The
nine stories in this intriguing, highly-imaginative, occasionally maddening
collection have a deeply personal feel to them. These are not easy, breezy
reads: these stories require that readers take a journey—and the road is not
always direct or level or smooth. A bit of effort is required—and sometimes,
more than a single reading. But, in the end, the reader is richly rewarded with
beauty and enlightenment.
This
isn’t ‘hard’ sci-fi or conventional genre erotica, but, indeed, something quite
extraordinary: less Frankenstein’s monster genre hybrid than the precocious love
child of an optimistic speculative fiction (Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov) and a
mature, deeply self-aware literary
sensualism. If it must be classified, then I would suggest a brand new
subgenre: call it ‘techno-sexual.’
And
what do we find in this brave, sometimes bewildering new world? Trans-humanism
that does not—cannot—forget its humanity. Awesome technical capability with the
aura of magic, though, in the end, it cannot assuage our deepest longings, our
atavistic thirst for mystery. Hyper-connectedness
that cannot sate our hunger to touch, and feel, and remember, as in this
extended excerpt from The Subsequent
State:
“Now kiss your Goddess—” she said,
but as she did, her voice throaty and hoarse, she did not finish, if there was
anything she’d been intending to speak, because without thought, without any
feeling, without anything but a need to touch her, this special woman who
smelled of nothing but herself and the earth, who’d opened her life and her
arms for him—for the first and only time in his life—he pulled himself up the
sheets, rubbing his almost painfully erect penis along the fabric and kissed
her gently, reverently, on that small, intimate, spot.
No spark, no burst, no roar, no
scream, no stars tumbling down from heaven, no cracks yawning open from below,
no sulfur, no pain, no suffering, no tears from Jesus, no slap from God: there
was just the music of her, the throaty, deep, and glorious sound of her
pleasure as it rolled and surged through her body, arching and pulling her
hands away from her clitoris and nipple to grip, grab, and almost tear at the
sheets.
When she calmed, when it had passed
to gentle heaves and quakes, Josh pulled himself up and moved—patiently,
slowly, naturally—up her full body to where he could wrap his arms around her,
her breasts moving against his chest, to where he could look down into her
eyes, still unfocused and distant from her release. There, in the slightly remote
starlight of her eyes, he saw her seeing him: with nothing but affection,
caring, welcome . . . and love.
The
writing can be dense, knotty, sometimes overlong to a point where potential dramatic
impact is diluted, the final ironic twists coming too little and just a bit
too late to dazzle. Yet, the collection does have its share of truly amazing
moments, inspired imagining, sparks
of the ingenious. Prêt-à-Porter tells
a marvelous tale of a futuristic garment that—virtually miraculously—adjusts to
the desires and moods of its wearer. The
Bell House Invitation brilliantly takes
the ideas of collective consciousness and cyber-community to their logical—and, perhaps,
a tad disturbing—extremes. The Potter’s
Wheel and [Title Forgotten]
imagine worlds in which connectedness makes us omniscient yet utterly incapable
of knowing our deepest selves.
Enthusiastically
recommended!
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