Willowbark “Bark” Gnarganfarkle is a 17-year old human boy living in The Belt, a mining-heavy region of the Virgo Super Cluster. Everyone assumes he is a Toxicovian, because that’s where all the human males went after abandoning earth and its increasingly authoritarian women, with both genders using genetic techniques to reproduce for centuries. But Bark is actually the only boy born on Earth in all that time, and now he’s living in a remote area of the galaxy helping his parents and his beautiful sister, Utopia, run amusements at a carnival for reasons he doesn’t understand. Bark meets new friends who are all various alien species: There are saxofrassians who looks like “a semi-Sshaped quadruped species with spindly insect legs,” Glacks who are ball-shaped with suckers, or Moleculors, who resemble nothing so much as a diagram of an atom. Bark’s own father is a Gnostikian, who is “lima-bean-sized” alien with one eye, and since humans and Gnostikians can’t interbreed, Bark is understandably confused about his provenance.
As Bark and his incredibly horny, profane, and gross (in other words, teenage) new friends get to know each other, he’s slowly pulled into several plots way above what should be his pay grade, including his mother’s secretive past as a genetic researcher who once synthesized a version of the synthetic hormone SUCK (a “radiant aphrodisiac” that temporarily makes inter-species copulation possible) that not only worked on humans, but was permanent. Unfortunately, the formula for this galaxy-changing SUCK was lost—but the Matriarchs of Earth are still hunting for it, and her. Meanwhile, Bark becomes enmeshed in the schemes of the local organized crime family, resulting in his taking part in a team effort to impregnate a Korkurvian Space Whore, which is both a specific gender of Korkurvian and a sign that new Korkurvian queen is in the making.
As you might guess, John Daulton’s STAR CLUSTER 66 is a pretty ribald story. Like teenagers throughout history, Bark and his pals are relatively obsessed with sex, and Daulton revels in plumbing the absurd and ridiculous in that context, resulting in scenarios like Bark’s Glack friend Quarts, who suffers from “Twin Reproductive Connection Disorder,” which means that whenever his twin brother Queem has sex, it’s Quarts who experiences the orgasm, regularly soaking entire classrooms with his ejaculate in humiliating and extremely gross episodes. There’s also the aforementioned Korkurvian Space Whore episode, where literally dozens of players copulate with the Whore over and over again in an attempt to win a huge pot of star credits.
Daulton writes with energy, and Bark emerges as a sympathetic and engaging POV character. Bark has just the right level of horror, shock, and curiosity regarding the increasingly insane events he gets involved with. His love for his family is a throughline that helps prevent his story from becoming a one-note joke. And the story has some truly inspired ideas—like a species of sexually transmitted “starcrabs” that are sentient and very vocal, who set up a small civilization in Bark’s crotch, alternately cheering Bark on or criticizing his decisions like a tiny, disgusting Greek chorus. This also means the humor here isn’t going to be for everyone. For readers who find acronyms like BITCHES (for “Berkeley Institute of Technological Conception and Human Embryonic Studies”) or PMS (for “Public Matriarch System”) hilarious, this is the book for you. Daulton’s gender commentary is a bit off-putting; though it’s clear he intends both human genders to be ridiculous in their attitudes and behaviors, his reductive approach results in statements like “It turned out that the natural tendency of human females to be sneaky was the biggest problem” or “it was all obvious to us: If you want to focus on fun or need to go to war, you go male. You want to be wooed and fawned over, make a baby, or sit with a sick friend, you go female” or referring to “symbolic castrations” as “cancellations.” This coupled with calling the moment when men abandoned Earth the “wokexodus” adds a tone of male victimhood to the story that’s distracting at best.
Another problem is that the book sprawls. There are few 300,000-word novels that wouldn’t benefit from being 200,000-word novels, and this one is not the exception. Daulton is clearly enjoying himself, and takes his time, layering on description and giving Bark a lot of room for commentary. This approach allows him to do a deep dive into his world-building, yes, but also means that many sequences like spaceship drag races and incidents in gym class go on far longer than necessary—or perhaps could be cut entirely. This is compounded by the fact that much of the world-building is superficial; the alien races all look strange, but everything is pegged to a human point-of-view—all the aliens act just like humans, all of them treat sex and attraction as if they were human beings even when their biology is specifically different, and many of the references in the story are from recent Earth history and culture, which doesn’t make much sense in the context of a galactic civilization that Earth only recently joined. One impact of the girth is a plot that sags a bit; there are several climactic scenes as different plot threads are resolved, but this results in diminishing returns in terms of urgency and excitement.
Energetic and engaging, John Daulton’s comedic sci-fi romp STAR CLUSTER 66 has some truly inspired moments. But a “more is more” approach results in an overlong story peppered with a lot of groan-worthy wordplay and a lack of focus.
~Jeff Somers for IndieReader