Exactly how steamy is this story?
R
What sex there is in Cloud Atlas is far from steamy. It's almost always looked at in a utilitarian manner—it's just for fun, or it's a way to get secrets, or there's just nothing better to do.
Frobisher is by far the most promiscuous character, frolicking with both men and women with hardly any emotional attachment to either. Adam Ewing witnesses Mr. Boerhaave and a prostitute "in flagrante delicto" (1.4.4) in his own bed. When Sonmi and Hae-Joo finally get it on (after witnessing the atrocities of the Xultation facility; there's no turn-on like cannibalism), their sex is "joyless, graceless, and necessarily improvised, but it [is] an act of the living" (7.1.267). It's a coping mechanism. And when Zachry tells us about his getting a girl pregnant, he delicately says, "I planted my first babbit up Jayjo" (6.1.22). Oh, the miracle of life.
In the world of Cloud Atlas, that's sex. Birds do it. Bees do it. So what?