Love Me Tomorrow

Love Me Tomorrow, by Robert H. Rimmer

December, 1978  Signet Books

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a hotstuff poet “in the Sylvia Plath tradition” who once starred in a porno flick cryogenically freezes herself in 1980 so she can wake up and screw her way through the Brave New World of 1996! Yes, folks, that is the plot of Love Me Tomorrow, “a novel of Future Shock Sex” per the awesome cover slugline (the best kind of future shock, if you ask me). The only problem with this bonkers setup is that the book was written by Robert H. Rimmer, he of The Harrad Experiment and The Premar Experiments, and he once again delivers a turgid crawl of a “novel” that’s filled with navel-gazing and bald exposition. 

Speaking of Future Shock, I wonder if whoever at Signet wrote that slugline realized how accurate the comment was, on two levels; for, not only is Love Me Tomorrow clearly influenced by Alvin Toffler’s nonfiction bestseller, but Rimmer himself also appeared in the bizarre 1972 documentary which was based on Future Shock (and hosted by Orson Welles!). Rimmer is fully on board with a progressivised future, and as demonstrated in The Premar Experiments he is wholly devoted to socialism. In this way Love Me Tomorrow is the antithesis of another book of the day that was influenced by Toffler: Lawrence Sanders’s The Tomorrow File. But the main difference between these novels is twofold. For one, Sanders’s novel is immensely better – but then, Sanders actually writes a novel, with drama and characterization and tension. Rimmer on the other hand writes an exposition-laden treatise. The other big difference between the two novels is that Sanders clearly sees the horrors of a fully-progressivised society, whereas Rimmer presents it as a utopia of sorts. (Guess which of the two progressivism is proving to be in the real world?) 

Actually a third difference would be that The Tomorrow File received an initial hardcover edition, whereas Love Me Tomorrow, same as The Premar Experiments, was a paperback original. It’s also a bit shorter than Sanders’s novel, though Love Me Tomorrow isn’t a short novel by any means: 430 pages of small, dense print. In reality it turns out that only 414 pages are comprised of the narrative, with the remaining pages given over to a bibliography. This should give you an idea of what you are in for; Rimmer has for the most part written an expose on his intended socialist utopia of the near future, based on the ideas and research of progressivists of the day, and has tried to pass it off as a novel. Like I mentioned in The Premar Experiments, Rimmer is like the antimatter universe version of Joseph Rosenberger, in that he has his characters baldly exposit on arcane books or research papers they’ve read…but whereas Rosenberger is clearly a right-winger Rimmer is very far to the left. 

He's also pretty humorless (befitting someone far to the left, one might argue), and this is evidenced throughout the novel, which is incredibly dry and incredibly talky. In essence, Rimmer was inspired by an obscure 1800s novel titled Looking Backward, by a utopian named Edward Bellamy, and here in Love Me Tomorrow has attempted to do a similar sort of novel. But he couldn’t just write a novel inspired by Bellamy; instead, Rimmer fills his own novel with rampant exposition about Bellamy’s book, quoting it and summarizing it (in addition to sundry other books, research papers, and magazine articles), and he overlooks such little things as characterization and drama and plot. He also totally fails on the “future shock sex” angle, with pathetically few sex scenes in the novel…and those sex scenes we do get are repugnant, like “mother having sex with her own son” sort of repugnant, more on which anon. 

The biggest slap in the face is that Love Me Tomorrow is boring. I mean it’s like Lustbader’s The Ninja, which took a novel about a ninja and turned it into a slow-moving excess of boredeom – this is a book about a former porn actress who freezes herself for sixteen years and wakes up in a slightly psychedelic and very progressive future, and it’s boring as hell. And like Sanders’s The Tomorrow File this is indeed a psychedelic era, with even a drink similar to Sanders’s “Smack:” C&C, a carbonated beverage that includes cannabis and coke among its ingredients. And just like Sanders’s projected 1998 was wildly progressivised when compared to the 1970s (or even today), so too is Rimmer’s 1996…but then only so far as the societal impacts go. While Sanders’s 1998 was suitably “futuristic,” thanks to its society of drug-taking young geniuses, Rimmer’s is more low-tech hippie, with the biggest innovations being a sort of immersive television and helicopter-hotel things. 

One similarity between The Tomorrow File and Love Me Tomorrow is that both novels are written in first-person. However the narrator of Rimmer’s novel is a woman…which means that Love Me Tomorrow is one of those strange (to me, at least) novels in which a male author writes explicit sex scenes from the perspective of a woman. Kids, don’t try this at home! But as mentioned there isn’t much sex at all in the novel; instead, there’s a ton of navel-gazing introspection…humorless navel-gazing introspection at that. This is the sort of book where our narrator, 33 year-old poet, porn actress, and cryogenic test subject Christina “Christa” North, will say, without even a hint of humor, stuff like, “If [Mory] had married me, I would have sucked him into my Stygian nothingness.” 

It takes a helluva long time to get to the future, too. The first hundred-plus pages of Love Me Tomorrow are a nightmare of psychoanalysis, as Christa North tells us of her sordid history. Long story short, Christa is now in an experimental cryogenic facitilty in 1980, sent here due to her frequent attempts at suicide. She’s 33, married to a wealthy older industrialist, and has two kids – whom she clearly doesn’t give a shit about. (Not that this stops her from screwing her son in the future section…but we’ll get to that…) But Christa sure does care about herself, as she blathers at us incessantly for a good hundred pages, detailing her life up to that point, complete with pedantic, verbatim discussions she had with a college boyfriend named Mory in the late ‘60s who thought he was the reincarnation of Edward Bellamy and vowed to become president one day. 

The navel-gazing is horrendous in this opening section as Christa’s narration hops from 1980 back to the late ‘60s, with periodic detours about her bestselling “dirty book,” The Christening Of Christina, which was about her sexual awakening and whatnot. Vaguely we are informed a film was made of this, somewhere in the early ‘70s, starring Christa herself – and it was one of those mainstream porn films of the era, complete with Christa giving blowjobs and having sex on camera. After this Christa became a famous “sword swallower” a la Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat, but she soon escaped that life, marrying older man Karl, having two children with him, and trying to make her name as a poet. And also trying to kill herself, and she recounts each failed attempt in total self-obsessed detail. 

As with Rimmer’s other books, most of the action occurs in Boston, so we get a lot of flashbacks to Christa’s Harvard days. There is a ton of exposition here from Christa’s boyfriend Mory, on how in the year 2000 people will be so different the US will need a new constitution and a “philosopher” President, ie Mory himself. Again, very similar to The Tomorrow File, so similar that I wonder if Rimmer borrowed some ideas – Sanders’s novel projected a radically altered Unitied States, alterations which had been spearheaded by “the first scientist President.” Mory endlessly talks as he screws Christa and roommate Jenny, just on and on talking – yes, there’s even exposition during the sex scenes. Mory’s goal is to get “the liberal wing of the Republican party” to vote for him when he runs in 2000 (ie RINOs, who curiously do control the party today, but for how long is the question). 

In between the rampant flashbacks we have the “main” storyline in 1980 with Christa in the clinic, and it all finally culminates in a big business deal Karl is trying to achieve on his yacht, and Christa gets super drunk, leading the other wives in some skinny dipping, after which she tries to screw one of Karl’s business partners – and kill him along with her as she pulls their fornicating bodies down into the dark sea. After this Christa is sent off to the funny farm, only it’s a special type of funny farm, as she’s become the unwilling guinea pig in a cryogenic experiment. Why Christa? Given the high rate of failures, the clinic is looking for subjects who are prone to suicide…in other words if the cryo fails, no big deal, because the subject planned to kill himself anyway! It gets a bit creepy when Christa sees her own obituary in the paper; the false story has it that she’s drowned, leaving behind a husband and two prepubescent children. 

Rimmer pulls an interesting narrative trick, so far as when exactly Christa’s “autobiography” is being dictated, and around page 130 we come to the future portion of the novel. And here the exposition becomes even more incessant. Rather than bring his progressivised, vaguely sci-fi 1996 to life via action, suspense, or drama, Rimmer instead has a variety of characters baldly exposit on all the changes that have occurred in the 16 years Christa has been asleep. What makes it humorous is that most of the characters are men, so therefore according to current sentiments the novel is a barrage of “mansplaining.” But then Love Me Tomorrow is yet another indication of how Leftism has changed over the decades; Rimmer’s version of it is essentially the late ‘60s projected into the ‘90s, with “Love Groups” of open marriages and wanton hedonism, with the expected sex and drugs…even psychedelia courtesy lightshows people go to see in large arenas. There is none of the straightjacketed wokeism and identity politics that defines the Left today…but then again the “future” Rimmer depicts here is nearly 30 years in the past. 

The only real tension occurs soon after Christa awakens; she tries to escape from the clinic, only slowly realizing that it’s now 1996. This entails a cool scene where she wanders into a cryo room and sees a bunch of dates on the sleeping forms that range from the 1980s through the ‘90s; in other words, to paraphrase Dorothy in The Wizard Of Oz, it’s not 1980 anymore. Here too Christa sees that David, the head scientist in the cryo project, has gotten much older since she last saw him a few “days” ago, but there’s not much else in the way of drama. And keep in mind, Christa has two kids who now would be in their 20s; Christa is so obsessed with herself that she doesn’t even think to ask about them until many, many pages detailing various incidental societal changes have gone by. 

Rather, it’s an onlsaught of “mansplaining,” with David even giving Christa specific “don’t have sex” instructions: 

This proceeds immediately into a discussion about abortion: 

And keep in mind, Christa has yet to ask about her kids! But hey, at least Rimmer has his leftist priorities in order…I mean sex and abortion should be discussed before finding out what’s happened to your children in the 16 years you’ve been sleeping. Good grief! 

But speaking of children, Rimmer’s progressivised 1996 has also achieved that (un)holy grail of the left, same as in The Tomorrow File: the sexualization of children. Christa is taken back to David’s Love Group, which is like an extended “family” of communal living…and the kids are free to walk around naked and sleep with their parents, as bluntly exposited for us by an 11 year-old: 

And still our heroine fails to ask about her own kids, or even about her former husband. But then, she did try to kill herself, so I guess Rimmer assumes Christa wouldn’t be much concerned with them anyway. It’s just an example of the author’s complete lack of understanding when it comes to writing a compelling novel. Hell, when Christa does finally ask about her kids, she’s told in like two sentences that they’ve grown up and gone on to relatively normal lives…and then we get three times as much detail on how toilets operate in this future: 

You might note the strange words in the above excerpts. Fully committed to his own nonsense, Rimmer has the people of his 1996 even employing a language called Loglan, which we’re informed via more exposition was invented some years ago. They’ve also taken words from an obscure book on some Himalayan tribe or somesuch, referring to wealthy people as “iks” or some other such bullshit. It’s all so stupid and mundane. And the cool groovy “future shock sex” stuff you want is minimal at best: we learn that see-through blouses are all the rage among jetsetters, and you can watch fullblown sex on TV (another similarity to Sanders’s vastly superior novel). For that matter, there’s an arbitrary attack on sci-fi; it’s mansplained to Christa that science fiction isn’t very popular in this 1996, as reality is so much more futuristic than anything some hack author could conceive, and from there Rimmer goes into a puzzling attack on Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, mocking the “patriarchal” vibe of it. So yeah on that point Rimmer’s certainly in touch with the real future; lots of Love Me Tomorrow comes off like the Twitter feed of some easily-triggered leftist of the modern day, ranting and raving at that goddamn patriarchy. 

This is also one of the first novels I’ve ever read where a footnote informs readers that we can jump ahead 32 pages if we want to skip the narrator’s rundown (“in an ongoing way”) of Mory’s book, Looking Backward II. I mean it’s nothing but info-dumping from beginning to end, and the sleazy stuff is off-putting. Back to the sexualization of children, on page 270 Christa kisses a teenage boy’s dick, wondering why mothers don’t teach their sons about sex…by actually having sex with them, and then later in the book Christa does this very thing. Her son, now a handsome young man in his 20s, is campaigning for Mory, ie Christa’s old Harvard boyfriend, and Christa is posing as some woman Mory has met – and the reunion between Christa and Mory is underwhelming at best. But then Rimmer fails again and again to add any impetus to the novel; it’s all just dry exposition with no emotional content. Mory is aware from the start that this mysterious woman is indeed Christa, but the truth of her having been cryogenically frozen is hidden from the public. 

So Christa decides to put the moves on her own son, Christa playing it sly that she might be his mother, and next thing you know he’s going down on her. This of course made me think of William Hegner’s unforgettable line “Kiss where you came from,” in The Ski Lodgers. (Some people quote Shakespeare; I quote trash.) From there it proceeds to full sex…I mean all the way, son screwing his mother, with the added sickness that the poor guy doesn’t know it’s actually his own mother he’s screwing. And of course nothing much comes from any of this. Instead more focus is placed on Christa campainging for Mory, complete with a sex tape they make together which is played on TV and of course only serves to make Mory even more popular. 

Curiously the novel is written with the conceit that it’s being read by someone in 2000. In the finale we learn that the nation pretty much resets in January of 2000, upon the last election of the country, and Christa is one of the prime movers of this new United States. Of course the name Rimmer has given the character, a female play on “Christ,” is our allusion to this from the get-go. But unfortunately Rimmer has not given us a novel in which we can read with anticipation as all this plays out. Instead it’s a soul-crushing block of deadened exposition which spells out every incidental detail of this “future” while ignoring all of the drama. 

In sum Love Me Tomorrow was one of the most disappointing novels I’ve read in a long time…the book I wanted, the “future shock sex” novel about some progressivised future, is not the book I got, and readers in 1978 must have been just as disappointed in it, as Love Me Tomorrow appears to be entirely forgotten these days, and justifiably so.