Rude Mechanicals

This is exceptionally cool! I am very jazzed to be in the newest issue of Full-Metal Orgasm - with a piece on sex in science fiction. Here’s a tease - and for the issue itself you can order it on amazon … and be sure and check out Full-Metal Orgasm’s tumblr!

Science Friction: A Slightly-Snarky Look At Sex In Science Fiction … And Why It Hasn’t Been Good But It’ll Get Better

Heeellllooo, Future!

Sure, we might not have jet packs or food pills but, come on, look around – go ahead, we’ll wait…

You done? Come on, admit it: this is the fuckin’ future: cell phones with more computing power than (the good half) of Einstein’s grey matter, access to just about every book ever written … and, more importantly, every episode of Star Trek (including the animated one) just a finger-swipe or mouse click away; self-driving cars self-driving themselves just around the corner; actually, honestly, good Dr. Who episodes; apps than can tell us in a second what took Kepler, Galileo,Tycho, and all the rest of those wonderfully-bearded astronomers their entire lives to learn; we have robots scruttling over Mars, poing under rocks for life; little blue pills that can raise even the most flacid of bridges; plastic breasts; genital cosmetic surgery; totally outraegous porn as easily found as Star Trek … and even - gasp - a black President.

Gay marriage is working its way to being totally legal, and - best of all - no big deal; and ganja fans will soon be able to …. what was I writing about? Oh, that’s right: before you know it weed will also be totally legal, and - best of all (again) – no big deal.

[MORE]

Tagged: full metal orgasm cyberpunk science fiction erotica

Posted on April 1, 2013 with 7 notes

Source: mchristian-technorotica.blogspot.com
$Here’s a teasing taste from my ebook, Rude Mechanicals, and from the dead-trees book Technorotica (which is Rude Mechanicals: Technorotica plus Better Than The Real Thing: Technorotica): a bit from the novella “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.”$

Here’s a teasing taste from my ebook, Rude Mechanicals, and from the dead-trees book Technorotica (which is Rude Mechanicals: Technorotica plus Better Than The Real Thing: Technorotica): a bit from the novella “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.”

Tagged: cyberpunk erotica sex technorotica fetish

Posted on July 18, 2012 with 5 notes
As my continuing celebration of the re-release of my cyberpunk/erotic novel, Painted Doll, here’s a review of the book from Forum UK:

In an unnamed Japanese city of the near future, Domino is a highly sought- after erotist, who uses a combination of skilful words and paints loaded with unforgettable sexual experience. However, the icily perfect Domino is only a façade, an identity created to protect American Claire from a killer who is on her trail. Meanwhile, Claire’s girlfriend, Flower, has been sent to a hippy commune in New Zealand, also for her own protection. The girls only have their memories, which they share in increasingly explicit letters, to keep the relationship alive, but both live in hope that one day they will be reunited…

The Painted Doll is a dark erotic novel, set in a world where the United States as we know them have been destroyed and the only safe haven is the hi-tech world across the Pacific. M. Christian weaves a clever tale of love and loss, slowly dripping in the details of Flower and Claire’s back story as events builds to a startlingly unexpected conclusion. Domino’s sessions with her clients are designed to explore how large a part emotion plays in any sexual encounter, and as the men who visit her as manipulated to climax by her words and her paints, she begins to realise that it isn’t always the most obvious scenarios which will push anyone’s erotic buttons. This is one for lovers of speculative fiction, rather than the general reader, but it’s memorable and skilfully done.

Tagged: sex cyberpunk cyber erotica

Posted on July 13, 2012 with 7 notes
BIG Changes!
I’ve done a lot of work on my blog … now blogs.

In a nutshell, quite a few people have pointed out that my writing is (to be polite) rather scattered: gay fiction and erotica here, science fiction and cyber-erotica there, and - somewhere in the middle - my non-fiction (like my newly released Welcome To Weirdsville).

So what I’ve done is set up two brand new blogs and tweaked Meine Kleine Fabrik to give folks an opportunity to focus a bit more specifically on my various projects and such

In the future my plan are to still post pretty much everything on M.Christian but then put the appropriate content (plus new and surprising stuff) on the new blogs.
Here are the new blogs and (very) brief descriptions of what’s on them:
… and, of course, Frequently Felt is still around: my - lobcock of erotic trivialities, oddities, and miscellanea transcribed with jaundiced talent for naught but a boxing Jesuit indulgence by a disreputable posse mobilitatis (which means weird sex stuff)
Stay tuned for even more changes - but in the meantime please feel free to write me with yours comments or (sigh) look up me on Facebook.
Tagged: gay queer cybersex technorotica cyberpunk weird strange history

Posted on July 4, 2012 with 12 notes

Source: zobop.blogspot.com
In celebration of the re-release of my cyberpunk BDSM erotica novel, Painted Doll, here’s an except…

In celebration of the re-release of my cyberpunk BDSM erotica novel, Painted Doll, here’s an except…

Chapter 2

… Qui Dan Road to the High Street, a stumble of crisp British in a city of fish sauce and MSG. The change didn’t alter her steps, modify her movements.

Beautiful? Oh, yes: without doubt, without a question. The splendor of a rose, the loveliness of an orchid. The kimono is flawless, as is the china white of her immaculately applied artificial complexion. As she walks, hearts stop then race. As she walks, heads twist, eyes widen. As she walks, breaths are hissed in, sighed out.

Beautiful? Oh, yes: without doubt, without a question. But she is a knife-edged rose, a razor sharp orchid. Her stride is mechanically perfect, as is her perfectly vertical posture. Their hearts might race, their heads may twist, their eyes certainly widen, their breaths absolutely hiss in and hiss out, but as she steps nearer they instead step back. As she walks, they avert their eyes. As she walks, they pull themselves in.

The woman walking down the High Street feels them watching her, their glances furtive tickles, their quick stares barely felt hooks out of the corners of her always forward facing eyes. Passing a bookseller – tight fans of rough tan paper with lurid Cantonese chops on their glistening plastic covers hung in sagging arcs of cord – a reflection was revealed to her, a caught sight of what they were seeing.

But not what they were thinking. But she knew, nevertheless: each of them lost in illusions and fantasies as carefully crafted as her rouge, as flawlessly presented as the mae migoro and ushiro migoro of her kimono, as immaculately assembled as her performance:

She’s a dragon, some might think: the cruelty of a reptile, the flawlessness of a myth. You may approach her, with bravery beyond that of any battlefield, speaking with a stammer and a twitch, and if you were fortunate beyond your worth she’d slow, pause, turn with prudently measured grace, deeming your presence not completely disgusting. With that look, at that glance, would be a flickering forked tongue of cruel invitation, a scintillating promise of peaked breasts topped with fist-tight nipples, a belly steel plate flat and firm, a behind curving out in twin clenches of muscular intensity, thighs sculpted by rigid posture, and between them a scented valley of ruby silk.

But first, a miniscule task. But first, an all but insignificant request: to firmly stand guard for her honor and dignity; to fetch a inestimable gem, an incalculable jewel, or just a unexceptional sticky-sweet pastry; to perform for her a melody of praise, or a stammering litany of desperate worth; or a quick athletic demonstration of physical merit; or become for her an avenging knight, a battle to defend her honor against some heinous offense.

A minuscule task. An insignificant request. Accepted without doubt or hesitation, the reward a slow curl at the corner of her cold stone face, a bow of gratitude, and a bright flash of serpentine green eyes. Totally entranced by her, completely captured by her, the dragon would then reveal the metaphorical points of venomous teeth, sinking the illusion of her love deep into the shaft of your encouraged penis by showing you the true face of her cruelty.

The prize was yours but the tasks were actually anything but miniscule, not at all insignificant: firmly stand guard for her honor and dignity – for a year; fetch a inestimable gem, an incalculable jewel, or just a unexceptional sticky-sweet pastry – from a thousand miles away; perform for her a melody of praise, or a stammering litany of desperate worth – perfectly, without the tiniest flaw; a quick athletic demonstration of physical merit – unattainable by even the greatest athlete; or become for her an avenging knight, a battle to defend her honor against some heinous offense – in combat against a killing machine.

And so the dragon passes by, a smile on her cold-blooded face. No one approaches her, no one is willing to come near. And so they live, by letting her just walk by.

She’s a doll, some might think: a porcelain figure, an ivory representation. Beneath the silks and satins would be a body as perfect as only a master artisan could create. Breasts both delicate and womanly, nipples as delicate as rosebuds, a belly with an ideal swell, hands with the grace of ten Noh performers, calves a perfect taper, thighs an entrancing form, back a clean surface of alabaster, neck a musical curve, feet delicate and precious, a behind highlighted with sacral dimples, and a female cleft that was a pale oyster and a tiny pink pearl.

Like a doll, she would belong to whoever buys her. Cash, credit, merchandise – the right amount and the woman would instead walk behind, following her owner towards palace or hovel, both with the same unmoving mask of her face.

Palace or hovel, she would walk in the door, standing still and quiet with an item’s posture. Maybe she’d look better in the living room window, where the afternoon would bathe her in golden light? Or perhaps she’d be better exhibited in the bedroom, where her kimono could be removed like one from a real woman.

Yes, the bedroom. That was where she would be best displayed. Moving past, it was clear in their eyes, the allure of her perfect submission. A thing. An object. A piece of feminine sculpture. Unable to disagree, unable to refuse, bendable in all kinds of imaginative ways. From behind, cock sliding between her cool ivory cheeks. Face to face, marble breasts for unimpeded kiss, licks, and sucks. On top, her tight thighs spread apart and welcoming upward thrusts. Anything you wanted, anytime you wanted.

Desire was a rippling wave behind her, a heat distortion in the warm city air. It was obvious in their eyes that there, in her, was a world without ‘no,’ a land without complaint, a woman without a soul.

Then they stopped, that wave of erections and licked dry lips chilled with a slap of frigid revelation. Stepping back with the rest of the crowd, these men retreated from the precise rhythm of her steps, with whimpering fear in their wide eyes, their shaking heads.

Ivory arms, marble legs, alabaster body: inflexible, unfeeling, stiff, unbending, unyielding, and — worst of all — cold. With her you’d never hear ‘no,’ never be refused, never be denied, but you’d also never hear the beat of her heart, the music of her voice, the chimes of her laughter, the moans and screams of her pleasure. You’d perform with her your deepest, darkest, most subterranean – and all she would do would be to look at you with inscrutably glass eyes.

She’s a tiger, some might think: a beast with the stripes of a traditional Japanese dress. Hidden beneath her Asian camouflage was a woman’s body, exercised into an extension of her erotic drive. Where other women had euphemisms and poetic alliterations, she had simple, direct, and powerful words to describe herself. Where other women had bosoms, she had tits of ideal jiggle and sway, covered in thrilling smooth skin. Where other women had nipples, she had a pair of dark brown direct connections to her clit. Where other women had posteriors, she had two plush muscular globes that clenched and released with the beating heat of her clit. Where other women had sexes, she had a demanding, insistent cunt.

To see and handle these differences would be more fortune than seduction. You did not take the tiger to dinner and slip hot words between dessert and coffee. You did not lay flowers at the feet of this hot blooded woman within the cool disguise of a geisha. You did not whisper poetry into the shell-like ear of this elegantly robed bitch.

There was no way to make her do anything, no way to slyly allure or simply trick her into a private room, no way to seduce her. The only thing anyone could do was to stand within the range of that sweeping predatory glance and hope that her eyes would positively estimate your worth as a device for her pleasure. Then, and only then, would her red-painted lips open ever-so, more than a whisper but less than full voice, and speak the one word you’d prayed to hear: “Come.”

Behind her, pulled along by her insatiable need, you would follow. It wouldn’t be a long journey, for her cunt has a very short attention span. Cheap hotel on the next street, expensive one even closer by, or just the nearest fetid and slimy alley – whatever was within range.

Patience was for ladies. Hesitation was for women. Tigers – even ones hidden within silks and satins – had no need for foreplay, patience, or hesitation. They wanted, so they took.

And if you were lucky, she would take you. Hands down to your cock, a squeezing judgment for size and firmness. Lips to yours, a tongue penetrating your mouth, am attacking kiss wanting nothing of you but to be kindling to her roaring heat.

On her knees, she would take you. But only because that was what she wanted. Your come was not expected or important. A flesh device to penetrate an orifice, you would be used until she was bored and ready to move onto other penetrations of other orifices.

Or perhaps she’d require something else. Falling back, satin fabric pulled roughly aside, she might bare an insistent slickness, the gleaming lips and fast-beating clit, and demand your service. Failure to accept or in performance too terrible to contemplate.

At the end, your cock would be needed: hard, strong, and fast — nothing else important to her. Burning hot, insanely wet, you’d enter and execute the task she’d ordered, working until her screams tore at your ears and her nails scratched along your back.

Then that would be it. Humiliating? Being reduced to only a device for someone’s pleasure usually is. But the blistering heat of her, the ferocious need of her cunt would put – and keep – a smile on your sweaty face.

But – and again men standing step back, retreat in shivering dread when she walks back – one does not ever tame a tiger, even after it is fed. Who knows what she might hunger for after? Meat, blood, flesh, dignity, any number of horrible violations – any of them within her grasp, and you too exhausted to resist.

Tigers are wild things, after all: enjoyable to watch in zoos, penned behind restraining bars, but far too bloodthirsty in bed.

She’s a machine, some might think: isn’t it wonderful what they’re doing with shape memory alloys, mnemetic plastics, optical fibers, and conductive polymers? Absolutely wonderful things coming out of Japan, India, the Wilding, and the young turks of the École Polytechnique, these days. Look up and there are dragonfliers pausing for location fixes before darting off at near-invisible speeds, packages clutched under their iridescent fuselages. Look down and there are myriad scurrying mechanisms trailing polished tracks of perfumed cleanliness through the city’s persistent grime. Look around and there are cinematics lazily scrolling across a lady’s fluttering fan, posters for the newest Malasian blockbuster cycling through tantalizing glimpses of furious martial arts and stiffly chaste duets, the hushed commuting fuel-cell and ethanol traffic, and the softly creaking carbon fibers of a prosthetic hand on a crumble-faced veteran of the Chinese genocide as he lays down a mah-jongg tile.

Look at her and you might see a device as carefully machined as a German car, a Swiss watch, a Japanese entertainment center, Indian software, or an African running shoe: breasts as ideal and resilient as silicone, skin of perfectly cured plastic, muscles as precise and strong as actuators, a genital-pleasuring interface between her thighs, a mouth with the same technology.

It was a safe bet that without her protective kimono covering, the pseudo-body of hers was as superlative as a supermodel, as sensuous as a Playmate of whatever month, as adept as an amalgamation of every courtesan who’d ever lived, as refined and machined as her manufacturers could make her.

Movement like the architecture in fine software, presence as authoritative as graceful as a jet fighter, skin as smooth as the polish on a fresh-from-the-factory-floor Ferrari, she passed by – and with her passing the tracking of lust and greed in the eyes of the male crowd, and sour envy on the faces of everyone else.

Here was the best of both of a man’s world: the twin allures of a clever device together with a well-articulated woman – or, to be more specific, as those men revealed so obviously, ‘coupled’ together, a mating between flesh and sex and advanced technology and power. Purchasing this – or simply leasing with an option to do the same – and putting it in the garage or the bedroom, would mean not just a product but also a woman of every dream, not just a sex partner but also a sophisticated piece of fine engineering.

But that wasn’t all. Look at them watching her move by. Lust was there, both for machine as well as woman, but there was also the dawning realization that there could be even more there: things that squeezed, buzzed, vibrated, hummed, heated, cooled, swirled, oscillated, tingled, and more, more, more so much more.

But then they pulled away, out of her way, out of her traffic, their fantasies dropping behind to be passed by the rushing acceleration of a nightmare, the barreling truck of a terrifying understanding.

Engineering, went their minds as they retreated, is fine and good, stimulating and thrilling. Sex, they thought as they ran away from her, is fantastic and wonderful. But to fuck a machine, to be intimate with gears and cogs, synthetics and electricity, hydraulics and radiators, could be good, but also could be like thrusting into a meshing, tearing, burning, shocking, scalding, blistering industrial accident.

Tagged: cyberpunk cybersex erotioca sex cyber technofetish

Posted on June 30, 2012 with 3 notes
Rainbow Reviews:

The first thing that stuck me about Painted Doll was the very mannered, structured and layered language; clause upon clause of dense evocative phrasing which could serve to push readers away, but instead drew me deeper into Domino’s world. The effect is a little like standing on a beach with the waves of a rising tide lapping at your toes until you’re standing calf deep without really having made the decision to get wet.

The chaotic, dystopic future in which Painted Doll is set is expertly sketched amongst this layered detail. It is sufficiently fully realized to be concrete and real; sufficiently impressionistic to leave me with intriguing questions. I suspect the Ecole Polytechnique’s creature may not be an obvious choice for a sequel, but the glimpses we’re given into his/its mind really grabbed me.

This rich, layered language also heightens the erotic scenes in the novel - both the artificial professional sessions, where Domino wields distilled emotions without so much as touching one finger to her male clients, and in the more innocent and earthy remembered sex she shared with her female lover, Flower.

It must be admitted that the story is let down by some poor proofreading, which has let assorted typos, missing words, and formatting problems mar the text. This is a real shame as other details - the choice of title font, and the fans used as section breaks, for example - were so spot on. At the same time, there’s more het sex and male-gaze than I was expecting from the back-cover blurb.

That said, the only element of the story itself that left me unsatisfied is that I am still, after two readings, unsure if the moment when Claire miss-steps, bringing the action to its climax, is meant to signal extremely strongly her fear and confusion, or if I have miss-interpreted how Domino’s neuroscopic art works. I suspect the flaw may be mine.

As a fan of the epistolary novel, it was an unexpected joy to find this vein of letter-based story telling running through this cyberpunk thriller. Although we never meet Flower directly, her character and her voice shines through. We only get to see the first flush of their love affair through the cracks in the masks of Domino’s new life, but I could still see why they would fall in love, why it was worth risking so much to be together, which means that what happens to Flower as the story comes to an end really hits home.

This isn’t an easy romance, either in its plot or the reading experience, but it is a very strong, compelling story which drew me in, and which I will remember for some time. M. Christian masterfully slides between the different parts of Domino/Claire’s identity, building and revealing the world, the character, the conflict at the heart of the story, and it’s a grand ride.

Tagged: cyberpunk cybersex sex erotic future futuristic

Posted on June 18, 2012 with 2 notes
Technorotica: Stories Shattering the Ultimate Taboo - In Dead Trees!

Here’s a bit of extra-extra-extra-special news! Remember those two ebooks that the great folks at Renaissance/Sizzler recently published? The ones with techno/science fiction focuses - Better Than The Real Thing: Technorotica and Rude Mechanicals: Technorotica?

Well, Renaissance/Eros Editions have just published a very special - print edition only - edition of both … plus extra-added content: Technorotica: Stories Shattering the Ultimate Taboo

“Love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans, while the number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practiced between humans will be extended, as robots teach more than is in all of the world’s published sex manuals combined.” -computer pioneer David Levy, in Love and Sex With Robots.

Bondage, science fiction, fetishism, real realities and virtual realities collide in this unique collection by one of the most popular authors of erotica … ever!

In the enigmatic M. Christian’s kinky new collection, two great things – technology and sex – go even better together!

Welcome to Technorotica: a giant-sized collection of human-machine erotica. You’ll find everything from sexy robots to virtual reality lovers, from shameless science fiction to contemporary explorations of technology’s impact on our sex lives and our sexuality. Headlining this stellar collection are two unforgettable novellas: In “Hot Definition,” the story of a future just around our corner, Neko experiences the ultimate domination in a way she never expected; in “Speaking Parts,” two lovers, one with a camera-shutter eye, come together in a scorching, obsessive relationship that takes them both to the limits of sexuality – and beyond. Plus ten more provocative stories of sex and technosex.

“Blow Up” alone makes it “worth buying I highly recommend this book.” -Fire Pages.

“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

Cover art: Jade
Book design: Frankie Hill
ISBN-1615084479
Publication date: 4/03/2012
Pages: 170
List price: $15.99

Tagged: cybersex robots cyborgs cyberpunk cyber gynoids sex erotica sexuality

Posted on May 15, 2012 with 1 note
Technorotica: Stories Shattering the Ultimate Taboo - In Dead Trees!

Here’s a bit of extra-extra-extra-special news! Remember those two ebooks that the great folks at Renaissance/Sizzler recently published? The ones with techno/science fiction focuses - Better Than The Real Thing: Technorotica and Rude Mechanicals: Technorotica?

Well, Renaissance/Eros Editions have just published a very special - print edition only - edition of both … plus extra-added content: Technorotica: Stories Shattering the Ultimate Taboo

“Love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans, while the number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practiced between humans will be extended, as robots teach more than is in all of the world’s published sex manuals combined.” -computer pioneer David Levy, in Love and Sex With Robots.

Bondage, science fiction, fetishism, real realities and virtual realities collide in this unique collection by one of the most popular authors of erotica … ever!

In the enigmatic M. Christian’s kinky new collection, two great things – technology and sex – go even better together!

Welcome to Technorotica: a giant-sized collection of human-machine erotica. You’ll find everything from sexy robots to virtual reality lovers, from shameless science fiction to contemporary explorations of technology’s impact on our sex lives and our sexuality. Headlining this stellar collection are two unforgettable novellas: In “Hot Definition,” the story of a future just around our corner, Neko experiences the ultimate domination in a way she never expected; in “Speaking Parts,” two lovers, one with a camera-shutter eye, come together in a scorching, obsessive relationship that takes them both to the limits of sexuality – and beyond. Plus ten more provocative stories of sex and technosex.

“Blow Up” alone makes it “worth buying I highly recommend this book.” -Fire Pages.

“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

Cover art: Jade
Book design: Frankie Hill
ISBN-1615084479
Publication date: 4/03/2012
Pages: 170
List price: $15.99

Tagged: cybersex robots cyborgs cyberpunk cyber gynoids sex erotica sexuality

Posted on May 15, 2012
Wow - and I mean wow - this is very, very cool: the great Sasha Mitchell over at R.U. Sirius’s site Acceler8or.com just posted this very cool review of my dark gay thriller Finger’s Breadth. Here’s a tease:

Did Oscar Wilde ever mention a baby-shit sofa, as fetishized by Tom of Finland, and crusted with salty, sweet sticky? Cliche to throw out Wilde when reviewing a piece of m4m fic? About as cliche as including a reference to Sex in the City in said fic.

Really, I josh. Because apart from a (for me) slightly delayed pick-up—and the more obvious fact that yours truly is of the vaginal realm—I had fun with, and eventually became engrossed by, M. Christian’s Finger’s Breadth.

Boilermakers, mambo-fuck you gay bars, scenarios seemingly inspired by a homoerotic Misery, and of course the ever prevalent ”asses flexing into handful-sized tightened cheeks” (is that your technology chirping, or is throbbing a better adjective?), Christian flaunts a downright capacity for electric lyric as well as (sorry mum, must include this in such a review) all the “hard cocks, strong cocks, long cocks, thick cocks – bobbing up and down, swinging right and left, even swirling in a sweaty circle,” that you could empty.

Not to mention a devilishly intricate plotline, which goes as follows: Fanning is a freelance cop on a most perplexing case. He kicks himself for not having caught whoever is terrorizing the tequila sunrises of Boyz Bay (did I just coin that?) by luring men for nonconsensual finger lobotomies.

[MORE]

Tagged: gay erotica queer thriller science fiction cyberpunk review book novel

Posted on April 26, 2012 with 3 notes
Here’s an extra-special, extra-grand, extra-fabulous treat: the one-and-only Cecilia Tan’s intro to the original edition of my science fiction erotica collection … and which, naturally, is also in the new edition as well.

#

I’m going to tell you a secret. There are only two people in the world I envy. One is the late Roger Zelazny, whose talent for an almost jazz improvisational way of writing I could never match.The other is M. Christian, for writing exactly what I’d write if only I could get off my ass. Which is to say, raunchy hallucinatory sexfuture dreams that never fail to arouse me and kick me in the gut at the same time. Good stuff.

I’ve always said that if there was someone out there who would write exactly what it was I wanted to read, I wouldn’t have to do it myself. Honestly, when I discovered M. Christian, I had that half-formed thought: gee, maybe I can quit… (of course, I didn’t).

It was the summer of 1994, if I remember correctly. I had founded Circlet Press three years before, to fill a void in the literary world. At the time, there was nowhere to publish erotic science fiction, or futuristic erotica, or whatever label you want to put on the wild, genre-bending stuff I and Lauren and others were writing. So I became a publisher, starting with chapbooks and slim little volumes of under one hundred pages. As news of the press spread to other speculative sex writers, manuscripts had begun to pour in for our anthologies. I decided I needed help getting through the growing slush pile and cajoled Lauren and some of my other authors to sit in my one-bedroom apartment one afternoon and read, read, read. We ordered Chinese take- out and delved into the manuscripts, pausing from time to time to eat a crab rangoon or read a “clunker” aloud.There were a lot of clunkers that day, and we were a pretty raucous group.

Then everything got quiet. I looked up from the story I was reading, and two of my readers were looking at each other. They then traded manuscripts: “Here, now you read this one, I want that one!” They’d found not one, but two, really good somethings. Lauren then brought the manuscript in her hand to me and strongly suggested I read it that instant, not later. “Just read the first sentence.”

I saw the words “I almost lost my virginity at fifteen, but his batteries ran low” and was hooked.

The manuscript was “Technophile” by M. Christian. Lauren had written on the comment form she handed me with it: YES YES YES. I agreed. It wasn’t just the best story we’d read all day, it was one of the best stories we’d read in the genre, ever.

The other story we received that day was “State,” a story I liked so much, I’ve published it twice. These two began a slew of stories Circlet published from Chris. At slush-readings in the future, people would go HUNTING for his name on envelopes, hoping to be the first to read something new. I’d like to say I had to break up a fistfight when “Fully Accessorized, Baby” was discovered, but that would be the fiction writer in me trying to sensationalize. (We just took turns.)

When the story “Heartbreaker” came in, my then assistant Susan Groppi read it without knowing who it was from. “A very very very good story,” she wrote in her comment form. “I often find I can’t describe what it is I like, just that it’s good.” Her editorial instincts were right on when a story just kicks ass, your initial reaction isn’t a critical one, it’s simply “woo hoo!”

One of the reasons I bought so many stories from Chris over the years is not only that the stories are consistently great, but that he has been able to write for any sexuality, from any point of view, man, woman, alien, third gender, robot, robot-wannabe… and of course sexualities and identities yet to be invented. For me, the whole purpose of combining two often formula-bound genres, erotica and science fiction, was to break out of the expected molds, to create something exciting, arousing, and provocative in all senses of the word. Chris has done that better than most who have tried their hand at it. He has a gift. And through that ability to see the world as it is not, to envision things wholly beyond our real boundaries of gender, technology, and identity, he is able to create characters that grab me. Characters I believe in. I empathize with Kusa, the rebuilt cybernetic woman-cop in “Heartbreaker.” I want to fuck Fields “the perfect love doll” in “State” and see if I can crack her facade.

Even better, Chris is one of the few writers who has been able to sell me stories where everything is not happy and rosy. I’ve always insisted on a sex-positive outlook for Circlet Press no rape, no dismemberment, no homophobia, you get the idea but the result is a lot of happy stories, where sexy people have good sex and both they and the reader enjoy it. The problem here, from a literary standpoint, is that without conflict, there’s not much of a story. Chris is one of the best at creating the kind of conflict that works best in an erotic story: inner conflict. The kind of conflict that many a writer has shied away from because it is the most difficult kind to portray believably and intriguingly. The kind of conflict that in science fiction is all too often replaced by external action, a fight, a battle, an explosion.This is why an M. Christian story is not just some of the most excellent, cutting-edge erotica around, but also great science fiction.

This is also why Chris’s stories quickly found homes outside of the specialized niche of Circlet Press. I started seeing his name in anthologies like Best American Erotica and The Mammoth Book of New Erotica. Since then, I find it hard to name an erotica market or anthology that he is NOT in.The secret is out I don’t think Chris’s manuscripts even go to anyone’s slush pile anymore. (These days they don’t even go to my office; I take them directly into the bedroom.)

There’s one more person I envy, and that’s the reader who is picking up this book for the first time. Prepare yourself to discover the intense pleasure within.

- Cecilia Tan

Cecilia Tan is the founder of Circlet Press and author of many works of erotic fiction, including Edge Plays, Royal Treatment, Mind Games, Magic University, The Hot Streak, Black Feathers,White Flames, and Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords.

Tagged: erotica science fiction cybersex cyberpunk sex stories collection

Posted on March 2, 2012 with 3 notes
$Just ‘cause, here’s the teasing opening from my cybersex tale, “Speaking Parts” that’s featured in my mechanically themed collection, Rude Mechanicals. Enjoy! # 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.”$

Just ‘cause, here’s the teasing opening from my cybersex tale, “Speaking Parts” that’s featured in my mechanically themed collection, Rude Mechanicals. Enjoy!

#

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.”

Tagged: cyber cyberpunk erotica sex sexuality science fiction

Posted on March 1, 2012 with 5 notes
AMPUTATION AND NOVEL PUBLICITY: AUTHOR M. CHRISTIAN THREATENS ONE FOR THE OTHER

PRESS RELEASE: In what is clearly an act of pure desperation, author M. Christian has threatened to amputate part of one finger to publicize his new novel, Finger’s Breadth (Zumaya Books).

“The fact is, it’s getting harder and harder to get the word out about anything new, especially novels,” says M. Christian, whose biography includes over 400 short story sales, nine author collections, the editing of 25 anthologies, and six previous novels. ”Is it no surprise that writers are having to resort to obvious stunts to try and get their work noticed?”

Though Finger’s Breadth – described as a gay erotic science fiction horror thriller – has garnered respectable reviews, Christian says that it has yet to gain the notoriety he believes it deserves.

“Even with Zee at Firepages saying ‘Finger’s Breadth has a way of getting under your skin and sending chills to your bones in both a terrifying and arousing kind of way. Finger’s Breadth is not a story; it is an experience I highly recommend,’ it’s been too damned hard to get word out about the book.

Christian points out other reviewers who, apparently, have also found the book to be superb: “I’ve got Lisabet Sarai, who says ‘If you’re looking for an easy, sunny, sexy book with a happy ending, don’t pick up Finger’s Breadth. If, on the other hand, you want a scary but enlightening ride through the twisted labyrinth of the human psyche, I highly recommend this book,’ and the Circlet Press calling it ‘…one of the most psychologically astute erotic novels since Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, and it deserves to be just as widely read,’ and even science fiction author Ernest Hogan, who calls it ‘a world of crime, out-of-control passions, mutilation, and madness. Terms like noir and hardboiled don’t quite fit – this is more like ultraviolet, the invisible light that makes the scorpions glow in the dark.’”

As for what the novel is actually about, Christian says that the book’s description as erotic, nightmarish, fascinating, disturbing, intriguing, haunting, you have never read a book like Finger’s Breadth is actually pretty accurate – if a little vague: “There are far too many scary books and movies about serial killers, psychos, nasty supernatural forces … but all of that, to me, is just too removed. It’s far too easy to be able to say it’s a matter of them – or him – and us: but the real horror I’ve always felt, and tried to explore in Finger’s Breadth is that the real horror is human nature itself. That, given the right set of circumstances, otherwise good people can have their minds, and most of all their desires, turned inside out.”

And so to try and get the word out about what he feels to be his best novel yet, the reclusive author says that he is willing to step into the light with his most audacious publicity plan ever: to lop off one of his own fingertips

“Okay, my track record for honesty isn’t the best … I’m the first to admit that,” Christian says about his planned amputation. ”The whole ‘stolen identity’ campaign around Me2 [his previous novel] was lost on more than a few people. Never mind that it worked and the book sold like hotcakes. But this time I’m totally, completely, absolutely, honest: I really want people to read Finger’s Breadth … and if it takes lopping off the tip of my little finger then I’m gonna do it,” he says.

When asked if the planned amputation is simply a publicity stunt, Christian responded with faux outrage: “A stunt? A STUNT?! Of course it’s a publicity stunt … these days writers have to be creative and, let’s be honest here, more than a bit outrageous if they are going to get noticed. The book’s about a mysterious figure cutting off the tips of little fingers in a near-future noir San Francisco so a pretend self-amputation is just too damned perfect!”

In answer to his admission that the whole thing is nothing but a publicity-seeking prank, Christian shook his head: “That’s not to say that it still won’t happen; they say that a good writer has at least a few good books in them, so if a finger is all it takes to get the word out about this novel … well, I have 19 more fingers and toes to go. Seems like a small price to pay.”

M. Christian can be reached at zobop@aol.com or mchristianzobop@gmail.com. His website is http://www.mchristian.com

To receive a review copy of Finger’s Breadth send an email to publicity@zumayapublications.com.

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More Finger’s Breadth reviews:

It is not that hard to come up with an idea that can be turned into a horror story and that is why horror has been part of the folklore of America and why these stories are so popular on camp-outs as we sit around a campfire. To successfully do this, we need a combination of characters and plot but more important than all else is a novel way to relate the story. For me that is the definition of M. Christian. This book is unlike anything I have read before and I suspect that it will stay with me for quite a while.
– Amos Lassen, reviewer

Finger’s Breadth creates a vivid portrait of a community torn apart by suspicion, where the thrills of hot, anonymous sex go hand in mutilated hand with the chill of fear, and no one is entirely what they seem. M. Christian skillfully mixes a dark, potent cocktail of lust, longing, paranoia and an overwhelming need for acceptance…
– Liz Coldwell, author of Take Your Slave To Work

To be effective, the act of literary intercourse between horror and erotica should be deeply unsettling. It should leave the reader feeling uncomfortable, overwhelmed by equal parts dread and anticipation. M. Christian understands this better than most, weaving a tale that permits the reader but a finger’s breadth of space between fear and arousal. His deft control of the story makes us feel the blade, but it’s his subtle manipulation of our emotions that makes us want the cut.
– Sally Sapphire, Bellasbookslut

M. Christian has seen the future – and it is hardboiled! If you love crime stories – gay or otherwise – and you love science fiction, you will love Finger’s Breadth. No other storyteller nails it quite like M. Christian does. This is a real page turner.
– Marilyn Jaye Lewis, author of Freak Parade

M. Christian is a force to be reckoned with. Just when you think you understand the path that his narrative and characters are taking, Christian throws a monkey wrench, or a limb, or a head into the works and you have to get your bearings and start all over again. No matter which book of his you pick up, prepare for an intoxicatedly weird ride.
– Ily Goyanes, author and filmmaker

Finger’s Breadthis mesmeric storytelling, riveting in execution and appalling in implication. M. Christian’s tale of erotic terror in a near-future San Francisco is imagined so skillfully that it grabs the reader with its easy familiarity, then refuses to let go as it careens to its shocking yet completely believable conclusion. Evoking such Grand Masters as Armistead Maupin, Thomas Harris and Rod Serling while remaining strikingly original, Finger’s Breadth is Christian at the height of his considerable powers. Like Charon the ferryman, the author takes the reader down the dark rivers of human sexuality and shows us things that would normally never see the light of day. Ultimately the most compelling aspect of this fiction is how fascinatingly and terrifyingly plausible it is. Finger’s Breadthshould come with a warning label: Read this before clubbing.
– Christopher Pierce, author of Rogue Slave, Rogue Hunted, and Kidnapped By A Sex Maniac

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M. Christian is – among many things – an acknowledged master of erotica with more than 400 stories in such anthologies as Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Bisexual Erotica, Best Fetish Erotica, and many, many other anthologies, magazines, and Web sites.

He is the editor of 25 anthologies including the Best S/M Erotica series, Pirate Booty, My Love For All That Is Bizarre: Sherlock Holmes Erotica, The Burning Pen, Guilty Pleasures, The Mammoth Book of Future Cops and The Mammoth Book of Tales of the Road (with Maxim Jakubowksi) and Confessions, Garden of Perverse, and Amazons (with Sage Vivant) as well as many others.

He is the author of the collections Dirty Words, Speaking Parts, The Bachelor Machine, Licks & Promises, Filthy, Love Without Gun Control, Rude Mechanicals, Technorotica, Coming Together Presents M. Christian, Pornotopia, How To Write And Sell Erotica; and the novels Running Dry, The Very Bloody Marys, Me2, Brushes, Fingers Breadth, and Painted Doll. His site is http://www.mchristian.com.

Fingers Breadth
Zumaya Books
Paperback: $15.99
ebook: $6.99
ISBN-10: 1934841463
ISBN-13: 978-1934841464

Tagged: novel amputation sex erotica gay queer cyberpunk books novel

Posted on February 23, 2012 with 1 note
Oh, Ralph, you are a true star! Not only does my great friend put something about Fingers Breadth on the great Von Gutenberg site - by the way, don’t forget that I have an article in the current issue - but then he puts up a fun post about my book on the Short and Sweet NYC site. Yer the best, Ralphie!

Oh, and speaking of the so-cool Mr. Greco he is also doing an anthology that you all have to send stories in for: Sex in New York City - Tales of Pleasure and Perversity in the Big Apple. I’ll put the call up in my very next post.

It is amazing what we have to do nowadays to get noticed, even people who already get press on a regular basis. In the world oferotic literature it’s probably even harder then usual to get a little look-see. Sure artists have their Twitter and Facebook accounts, and at super wonderful sites like shortandsweetnyc.com we do our best to get the word out about all that is out there, but there are still othermethods writers/film makers and musicians might have to consider in getting the word out.

For instance..

With over 400 stories in such anthologies as Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica and inmagazines and Web sites; editor of 25 anthologies including the Best S/M Erotica series, Pirate Booty; collections that include Dirty Words, Speaking Partsand Rude Mechanicals and the novels Running Dry, Me2 andPainted Doll infamous scribe M. Christian has announced an act of pure desperation in his latest press release…

M. Christian has threatened to amputate part of one finger to publicize his new novel, Finger’s Breadth!

Finger’s Breadth– a gay erotic science fiction horror thriller – has garnered respectable reviews, still the wily M. Christian is not satisfied. When I asked the man if this is a publicity stunt, he said:

“A stunt? A STUNT?! Of course it’s a publicity stunt. We writers have to be more than a bit outrageous if we’re going to get noticed! Hell, the book’s about a mysterious figure cutting off the tips of little fingers in a near-future noir San Francisco, so a pretend self-amputation is perfect I think!”

I breathed a sigh of relief as I don’t want to see anybody ‘suffering’ this much for his art. But the author did ad: “They say that a good writer has at least a few good books in them, so if a finger is all it takes to get the word out about this novel … well, I have 19 more fingers and toes to go. Seems like a small price to pay.”

We shall see what the future holds for M. Christian and how well he’ll be holding it in the future. In the meantime you can visit the writer at http://www.mchristian.com and you can buy Finger’s Breathdt here.

Tagged: book review science fiction cyberpunk

Posted on February 16, 2012 with 1 note
This is simply beyond wonderful: check out this very touching review of Fingers Breadth by Zee of Firepages. Swoon!

Someone is abducting young gay men in San Francisco, drugging them and cutting off the tip of their pinky. The entire city if on edge, especially after dark. The gay community fear for themselves, as they know that anyone could be next. Even though the police are looking for the Cutter, no one really knows who this person is nor the motivation of cutting a finger. Suspicion divides the community. There are people who have only nine-and-a-half fingers, and those who have ten fingers. The niners suspect the Cutter may have ten fingers and those who walk around with ten fingers hope they are not next.

M. Christian has to be the most amazing writer I’ve ever read. He is a master manipulator with his words. You read his stories and begin to feel exactly what he wants you to feel - arousal, desire, anger, fear, hope. Readers find themselves surprised to feel this way, yet it is M. Christian’s way of pulling dormant and primal emotions out of you. And the crazy part is that you don’t mind embracing these perverse feelings as you are that pulled into the story. Not only does M. Christian push his characters in his stories to their limits, but he also pushes his readers minds to meet him in these faraway places.

I loved how M. Christian addressed multiple facets of storytelling, like horror, thriller, and societal issues. The way the community split between those with 9.5 and 10 fingers was genius, and the horrible experience that the victims go through is downright chilling. Finger’s Breadth has a way of getting under your skin and sending chills to your bones in both a terrifying and arousing kind of way. Finger’s Breadth is not a story; it is an experience I highly recommend.

Tagged: gay thriller cyberpunk erotica queer mystery book

Posted on January 11, 2012 with 15 notes