Justine is a high-priced hooker that is wired for a perverse but unique kind of thrill. Thanks to extensive implants and modifications (such as rerouting of arteries and internal oxygen tanks), she can have her throat slit by a client who can then fulfill necrophilic fantasies on a body that can wake up again, save them from criminal charges, and collect a hefty fee. In M. Christian's story "Everything But the Smell of Lilies," her pimp asks her to stage a distraction from a crime and act as a real victim, placing her in the hands of a paramedic with a taste for actual corpses. Suddenly, the difference between even a realistic simulation and the genuine article is brought into sharp focus. M. Christian relishes these kinds of subtle distinctions and moral conflicts, and they appear again and again in The Bachelor Machine, this widely published erotica author's first science fiction anthology.
In the last century, technology brought countless changes to human sexuality from the refinement of the vibrator to the invention of Viagra. Culturally, the ongoing revolution in the rights of women and gays in and out of the bedroom and the rise of the AIDS virus makes sex seem like at once a more wonderful and dangerous experience than ever before. It is surprising then that more science fiction writers do not speculate on the implications of tomorrow's technological and social innovations, but it is clear from The Bachelor Machine that Christian is not just well-traveled in this strange country but a native of the territory.
The author is not content to merely use the trappings of the genre to set up a cheap erotic thrill. Each story is relatively short, but the sex always relies on the technology and both exist to further the plot and development of character. In Christian's hands the kinkiest acts can be the sweetest, and the most vanilla of couplings can suddenly seem twisted."Eulogy" is set in a future where death is almost unheard of, and a consensual act of oral sex becomes repugnant when we learn that both partners are aware that the recipient of the act carries a rare and truly fatal sexually-transmitted disease.
The use of technology is equally deft. M. Christian clearly loves imagining new uses for implants, cybernetic augmentation, and wearable computing. In the haunting "Winged Memory," a prostitute wears 'whoreware,' which includes a bracelet that charges cash cards and eyewear that cycles from green to red when a client's time is up. Concepts like sexual orientation are turned on their ear in stories such as "Fully Accessorized, Baby," where two women make love with fully functional prosthetic penises and a cybernetic arm made of teak. Some partners lack gender entirely, as in the entirely cybernetic soldier and his equally machine partner who appear in "Skin-Effect."
The writing is at once skillfully sensual -- with sex that never becomes repetitive or boring -- and quick, direct, and razor-sharp enough to remind one of cyberpunk's finest moments. I never felt as though I was being lectured about the setting; instead we discover it directly through the eyes of each story's protagonist. Even the quickest and raunchiest of the stories resonate with deeper themes and subtle nuances that urge continued reflection and repeat readings. "Technophile" deserves to go down in history for bearing one of science fiction's immortal opening lines: "I almost lost my virginity at fifteen, but his batteries ran low;" it also displays both Christian's tender side and his sense of humor. This story concerns a young man who begins his first sexual explorations with a lover whose genitals are incompatible with the wiring in his home.
It is hard to pick out weaknesses in such a strong debut collection. A few stories suffer slightly from their brevity and would probably have been more effective as longer works. I also felt the collection was lacking in contextual information, such as a list of when and where stories first appeared in print; some are previously published and some appear here for the first time but there is no way to tell which is which. I'd also love it if the stories included some author's notes about the inspiration or ideas behind them, and the inclusion of the fascinating dialogue between Christian and Circlet Press' Cecilia Tan (an extra provided only to reviewers) would have further enhanced the volume.
The Bachelor Machine succeeds on every level as both erotica and speculative fiction; even the weakest entries entertain, shock, arouse, or amuse. If he continues writing in this vein, the author is sure to make waves within science fiction. With talent and vision to spare, M. Christian belongs on your reading list, too.
In the 1980s, I read an article about some noted visionaries of the bold future of virtual reality. The visionaries uniformly denied that virtual sex would be a factor in this brave new technology. Apparently the visionaries hadn't noticed that several existing technologies were significantly subsidized by sex, among them the phone companies (by 900 numbers), Big Pharma (by The Pill), and the new videotape industry (by X-rated sales and rentals). Here in the Twenty-First Century, though we're still waiting for VR, phone companies enjoy the additional subsidy of surfers seeking X-rated websites, penile implants and Viagra keep multinational medical companies big in the stock market, and video stores add X-rated DVDs.
SF authors are bolder, or maybe just less blind, than the VR visionaries; they routinely incorporate varieties of cybersex in their fiction. But SF authors rarely center plot and theme on sex, and the professional and semiprofessional SF magazines rarely publish speculative sex stories. Yet the enormous sexual changes of the last few years, both trivial (porn spam) and profound (legalized gay/lesbian marriage in Canada), demand more SF exploration of the subject. Fortunately, on the small-press margins of SF, at the border shared with the erotica genre, a few writers are speculating intelligently and imaginatively about the future of sex. Among the best-known and best of the erotic-SF writers is M. Christian.
The stories in his new collection, The Bachelor Machine, pass the litmus tests of both the SF and erotica genres. Take out the tech and there's no story; take out the sex and there's no story. This description may lead those unfamiliar with SF erotica to suspect that every story is about getting off with the aid of futuristic technologies, and that's true as far as it goes. But that's not going nearly far enough.
The stories in The Bachelor Machine are not about sex, though they're stuffed with sexual acts; the stories are about what sex means. M. Christian is writing about the psychology of being human, and he often does so by exploring sexual possibilities and realities that are rarely discussed, even in private conversation. He not only thinks forbidden thoughts, he extrapolates them in the finest SF fashion.
The aptly named "Technophile" pushes technofetishism to the ultimate as it explicates an idea most authors (especially male authors) would never imagine, let alone write about. To put it bluntly, "Technophile" eroticizes castration. A character has his penis cut off and replaced with the top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art "Long Thrust." Another character wants to lose his virginity to the technological phallus, which he sees as hotter and better than the old-fashion flesh kind. But the cutting-edge implant needs a recharge and remains limp throughout the encounter, a bitter irony.
In the decaying post-industrial future of "Winged Memory", Dusk does something most people couldn't imagine, and would find horrifying if they did: he sells (and loses) his memory of losing his virginity. He does this to buy thirty minutes with a prostitute "walking the street, eyes available red." To have her again, Dusk keeps selling memories, until he doesn't know who he is, or who this woman is that he inexplicably wants.
The stories "Bluebelle" and "Skin-Effect" break taboo by making explicit the sexual undercurrents of the savagery and killing in nearly every Hollywood cop and military action flick.
In "Guernica", several individuals meet secretly in a basement to enjoy sex acts outlawed by a repressive Twenty-First-Century government. Their practices, costumes, and toys deliberately, ironically, terrifyingly recreate the uniforms, actions, and tools of the cops who would arrest and punish — and kill — them.
In "Butterflies$", a hacker immersed in the full-sensory, Disney-perfect Glade of the Datasea finds herself assaulted — literally — by a flock of beautiful butterfly-sprites. I generally hate stories about rape/violation, yet Christian's skill, imagery, and insight kept me reading to the end... and I never felt violated by the story. It's an impressive achievement.
In "Hackwork", Rosselyn Moss works for ExpressTaxi as a body that cyber-riders hire to carry their consciousness around New Orleans. They dictate her actions and, inevitably, drive her body into sexual encounters. One night, she is distressed to find herself whipping a beautiful young stranger — and even more distressed to discover the stranger loves it.
Like Rosselyn, the narrator of "Switch" is a rent girl. She isn't a taxi, but she may have an even more troubling job, for she never remembers who her clients were, or what they did to her. M. Christian travels deep into taboo territory by demonstrating that, for some, being so thoroughly controlled, so completely owned as to remember nothing, is the ultimate turn-on.
In "Everything but the Smell of Lilies", Justine Moor is a whore with a deeply creepy specialty. She's been turned into "a hardwired dead girl, a chilling and stiffening hooker", dying over and over for money. If this bleeding-edge cyberpunk extrapolation isn't disturbing enough, Justine finds herself lying, a motionless but fully-conscious corpse, in an ambulance staffed by a necrophiliac. (In case it's not already abundantly clear, some stories in The Bachelor Machine are not intended to arouse.)
Many of M. Christian's grittily urban stories are cyberpunk; "Heartbreaker" pushes the form to a logical extreme. When an undercover cop sets up the bust of an outlaw biohacker, the two women don't just have sex, they withdraw very special interface cables from inside themselves and connect them: "Linked, each hardwired into the other's genitals, mixed and matched, they surged and merged."
In "Thin Dog", fans jack their minds into a full-sensory experience of what it's like to be superstar reactor-rock band Thin Dog. Members Johna, Paul, Georgina, and Jingo (ahem) play instruments that are nanotech implants woven through their bodies; playing includes on-"stage" couplings and quadruplings.
Some stories not only share 1980s-cyberpunk's fascination with Japanese culture, but show the influence of "anime" (Japanese animation). In many ways, the woman and situation in "State" are ideal for anime. The prostitute Fields lives in Japan and earns her living by pretending to be an almost mythically superior Japanese-made sex android. Her masquerade must always achieve perfection — from biochemically lowered body temperature, to "incredibly durable bonding polymer" applied daily to every millimeter of flesh, to behavior in orgasm — because her clients must never suspect she's human.
Not every story is cyberpunk. "The New Motor" is an amusing steampunk entertainment set in Paul Di Filippo territory. Nineteenth-Century spiritualist John Murray Spear has a vision of "the Association of Electricizers... spirits with a mechanical turn of mind," and begins proselytizing for the creation of "the Physical Savior of the Race... the New Motor!" This charismatic messiah for "a new Age of Man Through Machine" leads his followers to transcendentalist New England, where they settle in the conservative town of Lynn, Massachusetts. Seducing and neglecting a particularly fervent follower proves seer Spear is dangerously blind to certain human truths.
The collection has some flaws. Some futures don't seem entirely plausible (a minor problem, and one hardly confined to the erotic-SF subgenre). A couple of stories are vague in their SFnal elements. I never quite figured out what "Bluebelle" was (a micro Death Star? a flying fembot? a round mecha?). It takes too long to learn what the futuristic technology is and does in "Eulogy". The endings of "Eulogy" and "Winged Memory" left me wondering just what was happening. And frustratingly, the book provides no copyright data, providing no information about if or when the stories were previously published.
M. Christian's prose is strong and supple and sometimes lyrical. If you don't like naughty language or graphic descriptions of sex, you'd better steer clear of his work. But if you like smart, taboo-breaking SF, then read The Bachelor Machine.
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When mega-names in the science fiction world like Mike Resnick and Paul Di Filippo praise your work, you know you've gone supernova. When someone like Cecilia Tan writes the introduction for your latest collection, you know the included tales are white hot, sensual, and as erotic as it gets. Such are the credentials, among others, of M. Christian's just published The Bachelor Machine.
After an uncertain time, their moans and cries and incoherent bursts of near-speech, near-philosophical-balderdash, synched perfectly then climbed, a pair of syncopated screams, toward a deity that they hoped to perhaps outdo with their engineered divinity, their mechanical savior.The machines, the bio-engineered, the alien, and the passionate humans in this collection of stories are, indeed, on a trip to tomorrow where the lusting may not always be easy, but the resulting orgasms are transcendent. I haven't read such syncopated prose since Filippo's The Steampunk Trilogy nor such riffing sensual descriptions since Samuel R. Delaney's now classic Dahlgren. M. Christian here writes, as Cecilia Tan says, like jazz, improvising on themes and taking the mind on a light-speed journey into the human erotic psyche and beyond.
Too often, science fiction can drag with polemic pseudo-dogmas or the hackneyed plots of space westerns with a lone hero standing tall against phantasmal enemies. You'll find nothing like that in The Bachelor Machine. Instead, your erotic particles will be deconstructed, sped up incredibly, and collided with a vision of sex and sensuality that is Tantric in scope.
She was beautiful. Stretched out on her huge bed, a midnight expanse that all but filled her bedroom, she looked up at me with huge earthen eyes -- lit by quivering desire, a pulse-pounding fever. Her mouth was on my right nipple, painting it with the gleam of her wet lips, making it harden almost to the point of pain. I felt the ghostly nipping of her white, white teeth. Then she really sucked, and I felt my legs turn to rubber and my cunt get heavy, wet, and hot.Like all fine quality erotica, The Bachelor Machine goes past outdated concepts of gender and identity and sends its exploratory probes into the core of sexuality and desire, deep beneath the surface we normally skim across in our day-to-day imaginings. This is the territory of off-world living, cosmic, and magical. While the high-tech bits are fascinating in their own right, it is in their union with the erotic impulse where the reader finds his or her ordinary orbit shifted. Odd, even bizarre, circumstances evolve into encounters that challenge the characters' notions of love and want, self and partner, genitals and psyche.
In my hand, the crop was light, all but intangible.
The sender was a flaming hot number in the cybersea, a dominatrix icon that played games with the boys' heads, and played them ultimately well, and safe. She'd earned, not taken, her ID: bytebitch. She wasn't a girlie milking her tits for all the drooling boys. She was a hard dealer -- no-nonsense and straight. They didn't like that, expecting sugar and spice, not razors and sure, clear percentages.Jump into the slipstream of The Bachelor Machine and M. Christian will take you for a joyride -- down into the places where nanoseconds seem to last an eternity and the orgasms are as big as Jupiter. Strap yourself on his rocket ship of soaring prose and fantastic plot, where your co-pilots have any gender, all gender and whose mission is to leave you breathless with desire and safely exhausted with satiation. Let The Bachelor Machine speed you on your way...
I think, I dream, I wish -- but it's not even a memory, because I'm not allowed any. I stretch out on my simple bed, in my simple flat, and spin my wishes of what they might be like, their faces, their rough hands, their cruel implements, their...cocks, in my mouth, in my hands, in my so-wet cunt. I think, I dream, I wish...
