"Speaking Parts" Excerpt From Rude Mechanicals

Check this out: the very-great Gay/Lesbian Fiction Excerpt blog just posted a very teasing taste from my novella, "Speaking Parts," which is in my collection of technorotica: Rude Mechanicals. 

"Speaking Parts" is one of two novellas plus four expicit short stories of sex and technosex included in the collection Rude Mechanical: Technorotica by M. Christian. Two lovers, one with a camera-shutter eye, come together in a scorching, obsessive, edgy relationship that will take them both to the limits of sexuality and beyond.

Rude Mechanicals: Technorotica
Publisher: PageTurner (November 28, 2009)
ASIN: B002Z3Z9LA

Excerpt from "Speaking Parts:"

#

Pell remembered seeing Arc’s eye—it was the first thing she’d noticed.

Tourmaline and onyx. Silver and gold. A masterpiece watch set in a crystal sphere, the iris a mandala of glowing gold. Her blinks were a camera shutter’s, as imagined by the archetypal Victorian engineer but built by surgical perfection not found anywhere in Pell’s knowledge. The woman’s left eye was jeweled and precise, clicking softly as the woman looked around the gallery, as if the engineers who’d removed her original wet, gray-lensed ball had orchestrated a kind of music to go with their marvelous creation: a background tempo of perfect watch movements to accompany whatever she saw through their marvelous and finely crafted sight. Click, click, click.

An eye like that should have been in a museum, not mounted in a socket of simple human skin and bone, Pell had thought. It should have been in some other gallery, some better gallery, allowed only to look out at, to see other magnificent creations of skilled hands. Jare’s splashes of reds and blues, his shallow paintings were an insult to the real artistry of the woman’s eye.

That’s what Pell thought, at first, seeing Arc – but only seeing Arc’s perfect, mechanical eye.

Pell didn’t like to remember first seeing her that way – through the technology in her face. But it felt, to her, like it had its own kind of ironic perfection to deny it. So Pell lived with the biting truth that she didn’t, at first, see Arc – for her eye.

But later, right after she got momentarily lost in the beauty of Arc’s implant, the woman looked at Pell with her real eye, the gray, penetrating right one – and Pell forgot about the tourmaline, onyx, silver and gold machine.

She had finally seen Arc, herself – the woman, and not the simple, mechanical part. Next to her, the eye was cheap junk: a collection of metal, old rocks, and wires.

* * * *

She wasn’t Arc at first. She began as just the woman with the perfectly created eye. Then she was the beautiful woman. Then she was the woman where she didn’t belong. Seeing her eye, then seeing her, Pell lastly saw her as oil, the kind of oil you’d see pooling in the street, that had somehow managed to make its way into a glass of wine. Agreed, it was cheap red wine – something out of a box and not even a bottle, but, still – she was oil. She didn’t belong and that was obvious, despite the cheapness of the gallery. She could tell, cataloging her bashed and scuffed boots, noting her threadbare jeans, her torn T-shirt, that amid clean jeans and washed (and too black) turtlenecks, she was a discordant tone among the harmonious poseurs in Jare’s tiny South of Market studio.

The woman was aware of her discrepancy. She wandered the tiny gallery with a very large plastic tumbler of vin very ordinare, stopping only once in a while to look at one of Jare’s paintings.

Holding her wine tight enough to gently fracture the cheap plastic with cloudy stress lines, Pell watched her, stared at the tall – all legs and angles, broad and strong – woman with the artificial eye. She tried not to watch her too closely or too intently, sure that if she let slip her fascination she’d scare her off – or worse, bring on an indifferent examination of Pell. Through a sad ballet of a slightly curved lip and a stare that was nothing more than a glance of the eyes, the woman would see Pell but wouldn’t – and that would be an icy needle in Pell’s heart.

Pell had already taken too many risks that night. She already felt like she’d stepped off the edge and had yet to hit the hard reality of the ground. Traps and tigers, beasts and pitfalls for the unwary loomed all around Pell. She moved through her days with a careful caution, delicately testing the ice in front of her, wary of almost-invisible, murky lines of fault. She knew they were there, she’d felt the sudden falling of knowing she’d stepped too far, moved too quickly, over something that had proven, by intent or accident, not to be there. Pell didn’t push on the surface, didn’t put all her weight, or herself, on anything.

But then everything changed. She’d seen Arc and her eye.

The plastic cup chimed once, then collapsed in on itself. Turning first into a squashed oval, the glass cracked, splintered, then folded, the white seams of stress turning into sharp fissures of breakage. The red, freed of its cheap plastic prison, tumbled, cascaded out and down onto her.

Pell had worn something she knew wouldn’t fit with the rest of the crowd. The official color of San Francisco, she knew, would fill the place with charcoal and soot, midnight and ebony. White, she’d decided, would pull some of their eyes to her, make her stand out – absence of color being alone in a room full of people dressed in all colors, combined.

"Looks good on you."

The shock of the wine on her white blouse tumbled through Pell as an avalanche of warmth flowed to her face. The decision to wear white that night had come from a different part of herself, a part that had surprised her. Now she was furiously chastising that tiny voice, that fashion terrorist who had chosen the blouse over other, blacker ones.

And so Pell responded, "Not as good as you would" to the tall, leggy, broad shouldered girl with the artificial eye. Which was beautiful, but not as beautiful as the rest of her.

* * * *

Pell’s reason for being at the gallery was Jare. Although she could never wrap her perceptions around the gaunt boy’s paintings, she still came when he asked. Jare, Pell, Fallon, Rasp and Jest. They weren’t close – but then foxhole buddies aren’t always. They weren’t in combat, but they could be. All it would take would be one computer talking to another – no stable job history, thus conscription.

All it took were two computers, passing pieces of information back and forth. Till that happened, they hid and watched the possibility of a real foxhole death in a hot, sweaty part of Central America fly by.

Foxhole buddies. It was Jare’s term – some fleck of trivia that’d hung around him. They didn’t have an official name for their tiny society of slowly (and in some cases not too slowly) starving artists, but Pell was sure that Jare would smile at his trivial term being immortalized among a band of too-mortal kids.

That was Jare. While the rest of them tried to focus on pulling their paintings (Pell, Jare, and Rasp), music (Jest), and sculpture (Fallon) as high as they could, there was something else about Jare – something, like his paintings, that refused to be understood. His techniques were simple enough, broad strokes of brilliant color on soot-black canvas, but his reasons were more convoluted.

Or maybe, Pell had thought earlier that evening (before turning a white blouse red and seeing the woman with the artificial eye for the first time) both man and his work were simple: broad, bold statements designed to do nothing but catch attention. He was like his paintings, a grab for any kind of attention – an explanation too simple to be easily seen.

In the tiny bathroom, Pell tried to get the wine out of her blouse. Contradictory old wives’ tails: first she tried cold, then hot water. The sink ran pink and so, soon, did her blouse.

The woman with the eye stood outside the door, a surprisingly subtle smile on her large mouth. Every once and a while she’d say something, as if throwing a bantering line to the shy girl inside to keep her from drowning in embarrassment.

"Who’s he foolin? I can do better crap than this with a brush up my ass.”

"You should see this chick’s dress. Looks like her momma’s – and momma didn’t know how to dress, either.”

"Too many earrings, faggot. What year do you think this is?

"Hey, girl. Get out here with that shirt. It’s better looking than this fucking stuff on the walls."

Cold water on her hands, wine spiraling down the sink. Distantly, Pell was aware that her nipples were hard and tight – and not from the chill water. Down deep and inside, she was wet. It was a basic kind of primal moisture, one that comes even in the burning heat of humiliation. Finally, the blouse was less red than before. Planning to run to where she’d dropped her old leather coat to hide the stigmata of her clumsiness, her excitement in two hard brown points, she opened the door.

The tall woman smiled down at her, hot and strong. In one quick sweep of her eyes, Pell drank her tall length, strong shoulders, columnar legs. She was trapped, held fast between the hot eyes she knew must have been staring at her, pinning her straight to her embarrassment, and the presence of the woman.

Her eye, the eye, clicked a quick chime of precision – as if expanding its limits to encompass the totality of Pell. Pell did not mind her intense examination. It added, with a rush of feelings, to the quaking in her belly, the weakness in her knees.

"Gotta splash. Wait right here,” Arc said.

Of course she waited.

After a few hammering heartbeats, the door opened and she came out – butchly tucking her T-shirt back into her jeans – and Pell was again at the focus of her meticulously designed sight.

"You live anywhere close? I’m tired of this shit. You?"

"Down the block. Just on the corner," Pell said, trying hard not to smile too much.

The woman downed the small sample of red in her glass and, looking for a place to put it down, and not finding any, just dropped it with a sharp plastic clatter on the floor. "Show me. It can’t be worse than here. Too many fucking artists."

Rude Mechanicals

Rude Mechanicals

Tanaka Tatsuyuki

State

Here's a little cybersexy treat: a tease of my story "State" - which appears in the print-only book Technorotica, and the ebooks Better Than The Real Thing, and The Bachelor Machine

STATE 

Once part of a sprawl of temporary industrial units floated into Kyushu harbor to make a Korean-owned nanochip factory, the building was industrial architecture that had been stuck on a shelf and left to forget – or really just rust. As far Fields knew – and could see – rust still really managed the property. Rumors said that Mama had scored the old building for cheap, had found some hungry jacks to scalp juice from the main grid, and some mysterious "sources" for the rest. The girls? They came from wherever lost girls always came from: the cramps of hunger or addiction, the Devil of father. They came and Mama fed them, sprayed them when they were sick, and put that rusting roof over their heads. In return, they worked.

Friday nights weren't usually this busy. There were even rumbles from Mama's office that Fields might be called down from her box to work the cribs with the pie-faced girls. But someone asked for the special of the house and she was spared having to watch the ordinary flatscreen with the rest of the girls. She was the special, so she had awhile to get ready, and even watch the end of Don't Drop It (her favorite) on the antique Hakati tank – and yum! – relish the new host).

The antique took a long time to power-down, and she always (since Mama had sold it to her) felt that thrill-tingle of worry that some client would come in and still see the spray/wash/float of green/blue/red hanging in front of her cheap holo print of Tokyo At Night that masked the unit and would ponder a bit too long over why a Mitsui Automaton would be watching a game show.

The streets, and common knowledge, said that Autos took awhile to power up, boot up their software, get their circuits warm and ready – though never really willing: the prefect love doll. The perfect toy. The real fact was that it took Fields time to get completely into her Act.

Her friendly gray robe went first, into the hidden closet behind the false wall of phony blinking tell-tales and dummy flatsceens playing loops of technical gibberish, with the rest of her reality: hung on a hook next to her vid discs, street clothes, wigs, pills, towels, creams, sprays, and plain-faced bottles of special dye.

Very special: an incredibly durable bonding polymer that she applied each morning – but was always careful to examine every inch of herself in a roll-up plastic mirror, lathering on the thick blueness at the faintest signs of her real pinkness before the light over the door flashed green. Her hair, every brown strand, was months gone – and kept at an imperceptible level by a chilling spray of tailored enzymes. Sure, she could wear any of her wigs, and sometimes did for those who just couldn't deal with an too-inhuman Automaton, but for the most part she liked going smooth and streamlined: you paid for a machine.

The little yellow hexagon pills still had about another two hours to go – her skin texture and temperature would be just that different. Not quite human, almost machine synthetic. Anyone, of course, who knew the real Mitsui would know the reality of pink-skin and blood Fields under the blue, behind the contacts, beyond the re-engineered body. But then the Autos were very rare, their legends and rumors huge, and who would know the real thing, after all in the dim shadows of big, sprawling, bad Kyushu?

Fields's body was a gift from Mama, really an investment: those long days two years ago with the Osaka Scalpers had taken what nature had lucked her with and shaped her into an almost perfect Auto Class B – still one of Mitsui's most popular models. Strong shoulders; round face with high, almost too- wide-for-nature, cheekbones; tiny, pert, full lips; huge crystal blue eyes; high, wide and moderate tits, huge against her actually small frame, with aggressively large nipples – some of it was really hers, some was machine made for her machine act.

Her looks, real or made, would be good and profitable as long as the real unit was State-of-the-Art ... and the rumors of how good, and how hot, kept flying.

[MORE]

The Future Is Really Here...

From Web Urbanist:

Dutch architects Universe Architecture hope their möbius strip ‘Landscape House’ will be the first home constructed with 3D printing technology, but London’s Softkill Design aims to beat them to the punch with this nest-like design. Made of plastic, the organic-looking ProtoHouse 2.0 could be built off-site in three weeks and assembled in a single day.

Softkill Design plans to have the first prototype out by this summer. The single-story house will be 8 meters (26 feet) wide and 4 meters (13 feet) long, with prefabricated sections small enough to transport in vans and snap together on-site. The lightweight pieces fit together like velcro or buttons, without the need for bolting, screwing or welding. Once assembled, the structure looks like a spider’s nest.

Gilles Retsin of Softkill Design told Dezeen of the competing Landscape House, “We actually don’t even consider that a 3D printed building because he is 3D printing formwork and then pouring concrete into the form,” Retsin said. “So it’s not that the actual building is 3D printed.”

The original ProtoHouse 1.0 represented the first prototype for a 3D-printed building, in which all elements of the house – structure, cladding, interior and finishing – were printed. “When we started this research, it was kind of science fiction,” says Retsin. “It’s not actually that far off any more.”

A Gentleman's Duel

Rude Mechanicals

 

Rude Mechanicals

Gael Bertrand

Patlabor 2: Kenji Kawai

Rude Mechanicals

 

(via ginnyd)

Introduction to Love Without Gun Control

Here's a bit of fun: the introduction to my collection of (non-smutty) science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories: Love Without Gun Control (out now in both 'e' and ond-fashioned paper from Renaissance E Books.

Congratulations on your purchase of the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine. Utilizing the finest in Hack Technology, we at Write Way guarantee that if correctly used and maintained the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine can give you years of successfully written introductions.

After removing the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine from its ecologically protective shipping container, place it in a convenient location where it will be away from direct sunlight, moisture, dirt or dust, or undue criticism. Next, attach the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine’s Driving Force inlet jack to the nearest source of creative energy. We are Write Way recommend a standard Emotionally Vacant Upbringing (EVU), or Societally Isolated Childhood (SIC) coupled with the optional Write Way Rare Parental Approval (RPA) module for efficient creative drive. Warning: Insufficient creative energy can result in repetitive, arrogant results (see Appendix A: MeMeMe Syndrome) or false modesty (Appendix B: Blush Syndrome).

After attaching your Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine to an available Driving Force, open the Inspiration Input panel located on the lower right section of the machine. Using a small, sharp instrument (such as your penis), activate/deactivate the appropriate DIPshit to assign the desired introduction inspiration input. Warning: Failure to activate the correct combination can result in various undesirable results, leading to arrest and criminal prosecution and/or Literary Awards.

Next remove the deebing support ring (located under the forelock wheel assembly) and carefully stipple the mantune cage until the blue light rotates into the green. With the loose pin in your left hand, then proceed to osculate the frandip to achieve maximum caustic relux feedback. If the frandip doesn’t achieve enough caustic relux feedback, consult the enclosed Troubleshooting Guide or kick the mantune cage wearing a size twelve steel-toed boot, aiming specifically for the wizzing input slot.

After the caustic relux feedback has been achieved, it is time to select the Editorial Interface Mask (EIM). Please note that three pre- set Editorial Interface Masks have been preloaded into the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine, specifically the Father Figure (FF), the Tyrannical Ogre (TO), and the Uninspired Hack (UH). If you are interested in other Editorial Interface Masks, the Automatic Introduction Writing Machine Upgrade contains ten others as well as additional viewpoint features such as Alcoholic Blurring (AB) and World-weary Cynicism (WC).

To fully utilize the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine’s Deadline Matching Feature (DMF) it’s important to configure the Irresponsibility and Compulsiveness scale, located on the back of the machine, next to the Frustrated Author Input (FAI) and the Destructive Relationship Exhaust Fan (DREF). Turning the pip knob to the left will increase the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine’s dependability in meeting responsibilities (real or imaginary), though it will also affect the Spontaneity Output Mechanism possibly resulting in a creative, if predictable, column. Reversing the pip knob will diminish predictability but can also result in what is commonly referred to as Deadline Lapse Syndrome, which has been proven to be a leading cause of Writer Termination (WT). Correct balancing of these two forces is integral to the correct operation of the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine.

While we at Write Way understand that even after utilizing the excellent technology embodied in our Automatic Introduction Writing Machine there are other, unknown factors that can affect Creative Output (CO) and Monetary Input (MI), we must still insist that payment for the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine be received within one month of delivery (depending on location and volatility of local delivery personnel). Failure to expedite payment will result in financial and physical penalties, possibly including fines, levies, liens, testicular removal, spinal rearrangement, dental extraction, and colonic impaction.

You are now almost ready to use your Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine to produce admirable and possibly noticable introductions. Before continuing, however, it is important to observe the three-stage Safety Feature Checklist (SFC):

• To ensure proper lubrication of the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine’s internal assembly, a fifth of cheap bourbon must be fed into the Inhibition GearBox (IGB) on a daily basis. If suitably cheap bourbon is not available, a bottle of cough syrup or rubbing alcohol can be used.

• If overheating occurs, the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine must be automatically switched into standby mode by turning the fiddle switch to the Moderate setting. This will cause the machine to “wheel-spin” until it cools satisfactorily. Failure to place the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine into this mode if overheated can cause the sensitive gibber line to vaporize, resulting at a ten x thousand foot-pound force explosion. This, naturally, voids the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine’s warranty, as well as any operator within three hundred feet of the device.

• Before final activation of the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine, the operator must completely fill out the attached Waiver of Responsibility (WoR), absolving Write Way of any damages – real, emotional, or imaginary – that the operator may experience during the operation of the machine. Failure to do so will result in the gibber line to vaporize, resulting at a ten x thousand foot- pound force explosion.

If you have followed these instructions carefully, you are now ready to use the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine and produce profitable and possibly entertaining columns for years to come. If however the machine fails to operate, place it back in its ecologically protective shipping container and return it to an authorized service center or convenient landfill.

If you are in need of an introduction in the meantime, we suggest that you simply retype this manual – god knows, manuals are just like introductions: no one reads them anyway. 

Rude Mechanicals

BotGirl by ArtMagix

Rude Mechanicals

i-girl 2.0 by Plassgard

Lisabet Sarai Likes Painted Doll

My great pal - and a great writer - Lisabet Sarai wrote a nice little piece for the Erotica Readers And Writers Site called "Portrait of a Chameleon" featuring reviews of both my erotic romance Brushes (coming soon in a new edition from Renaissance E Books/Sizzler Editions) and my cyberpunky BDSM novel, Painted Doll (just released in a new edition from Renaissance E Books/Sizzler Editions).

As Brushes hasn't been re-released yet I thought I might at least share the Painted Doll bit ... so here you go:

Painted Doll could hardly be more different. The novel is a cyberpunk lesbian thriller set in a future Shanghai. Claire Monroe, a refugee from the disintegrating United States, uses her mathematical aptitude to support herself and her young lover Flower in the wired, crumbling heart of Asia. When someone steals from her powerful, shadowy employer Taka, she is blamed. The equally shadowy figure of Many saves her by constructing an entire new psychological and biological identity for her as the “erotist” Domino. Meanwhile, Flower is sent to a New Age colony on the other side of the world. 

M.Christian knows how to write cyberpunk. We have the traditional electronically-enhanced urban environment, alternatively luxurious and trash-choked; the ubiquitous surveillance and the masks used to defeat it; the reality of everything for sale, including the human soul. If you enjoy the genre (as I do), you will feel quite at home in M.Christian’s future metropolis. 

The most original aspect of The Painted Doll is the concept of the erotist. Like a high-priced call girl, Domino meets her clients in an anonymous room for encounters charged with erotic intensity. However, Domino does not have sex with the men who engage her services. Rather, she uses a set of neurochemical stimulants absorbed through the skin, plus her own voice and imagination, to guide her clients through a physiological and emotional exploration of their sexual fantasies and personal secrets. She paints a streak of carefully mixed chemical on the forehead, around the nipple, across the kidneys, and her subject reacts with fear, self-disgust, arousal or joy. Domino is as much an artist as Escobar. The sessions in which she strips her clients bare with her paints and her voice are among the most compelling scenes in the book...

Rude Mechanicals

(via groteleur)

Travis Charest

 

Patrick Califia Likes Rude Mechanicals

This is a very special treat: a blurb from the legendary Patrick Califia - a great writer and an even greater friend. Thanks, Pat!


Here is the latest collection of M.Christian's insightful and original work. Fabulous! I have yet to read anything Chris has written without feeling that my own assumptions were challenged, and I was pushed to think about sexuality, politics, gender, and literature in a whole different way. There aren't enough people who can write from the polymorphous perverse perspective that he seamlessly adopts. He is a genuine ally of sexual minority communities and has walked the walk and talked the talk in dozens of different erotic and edgy experiences. If you'd like to expand your horizons and spread your wings (or your legs, or somebody else's legs), you couldn't have a better guide than the wise, wry, irreverent, and twisted M.Christian.
-Patrick Califia, author of Mortal Companion, Hard Men, and Macho Sluts.

Amos Lassen Likes Technorotica: Stories Shattering the Ultimate Taboo

Here's a very nice treat: a fantastic review of my new book Technorotica: Stories Shattering the Ultimate Taboo by the always awesome Amos Lassen!

I  think of M. Christian like I think of hummus—both are acquired tastes. However, once you get to liking either, you just can’t get enough. As prolific a writer as Christian is, I never get quite enough. He is erotic and futuristic and has a sardonic sense of humor, However, above everything else, he goes where few dasn’t. In this anthology, Christian takes a step into the future and writes about bondage, fetishes, science fiction, and sex with robots and so on. In fact, we are taught by robots how to be great lovers. I suppose you could label this man/machine erotica as Christians unites sex and technology and there is a lot of Christian trademark kink. This is most definitely not your “everyday” read. 

Eleven stories are sandwiched between the introduction, “Welcome to the World of Tomorrow” and the afterword, “Do You Know Where Your Children Will Be”? All of the stories are excellent but the one that stands out for me in “Blow Up” and that is all I am going to say. If you want to know why it is so special, you will have to get a copy of the book. Christian writes what I call literary erotica. He manages to infuse good writing with lots of sex and the result is almost a new genre. He is, however, the most difficult author to review because it is so easy to give away plots when discussing his writing. Therefore all I can say is for you to get a copy, clear an afternoon sit in the recliner with your feet up and the book open and enjoy every word. 

“M. Christian is one hell of a writer. A no-holds-barred storyteller, he embraces his reader at the start and doesn’t let go until long after the end.” -Mari Adkins. 

“M. Christian’s stories squat at the intersection of Primal Urges Avenue and Hi-Tech Parkway … feral-eyed, half-naked … Truly an author for our post-everything 21st century.” – Paul Di Filippo, author The Steampunk Trilogy.

Rude Mechanicals

REBOOT by Wen-JR

THE MECHANICAL BRIDE

Rude Mechanicals

Major KUSANAGI Motoko by ~kiwine

Rude Mechanicals

Lisabet Sarai Likes Technorotica

This is a very, very special treat: an extremely flattering review of
Technorotica: Stories Shattering the Ultimate Taboo - a print-only special edition, made up of the Rude Mechanicals and Better Than The Real Thing ebooks, all published (by the very great Renaisssance E Books/Sizzler Editions) by the always-great Lisabet Sarai.  Thanks so much, Lisabet!

Technorotica: Stories Shattering the Ultimate Taboo by M. Christian 

Barbary Coast Editions, Renaissance E Books, 2012

One of the most enjoyable aspects of being an author is that you get to invent new worlds. Sometimes those worlds strongly resemble our so-called reality; sometimes they deviate wildly. Even the most bizarre fictional world, though, needs to feel real. The reader needs to see, smell, taste, and touch the alien environment in which she finds herself. Against all logic and common sense knowledge, she needs to believe. 

Pulling this off is tough, especially in genres like paranormal and science fiction, where the story by definition is set somewhere other than the world as we know it. M. Christian is a master of this trick, as he demonstrates in Technorotica, his new collection of stories concerning the erotic connections between humans and machines. 

I'll admit up front that I've long been a fan of M.Christian's work (I even edited one of his books, ComingTogether Presents M. Christian) and that I'm deeply in awe of his imagination. Despite what might be considered a positive bias, I still feel totally comfortable and justified in asserting: this is a fantastic book, in both the literal and figurative sense. 

The stories in this collection could loosely be called science fiction erotica, but they vary a great deal in focus and tone. Several of them (“Hot Definition”, “Speaking Parts”, “Hack Work” and the excerpt from Christian's novel Painted Doll) are set in a shadowy, perilous, cyber-punk world where everything is for sale and everyone lives on the edge, staying alive through crime or luck or sometimes both. Prosthetics, holographic doppelgangers, constant electronic surveillance, mind-jacking and body snatching – fans of Gibson, Sterling and Cadigan will feel right at home. However, this author isn't primarily concerned with gadgets and technology (never mind the title of the book) but with feelings: fear, hunger, desperation, desire and love. These stories explore how humans reach out for one another, as the mechanical invades and erodes the meaning of humanity. 

“Blow Up” and “I am Jo's Vibrator” are lighter in tone. The former lets us into the mind of a man with a peculiar fetish. The latter, as suggested by the title, is narrated by a sex toy. Both will make you smile (or at least, that was my reaction) though “Blow Up”, the first tale in the book, has a subtle darkness that's a preview of the more serious stories to come. 

I've read the tale “State” in several other M. Christian collections. It remains one of my favorite erotic stories of all time. A human woman/sex worker impersonates a blue-skinned, state-of-the-art Japanese sex robot. The neat logical flip here satisfies the intellect. The woman's arousal at becoming the ultimate sex object provides satisfaction in other dimensions. 

“The Bell House Invitation” is a fabulous new take on ménage, or more accurately, polyamory. Four individuals – two men, two women – live together and share a group mind. Together they seduce another woman with the aim of convincing her to join their communal consciousness. The sex scene in this tale succeeds in exploring all the participants' experience simultaneously, pulling the reader into the mix. It's lusciously explicit without losing the sense of wonder that derives from a level of communion most of us only dream about. 

In contrast, “Billie” includes no overt sex at all yet still manages to convey an intense feeling of desire. This vignette of a butch woman speeding along the Pacific Coast Highway on her vintage 1977 Harley Davidson details a synergy between human and machine so strong it becomes erotic. 

“A Light Minute” focuses on communication over a distance, as a reclusive woman terrified of the world outside opens herself to the lover she knows only via electronic missives. 

Finally, “KSRN” is a dream-like reverie about speed and sex, chrome and compassion. If I'd been the author, I would have put this story last in the book. It leaves you feeling haunted and yet somehow complete.
Overall, my reaction to this book was “Wow”. But then, I'm seriously turned on by originality. If you share this trait with me – get yourself a copy of Technorotica.

(And by the way - the book includes a great preface and afterword, too!)

Rude Mechanicals

Want Want Want

(via haku55)

Taste of "The New Motor" From Betty Came: The Mammoth Book of Erotica Presents The Best of M. Christian

Here's a teasing taste of my steam-punky erotic story "The New Motor" from both The Bachelor Machine as well as the (very flattering) Betty Came: The Mammoth Book of Erotica Presents The Best of M. Christian.

The New Motor

It is not our place, via hindsight, to say what exactly happened that one particular night. It’s easy to dismiss, with scorn or even a kind of parental, historical, fondness, that he was just visited by vivid dreams, a hallucinatory fever, a form of 1854 delusion (after all, we smile, frown, grimace, laugh or otherwise, this was 1854), or some hybrid kin of them all: a vision 1/3 unresolved traumas, 1/3 bad meal of steak and potatoes, 1/3 19th century crippling social situation. What we cannot dismiss—because it’s there with minuscule precision, in detailed blocks of blurry type in rag pulp sidebills, in the fine-filigreed pages of the genteel or just the skilled—was that John Murray Spear, a spiritualist of some quite personal renown and respect, did indeed depart Miss August’s Rooming House for Gentlemen of Stature (near the corner of Sycamore and Spruce in Baltimore, Maryland), and go forth to tell anyone who would listen—and some did, as those news- papers reported and those diaries told—about his visitation by the Association of Electricizers.

Close your eyes, metaphorically, and envision the images that might have fluttered through the expansive and trained consciousness of Mr. Spear as he lay, barely waking on a cheap mattress more tick than stuffing, the too-warm embrace of a humid Baltimore summer morning pouring through the thin gauze of the window. Amid the jumble and clutter of a day’s thoughts, they walk—as contemporary A. J. Davis expressed: “spirits with a mechanical turn of mind”—into the far-reaching mind of John Murray Spear. Perhaps gears lit with fairy energies, they turn and tumble through his waking, shining metal honed with eldritch tools, playing inadvertent peg-toss with his sheet- raising morning priapism. Maybe a great churning clockwork con- traption whose complexity echoes Medusa’s curse of knowing equally insanity or death. Or they might have taken the form of a Con-Ed employee in bedazzling ethereal refinements, in a saintly pose of divine grace while the animated logos and mascots of every power company that was, is, and will be flitted around his nuclear halo—commercial cherubs to His crackling, humming, arcing, power.

Their form was something that even escaped Spear himself, for when he spoke of their visitation—and he did, oh yes, he did from his own mount and other less spiritual soapboxes—a 220-watt gaze seemed to consume him and his articulations became less detailed and more abstract: “Their form,” he said to his breakfast companions and, often, for many weeks thereafter to any stranger on the street, “is fast and incorporeal. I don’t possess the mind to express their appearance in words, but their message, dear—” Sir, Madam, Officer, Friend “— is clear and ringing in my ears: Go forth, they spoke, go forth and with these two simple hands bring into the world a machine, a great work of engineering, that would take motive power from the magnetic store of nature, and therefore be as independent of artificial sources of en- ergy as this, our own the human body. Go, this conglomeration of spirits pronounced, and build the Physical Savior of the Race,The New Messiah... the New Motor!”

John Murray Spear did, indeed, say these words: from that rea- sonably expensive boarding house in summer heated Baltimore, to the swampy humidity of the capital, then upwards towards the cooler en- virons of the Northeastern states. He spoke of the visitation of the Elec- tricizers to a shocked and tutting crowd of theosophists in Providence, his hypnotic description of the coming glory of the Motor and how it would bring about a new Age of Man Through Machine ticking out of synch with their slowly shaking, disbelieving heads.

He spoke of the Motor in Boston before a hall not as packed as it had previously been for the spiritualist of some repute, and answered with complete sincerity questions of the Motor’s construction (“things of this earthly sphere coupled with the energies of transcendent mo- tion and ethereal force”), creation (“for a small donation you can speed its manifestation and arrival here, to us”), method of operation (“can one envision a locomotive, some new machine of human use and creation, that might come during the new millennium? The works of the Motor may be visible to some of us with the enriched spiritual vision, but the true powers of it will be as unseen as that machine of ages undreamed”), and patentability (“if the material servants of this, our Government of Country, should grant me the license of its man- ufacture then I see no reason not to accept”).

Coal-and-snow beard, hair wild with his feverish retellings, sup- ple (for a man of his forty summers) body bending wildly with each description of the glory of the Motor and his saving of mankind through its mechanical enlightenment, Spear made himself a sight as he traveled. For some he was a sight that brought smiles, frowns, or sadness at his state of affairs. But as he slowly, town by town, street by street, meeting by meeting, told his tale, made his claims, his en- treaties, he gathered people who listened earnestly to his description of the Mechanical Savior of the Race, the New Motor...

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On a weird side note, the tale of the New Motor is based on reality - and you can read about John Murray Spear and his spiritual contraption in my non-fiction collection, Welcome To Weirdsville

Rude Mechanicals

 

A World of Thinking Robots

(via kirbymuseum)

Page 2 of Kirby and Joe Simon’s “A World of Thinking Robots” from Real Fact Comics #2, dated May 1946.

Rude Mechanicals

 

Prototip - OPP 'Other peoples property'

REARS ITS UGLY GREEN HEAD

(via bobdobalina)

“...REARS ITS UGLY GREEN HEAD”
Mike Hinge & Neal Adams, Heavy Metal July 1979

Ringworld Review

As promise, here's another very-fun (if I do say so myself) science fiction review from Dark Roasted Blend. Enjoy!

(right image: art by Courtney Skinner)

Ringworld

The cornerstone of Niven's "Known Space Universe" series of stories and novels Ringworld is pure science fiction adventure – on a scale that's quite literally immense. Set in a very distant future where humanity is just one of dozens of space-faring species, the novel is about several unique beings (two aliens and two humans) on a very unique quest: to explore the single greatest engineering feat in the universe: The Ringworld. Initially at each other's throats, the cowardly Puppeteer, the savage Kzin, the 'lucky' Teela Brown, and Louis Wu -- the book's 200-year-old hero – they soon find a way to work together to try and survive as well as solve the riddle of the staggeringly huge structure. How big? Well, the Ringworld is a band the size of Earth's orbit and thicker than the diameter of our tiny planet.

Although the book does require a pretty good grasp of Niven's Known Space Universe to understand and appreciate the complexity of the Ringworld and how it fits into the other books and stories, the knowledge is by no means essential to enjoying the book. It remains a truly classic novel of science fiction and is worth reading over and over again.

Review by author M. Christian

M.Christian ... Science Fiction Reviewer?

I'm thrilled to be able to announce at the reviews I wrote for the always-excellent Dark Roasted Blend just went up! To start, here's some quickie capsule reviews of some classic cyberpunk titles ... with others going up very, very soon.

(right image credit: Huxtable)

Neal Stephenson
Snow Crash

Considered by many to be the ultimate cyberpunk novel (or second only to Gibson's Neuromancer), Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash has everything the genre requires: high-tech toys and low-life characters, a flash and dazzle style, a noir beat, enough concepts and ideas for a dozen other novels, and heaping helpings of bad boy attitude.

Set in a run-down LA in an archetypal "not too distant future," the novel is basically the story of Hiro Protagonist (wink, wink), the "Last Of The Freelance Hackers And Greatest Swordfighter In The World" and ex-pizza delivernator for the mafia; and Y.T., a nimble and nubile adolescent "kourier."

In the course of trying to survive a world run by corporations, and where the endless suburbs are lit by the omnipresent loglow of franchises like Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, and CosaNostra Pizza, Hiro and Y.T. stumble into a plot by billionaire villain L. Bob Rife to... well, rule the world using a special brand of information warfare with its roots in ancient Sumerian mythology. Along the way, Hiro and Y.T. meet characters such as Ng, the technofetishist weaponeer, and Raven Ravinoff, the nuclear bomb-connected Aleut harpooner and assassin whose preferred weapons are molecular-sharp glass knives.

Snow Crash, when it rocks and rolls, which it often does, is like strapping yourself in for a dose a blisteringly fast anime: a near-chaos of cyberdelic images, methamphetamine-fueled concepts, quick bursts of characters and characterization, along with flights of pure digital fantasy. For those new to cyberpunk, reading a chapter of Snow Crash is like taking a shot of science fiction espresso.

Luckily, Neal Stephenson also knows when to put on the brakes, to pull over by the side of his roaring information superhighway of a novel and let the rest of us catch up a bit. For all its flash and dazzle, Snow Crash also has some great moments of humanity. The scenes, for instance, with Y.T. and Uncle Enzo, CEO of the American Mafia and Hiro's ex-boss as head of CosaNostra Pizza, are charming without feeling cornball. Other characters, some of them only featured for a few paragraphs, manage the same.

Some have criticized Snow Crash as a perfect example of style over substance, sarcastically saying that it's cyberpunk's purest form. Sure, the book has some serious flaws – like when it slams on the brakes to lecture Hiro, and the reader, about Sumerian mythology's relationship to linguistics and human information processing. But what saves Snow Crash from being bubblegum and instead makes it a satisfying literary meal is the inescapable sense that Stephenson is not taking himself, the book, or cyberpunk itself, very seriously.

Snow Crash is, in its heart, a cartoon: a laughing, giggling, fun time. The heroes aren't heroes. The villains – for the most part – aren't villains. The Metaverse – Stephenson's version of cyberspace – is a bold and colorful place full of animated characters, and the real world the stages and settings are too bold and outrageous to be anything but Stephenson's elbow to the reader's ribs with a chuckle of "Get it?"

To press the point, just look at Stephenson's other novels. Some have the same pop and sizzle -- like The Diamond Age -- but after reading Snow Crash it gets pretty clear when he's going for serious and poignant and when he's taking us along on a digital, cyberdelic, outrageous, dazzling, bizarre, animated, good-time ride.

(review by M. Christian)

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K. W. Jeter
Farewell, Horizontal

Like most of Jeter's novels "Farewell Horizontal" is rich and vibrant, with amazing and engaging concepts, packed with imagination to spare, and populated with fascinating characters on bizarre yet human missions.

Set in a future where a large segment of civilization is living in – and on the outside of -- a monstrous building called Cylinder, Horizontal teases and tantalizes with a lack of detail, making the book seem more like a surrealist exercise than a traditional (quote) science fiction (unquote) novel. Still, there's enough intimate details present to draw you into Ny Axxter's strange world.

A graffex (which are sort of/kind of digital tattoos or markings) artist, Ny longs for the big time, a serious score that will lift him up – literally – from being a scavenging freelancer. And like everyone else who calls Cylinder home, he knows that his fame will come by not staying in the building, by being horizontal, but instead will come from what's on the outside, on the vertical.

The vertical is what makes Farewell Horizontal sparkle. Jeter has always had a brilliant imagination and with this novel, he lets it fly. Ny – and the rest of the outcasts and fringe folks of Cylinder – live their lives clinging to the building's staggering drop surface with a technofetish inventory of fun and interesting devices and technologies. It's when Jeter gets down – or up, as the case may be – with Ny and his life that the book really draws you in. You feel like you're there with him on the surface of the building, and when he sees what could be his score – a genetically engineered flying woman or 'angel' – you feel the exhilaration. The same goes when Ny is caught in a war between two warring gangs, a war fought on the same vertical he's trying to make his home. You are there alongside him as he tries to get through it all alive.

Unfortunately, Farewell Horizontal suffers from the feeling that it's just one part of a planned series, a series that was never completed: plot elements are left hanging, characters that are clearly meant to go somewhere go nowhere, and while the lack of details make the book refreshingly surreal (yet rich with cyberpunky elements), one gets the feeling that Jeter simply didn’t have the rest of the series he might have liked to set the stage and flesh out this fascinating world.

Still, Farewell Horizontal remains a very good book and deserves a read. While it might not be the perversely dark love poem to Philip K. Dick that his first book, Dr. Adder, was, or be a truly thought-provoking and sensitive book like The Glass Hammer, or – for that matter – a wickedly funny and strange thing like Infernal Devices, Farewell Horizontal is still more imaginative and vivid than many other books. If nothing else, it will change the way you look at skyscrapers … tripping your imagination into thinking what it would be like to live on the vertical and not just the horizontal.

(review by M. Christian)

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William Gibson
Virtual Light

It's interesting that after he finished his masterpiece Sprawl Trilogy of Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive, Gibson – the master not only of cyberpunk but of postmodern literature as well – would step back in time but remain in the future to write Virtual Light, the first of another three-part series, the so-called Bridge Trilogy.

Interesting, because Virtual Light is a fine and at times brilliant book that owes very little to science fiction, even though it has some elements in common. Set in a very near future, it follows the adventures of bike messenger Chevette Washington and disgraced cop Berry Rydell, who get caught up in a McGuffin chase when Washington impulsively steals a pair of special, high tech glasses. Their chase takes them all over California, most fascinatingly to a squatter city built in the decaying spine of San Francisco's Bay Bridge. Darkly comic, the novel has all of Gibson's trademark vividness and wickedly cool language but is much more of a noir novel with some surreal/science fiction elements than the ferociously dark and vicious Sprawl books.

Because of this, it's a much lighter and almost refreshing read, which threw a lot of Gibson's previous readers who may have been expecting something with a sharper edge. Still, when taken on its own or as part of the other Bridge books, Virtual Light remains a work by a master – a master who successfully took a different direction with a wonderful new book.

Review by M. Christian

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Samuel R. Delany
The Einstein Intersection

As with all truly great science fiction novels, The Einstein Intersection is less about science and more about fiction – in this case, fiction told by one of the greats not just of science fiction but modern literature as well.

Surreal doesn't begin to describe the setting and characters of The Einstein Intersection. Ostensibly about aliens exploring and trying to understand human culture after mankind has either left the planet or died off, the book is much more about some of the more powerful human archetypes. From Lo Lobey himself, a goat herder based on the myth of Orpheus, to the subject of his quest, Billy The Kid (AKA death), the book is a literary stage, allowing Delany to explore the world of our myths, fables, legends and fantasies.

It's unfortunate that people often pick up the book only to be frustrated and confused by Delany's psychedelic style. But for those with imagination and patience, reading The Einstein Intersection can swing open a brand new universe of style, language, and story: it's a wonderful book by a magnificent writer, first, and a great science fiction author, second.

(review by M. Christian)

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J. G. Ballard
Vermillion Sands

I want to live in Vermillion Sands. I want to wake up in the morning and look out my bedroom window at the hypnotic world J.G. Ballard has created.

A collection of short stories, Vermillion Sands is set, mostly, in a Palm Springs-type vacation resort. There are two kinds of people there: the rich and the people who serve the rich. More importantly, though, the resort is a way for Ballard – in these stories – to explore the artistic process via a whole plethora of new technologies, from cloud sculpting to sound jewelry and more.

But Ballard is Ballard, so just writing stories about a resort, the people enjoying it or working there, or even the arts, is not enough: each of the stories in Vermillion Sands is also laced with his trademark psychological depth and lyrical subtlety. Sure, the stories might not be as subversively perverse, emotionally enigmatic, psychedelically strange, or horrifically languid as some of his other books and stories, but these light and almost funny tales are still J.G. Ballard – and that means they will always be as a brilliant and elusive as the landscape outside of Vermillion Sands.

(review by M. Christian)