Docile by K.M. Szpara

I received an ARC of this book from the publishing company Tor.com in exchange for a fair and honest review. Content warning: rape (also from the POV of the rapist), dubious consent, sexual harassment, attempted suicide.

Docile is set in near-ish-future Maryland, at a time when people who’ve amassed debt can erase it by selling themselves into (usually temporary) slavery. Most slaves take “Dociline”, a type of drug that makes a person highly obedient and keeps them from forming long-term memories. This way, they don’t have to remember what happened to them. For Elisha Wilder, however, Dociline isn’t an option. His mom had taken it while serving her ten-year sentence, and she never fully recovered; he’s terrified of losing himself as she did. Elisha is bought by Alex, whose family invented Dociline. When Elisha refuses to take the drug, the shocked Alex is determined to turn Elisha into the perfect slave without it.

Okay. Right. The tagline for this book is, There is no consent under capitalism. I think that gave me pretty incorrect assumptions about what it would be, and I guess that’s on me. In short, this book is standard slavefic.

For those of you not in the fanfic community, slavefic is… exactly what it says. A story that focuses on how one character is enslaved to another. Such stories generally come in two broad varieties: a (hot) master breaking in a new slave, or a slave recovering from past abuse (usually with the help of a (hot) new master who’s actually against slavery). Because slavefic is a proper subgenre, like e.g. farmboy fantasy, it comes with its own tropes. The master-who’s-never-wanted-a-slave suddenly needs to acquire one for vague “societal pressure” reasons! Crazy rich people parties where the slave is rented out to the master’s friends! (Alternatively, the master may growl they’re mine! and refuse to rent them out.) The master’s jealous ex who hates how obsessed the master is with their new slave! The recovering ex-slave gets to choose their own clothes for the first time and is overwhelmed by the experience! Bucketfuls of angst about whether the master-slave relationship can truly be called love! Buttplugs!

And Docile is, well… a very by-the-numbers slavefic. Because it’s a super niche subgenre, I’m struggling with how to word my critique for a broader audience. If you’ve never encountered slavefic before, then the broad question the book asks is quite compelling: is love possible when there is monetary pressure involved? If you do know the genre, then the book’s blandness makes it hard to take that question seriously. I’m just saying, I think it’s possible to examine the issue of consent without Alex taking Elisha’s virginity a couple hours after they meet and then sticking a buttplug up his butt to hold the semen in him for the night. But you can’t write slavefic without it, jazz hands.

(Side-note: I know you think I’m some world-weary pervert, but Alex “locks” the buttplug with a fingerprint lock and I was so confused by how that mechanism would work that I ended up questioning two friend groups about it. Which led to some fierce buttplug debate. With diagrams.)

Once I readjusted my expectations to slavefic, I also readjusted what I wanted out of the book. The goal of slavefic is, of course, Feels-with-a-capital-F. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any of the characters likable. I did feel bad for Elisha, but he spends most of the book as a severely traumatised slave in love with his abusive master; the feeling was more frustrated pity than sympathy. I was sincerely hoping that super-privileged, super-naïve, self-pitying Alex would get murdered in a slave revolt by chapter 7.  I actually quite enjoy asshole love interests, like Laurent in Captive Prince or Cardan in Cruel Prince, but I do need them to be entertainingly awful. For me, Alex was not evil enough to like for his evilness, but took way too long to learn the lesson that Poor People Are Human Too to like for any other reason.

The other characters don’t get that much focus. Special shout-out, however, goes to Elisha’s dad, who bullies him for having learned fancy-pants big-city piano playing skills while being a sex slave to save his whole family from debt. Second special shout-out goes to the secret anti-slavery group who continuously ignore and undermine whatever little bit of agency Elisha has left as a slave. I keep stumbling on the trope of the out-of-touch activist who seems to bring as much harm to the people they want to help as their active oppressors. While criticising activists is valid, I guess I wish it was explored with more nuance. It often feels like a simple way to add “moral ambiguity” to a situation that’s pretty fucking black-and-white (i.e. slavery), and I wish the moral ambiguity could be added from an angle that didn’t involve throwing activists under the bus wholesale. (To be clear, ambiguity as in e.g. violent resistance vs peaceful protests, not ambiguity in regard to slavery itself.)

I think Docile would have worked better for me if the world was fleshed out more. People inherit their family’s debt and if they don’t pay up by a certain point they get thrown in “debtor’s prison”. (Not sure which point specifically: Elisha’s family is already three million in debt when he sells himself, but some guy who “only” has 200k college debt is also selling himself.) I think the point of the debtor’s prison is to make it clear that Elisha is becoming a slave “by choice”. But I never quite got what choice B is — what horrible tortures are happening in prison that make sex slavery preferable. Also, in general I struggle to imagine that it makes much economic sense to have a significant portion of the population be brainwashed slaves in a futuristic, post-industrial, presumably mostly-automated society. I suppose that means The Cruelty Is The Point, but that just didn’t come across to me while reading.

I had other questions too. What does the rest of the world think about the US (or, well, specifically Maryland) bringing back slavery, this time with brainwashing drugs? What’re the wider ramifications within the US, seeing as how it’s a country that historically had institutionalised race-based slavery? (As I’m a white Ukrainian, I don’t think I’m the right person to pick this topic apart. But please check out this review that does discuss the book in regard to race, as well as this piece that discusses how reactions to Docile mostly avoid grappling with it in relation to the history of race and slavery in the US.) In a society that seems really great in terms of LGBTQ+ rights, I don’t quite get why there’s societal pressure for Alex to be partnered with either a boyfriend or slave; what about, like, asexual people? Finally, the 200k college debt guy went to uni for philosophy — how has academia not collapsed yet?! (I realise Americans nowadays also go into severe debt for uni, but at the moment the answer to, “What’s the worst that can happen if I follow my dreams instead of studying something ‘practical’?” isn’t “Spend 10-odd years as a drugged-to-the-gills sex slave”.)

One last note I want to emphasise again is that there is a lot of explicit non-consensual and “dubiously consensual” sex in this book. A fair amount is kink-based (some of the kink-based play is consensual, with safewords). If you’re not comfortable with that for whatever reason, definitely stay away. This is pretty typical for slavefic, but one aspect in particular really bothered me. Spoilers [highlight to read]: Two of the characters who Elisha is forced to have (manual and oral) sex with while a slave are actually members of the anti-slave resistance. One of them was pretending to be a slave on Dociline. This further traumatised Elisha as he believed himself complicit in having “taken advantage of” someone who could consent even less than he could. It really, really bothered me that the two resistance members just say, “Oh, sorry about that” after Elisha is freed. And then nobody ever brings it up again, not even when Elisha goes on to have a sexual relationship with the fake slave.

Anyway, in short. If you thought the book was gonna be some in-depth critique of capitalism where commies pop out from behind the bushes and yell, “Ahaaa, but isn’t all work slavery because of the implicit threat of starvation otherwise, vive la Universal Basic Income!”, Docile is not for you. If you’ve read more than, say, three slavefics before and get the basic idea, Docile might or might not be for you. But if you’re curious about slavefic and aren’t sure how to navigate AO3, maybe pick up Docile? I guess?