The
five stories in this intriguingly focused collection of f/f erotic romance,
draw inspiration from a wide range of fantasy and speculative fiction,
everything from Lewis Carroll’s Through
the Looking Glass to The Butterfly
Effect, True Blood, Quantum Leap, and the famous Mirror Mirror episode of the original Star Trek series. While authors seldom
like to be reminded of their influences—“Gosh! You write just like [insert name
here] . . .”—it is the true artist who knows how to take good preexisting
story-stuff and rearrange its atoms into something dazzlingly novel. The great
Twentieth century composer Igor Stravinsky once remarked, “a good
composer does not borrow, he steals.” What Stravinsky didn’t mention—no doubt
being too infatuated with his own drollery—is that a great artist coopts the
older material in such a way as to make it wholly his or her own. (Then too, Fantasia notwithstanding, Stravinsky
didn’t have a legion of Disney Corp. lawyers bound and determined to plug every
loophole in the copyright statutes.)
Alternate
realities, whether glimpsed fleetingly in a fitting room mirror (as in R. Anne
Sawyer’s So Quite New a Thing) or
experienced to their sensual full (Reflections
by Kate Dominic) offer a fascinating and diverse range of ideas for fiction.
Quantum possibility (new parallel realities theoretically created by each
choice we make) and alternate personal history are explored with poignant and
powerful effect in Annabeth Leong’s The Universe Where Katie Lived, in which
orgasm itself brings new dimensions into existence—an experience to which many
lovers can well relate. In Kathlene Tudor’s Into
Tipera—perhaps the most heavily traditional-sci-fi influenced story of the
lot—a scientist defies authority and risks her life to prove her theories
concerning the possibility of travel between alternate space/time dimensions. Vivian
Jackson’s Game Fae is a delightful
contemporary fantasy tale wherein an overworked video game designer finds
herself drawn into a world more fascinating and sexy than the most
extravagantly imagined cyber environment.
Her whole body was electrified,
ablaze, and needing. In this place she wasn’t alone, the only girl, the only
gay girl, the only anything. She was part of the greater whole. Part of the
faerie queen. A tiny fae tugged at her earlobe, shishing into her ear, tweaking
a sweet spot of sensation just below, next to her head. Another found the pulse
point in her neck and rubbed against it. Felt like the rough tongue of a cat,
but warm and slick. God, to feel something like that on her clit. Laughter
trilled in her mind. “Now you’re getting it. We aren’t bad faeries, we just
like fucking. Open your eyes.”
Just
one of many delights to be found in this marvelous collection. Enthusiastically
recommended.
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