But, on the medium-future Earth of Carla McNeil's Finder, I tend to think everyone is going to get fucked, one way or another. It's a cruel world in dozens of ways, full of people stuffed into straitjacket lives with few choices, either "tribals" living in rural poverty and dying young or "clans" rigidly required to be nearly-identical in thoughts, actions, careers, and aspirations and stuffed into Trantorian domed cities.
So the fact that Vary is making a deliberate choice about how, where, and by whom she's going to be fucked is pretty damn positive for this world, and I'll take it in that spirit. Finder: Mystery Date is her story.
She's an up-and-comer in the world of classy prostitution, featured on the flyers of the Lian-Jin Institute of the Art, a top-notch institution of the city of Anvard, where she lives and works and studies...well, the kind of things you'd expect a high-value companion to study.
But, since those high-powered prostitutes generally do something else most of the time, and are sexually tied to one rich patron - again, I don't think the economy of McNeil's world makes sense; it's a big, technological, modern world that's stuck in medieval structures for handwavy reasons - Vary is also studying more traditional academic topics at Temple University. (No, not the one in Philadelphia. That would be a fun book, but it's not this one.)
The plot of Mystery Date is mostly about Vary's crush on her professor. One might expect that a young, highly attractive woman who is more than halfway along to being one of the most sexually skilled and accomplished people in her world would not have much trouble seducing a middle-aged academic, but there'd be no story if that was the case, would it?
And, anyway, it's more complex than that. Vary is crushing on both of her major anthropology professors - the cold and distant Zivancevic, who at least is human but wears a white blindfold at all times and has inhuman robotic legs, and the more vivacious and friendly Shar, who is one of the nonhuman intelligent Laeske (something like feathered dragons the size of horses). [2] Zivancevic could presumably have sex with her the usual way, but she can't get emotionally close enough to him for that to happen. She can be part of some sex-related activities with Shar, but the annual mating rituals of a alien species are not what a young hottie like Vary is looking for.
(She implies she's had crushes on professors/mentors before; my assumption is that she's generally been able to seduce them and then move on. The fact that Zivancevic is so resistant is the whole point here; Vary is someone who's always previously been able to seduce everyone she wanted to pretty much exactly when she wanted to.)
McNeil tells this story is a cluster of short vignettes that grow into longer sections as the story goes on: we start with moments and individual emotions and move on to an expedition in the second half, where these three all go to the big annual mating ritual of the Laeske. (Typically for McNeil, this happens way out in the wilderness and is very "natural" - her stories take place largely in big bustling tech-y cities, but there's an underlying tone that living like that is wrong for humans and other thinking beings.)
Does Vary get to fuck Zivancevic? Does she get good grades? Reader, those are the wrong questions - and I won't answer them anyway. Mystery Date is about the journey and what Vary learns along the way. It may also be about the myriad notes about the world and story that McNeil includes in her backmatter here; I read this in The Finder Library, Vol 2, which has dozens of pages of notes on the included stories, almost for every single page.
And, as before, McNeil combines a distinctive viewpoint - you can see my grappling with how to describe it here; she writes SF like no one else I know - and supple, engaging, detailed art. I might not want to ever live in the world of Finder, but it's one of the best SFnal worlds in all comics, and I love to keep visiting it and seeing the people McNeil has embodied there.
[1] There seems to be traditional, house-based prostitution here - and, as usual with Finder's world, there's only rarely a sense that any activity is illegal; things are culturally approved or not, and that's a complex knot depending on what culture you're part of.
But the equivalent of grandes horizontales are basically the celebrities of this world, though they seem to be famous as much for the other things they do - they're artists, writers, scientists, whatever; top of their fields at something interesting, skilled, and/or creative - and they each have a single patron who bankrolls them and, for that, gets their exclusive sexual services.
Finder is, I'm coming to think, at base about the many horrible failures of capitalism, but this seems bizarre in what is presented as a market society. Why are the people most able to attract a wide paying audience - in a world that we've already seen has mass-media and mass audiences - stuck aspiring to be the playthings of rich randos?
I think McNeil really loves constructing rigid categories for people - that's how she builds worlds - and then examining the interstices and ways her characters can live within those rigidities. But those rigidities in the background make her world seem really unpleasant and forbidding, to me at least, in every last detail she presents. Her notes in particular read to me like a long list of "and here's another really horrible thing these people need to live with! Isn't that anthropologically interesting?"
[2] I don't think I've mentioned this previously when talking about Finder - see my posts on the first omnibus, Talisman, and Dream Sequence - but there are multiple nonhuman sapient races in this world. Quite obviously nonhuman: they have physically varied bodies and aren't Star Trek-like humanoids with facial prosthetics. (And I would not be surprised to find that humans have sex with them - it doesn't happen here, exactly, but it's plausible in this world - but there's no way even species that can manage to have mutually fulfilling activities, which might require some serious conversations and willingness to adapt, would be anything like interfertile.)
McNeil doesn't give a hint of the origin of any of these races, so they could be genetically engineered at some point in the previous few thousand years, come from planets elsewhere in the galaxy, or even something more exotic. Her obsessions as a teller of stories are mostly around cultures, particularly orally transmitted cultures and their expectations/obligations, so I don't think she cares where any of these races came from, only how they fit into this landscape now.
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