wow! Cool!” but these days I look back at it and I wonder how it even passed the editors. As with the A Working of Stars scene from last week, this scene does make sense in the grand scheme of things, and is believable, but when I reread The Last Ship a couple of years ago I cringed a little at the way the scene was written.

So, of course, I’m going to share it with you. It’s a long one, so there are a lot of screenshots. All words are by William Brinkley.

I’m pretty sure the whole scene could’ve been abbreviated or even removed after Lieutenant Girard said “Why don’t you come in, Captain?” The rest of it, to me, felt gratuitous. Then, in the fourth screenshot, the captain refers to his erection as being “seemingly impossibly, almost comically huge, oversized.” Yes, the captain hasn’t had sex in at least eleven months (this is mentioned elsewhere in the book), but even after I went through a dead bedroom period in my second marriage I never once thought of my erection that way. It was just… well… just an erection. Then we move onto the captain’s reference to her scent, and he uses the phrase “cunt smell”, which, okay, yes, women have a scent when you get that close to them, and yes, it’s almost indescribable, but that’s just not sexy. Not to me, anyway. Finally, after another four or five pages of the captain declaiming how great sex is with Girard, he pulls out and comes all over her, which to me was something I’d only ever seen in porn or read about in erotica I’d downloaded from various BBSes (kids, ask your parents). I can’t imagine someone with the gravitas of the captain of the Nathan James doing that, although I suppose if he’s concerned about getting Girard pregnant then it might work.

Girard and the captain have one more explicit sex scene about 30 or 40 pages later, and I’m not going to put it in here, but it’s the last sex scene in the book. After that, things get more serious and there’s no time for sexytimes.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, but I’m not going to lie: teenage me reread those few scenes a lot.