Dark Futures - #ScienceFiction #Dystopia #EroticFreedom

Image by Carroll MacDonald from Pixabay

By Lisabet Sarai

Most people who know me, both in my author persona and in meat-space, will agree that I’m an optimist.

Except, it seems, when I’m writing science fiction.

As a reader, I’ve been a scifi fan more or less forever. (Witness my recent post on the ERWA blog.) More drawn to “soft” than “hard” scifi, I’m awed by the ability of the best scifi authors to fashion totally convincing alternate realities and to explore their social implications. Unfortunately, my love of and admiration for the genre has made me hesitant to write speculative fiction myself. I’m consumed with self-doubt about my own ability to create truly original scifi scenarios. Thus, I have only a few speculative fiction titles in my catalogue.

Every single one unfolds in some sort of dystopia.

Furthermore, as you might predict, almost all my dark futures involve some distortion of positive sexuality.

Quarantine, my most ambitious scifi effort to date, takes place in a near-future US where the population, the social fabric and the nation’s infrastructure have been devastated by a virulent plague. Echoing the AIDS epidemic, the disease supposedly arose in and was spread by the gay community. In the wake of wide-spread rioting and horrific violence, a shadowy cabal known as the Guardians of American Greatness has taken over the government. All men whose genome includes the “H-gene”, which supposedly predisposes them to homosexuality, have been imprisoned - “quarantined” - in remote internment camps. The novel follows Dylan, a brilliant and desperate young man who’s been quarantined since he was teen, as he seduces one of the few human guards in order to engineer his escape from desolate Camp Malheur.

It’s not much of a stretch, I guess, to imagine a rabidly homophobic America that glorifies Eisenhower-era “traditional” families and treats same-sex attraction as a literal crime. In writing the book, I hoped I could make this dystopia vivid enough that readers would forgive the lack of originality, not to mention the more or less obvious political stance of the author. Quarantine is a romance; Dylan and Rafe, the ex-gang-member-turned-guard, have to overcome not only the real-world obstacles facing them as fugitives but also some serious trust issues. Eventually they realize they love one another. Still, the book does not have an unequivocal happy ending. Rafe and Dylan are together for the moment, but still threatened by the authorities, as well as physically and emotionally damaged. Meanwhile, a revolution is brewing which could easily tear them apart.

Dystopias tend to persist even after the story ends.

Another example can be found in my short story The Antidote. Indeed, this dystopia shares many features with the world in Quarantine, though I wrote this story first. It’s set sixty years after the Plague, a sexually-transmitted disease that triggered mass deaths, riots and massacres. The government, superficially more benign than that the thugs in Quarantine, requires that all citizens submit to a mysterious libido-suppression technology, in order to prevent a resurgence of the deadly virus. Most people are satisfied with monthly government-supported, hormone-enhanced procreative sex. But Lena is different. Though she loves her husband Jeff, she yearns to experience the thrill of forbidden lust, to know what it feels like to couple with a stranger. There are rumors of an antidote to the government’s technology. Lena’s willing to risk everything for a taste.

Superficially, Lena’s world is peaceful, prosperous and orderly. But can one truly be human without knowing sexual desire? I guess my personal opinion is pretty clear.

The Last Amanuensis (currently out of print, but hopefully to be re-released soon) once again is set in a world overseen by an intrusive, authoritarian government. In this case, though, it’s not sex that’s forbidden, but literature and art. The Preceptors envision a purely rational society, controlled and harmonized by logic, mathematics and science. They arrest and eradicate people who challenge their ideology. Adele, the amanuensis of the title, is hired to record a secret trove of brilliant poems written by her employer and help to keep them hidden.

Trespass, published in the altruistic erotica collection Coming Together By Hand, presents a different type of dystopia, one in which a small, super-rich elite lives in beautiful, soaring cities, supported by a destitute, struggling under-class. Again, almost a natural extension of today’s realities... The tale chronicles a tragic romance between a woman of the Tower People and a young man from the Sub-urbs. It also explores how notions of obscenity and transgression can vary from one society to another.

My dystopias reveal a good deal about me, I guess. It seems I’m worried most about losing freedom: freedom to love whomever one desires, freedom to experience lust even without love. Deep down, I’m worried about the eradication of the erotic. Love, sex and the joy they can kindle are precious. In today’s world, however, let alone tomorrow’s, I see them as fragile.

I’ll end with a bit of flash fiction I wrote a long time ago, on the same basic, dystopic theme. 

Yes, you can imagine that I’m the one speaking.

Before the Plague

Of course you can buy me a drink. I'd be honored to have the company of an attractive young man like you.

Sorry, I can't help it. I know that I look like a lusciously ripe thirty-five. I've always had fabulous tits, and shapely legs, too. And the hair is all mine, even if the color is augmented. I've got to be honest, though. Don't be fooled by all the wiles of anti-aging technology. I'm old enough to be your grandmother. No, probably your great-grandmother.

Don't be shy, though. Didn't you ever fantasize about an older woman? You don't have to admit it, I know you have. Every young man wonders what it would be like: the willingness, the experience, the gratitude.

So, here I am. The older woman. The woman who remembers. Yes, I remember, I swear, remember what life was like, what sex was like, before the plague.

You were born to the plague. So were your mother and father. For you, making love has always been tainted by the threat of death. What a tragedy – an abomination! Can you even begin to imagine a time when two people who were drawn to each other could have sex without fear, without consequences, other than the fact that the emotional connection might or might not strike true?

It's nearly inconceivable to you, I know, the notion of spontaneous sex. No vaccines, no tests, no questions asked. No barriers – at least no physical ones. You might enjoy yourself, you might not. That was the only risk.

I lived in that age. The golden age, it seems now. You could revel in your own body, in someone else's body. Anyone you fancied. Maybe a stranger. Maybe your best friend's husband – or even your best friend herself! If desire called, you answered, as long as that was what felt right.

Every day was ripe with erotic possibilities. We moved through our world (well, perhaps I should speak only for myself) in a continual state of borderline arousal, ready to recognize and enjoy the next sensual adventure.

You're trying to be polite, but I can see your nose wrinkle with disgust at my "promiscuity". To you it sounds unthinkable. Irresponsible. Try to understand. Sex was safe – without drugs or viral inhibitors or any other "precautions". Oh, you could be hurt. You could fall in love with someone who didn't care for you, or with a stranger you'd never see again. But you were always free to try.

The Pill was the liberator that gave us this age of deliciously decadent exploration. My mother might have been as horny as I was (and let me tell you, I was horny. All right, I admit that with the rejuvenation treatments and the tailored hormones, I still am.) But she couldn't let herself go, because she might have gotten pregnant.

Pregnancy! Another life! Now there's a consequence, fully as weighty as potential death! Again, hard for you to comprehend the risk of accidental impregnation. Your parents probably paid a pretty penny for fertility boosters and gene customization, to produce a boy as cute as you.

Now don't get offended. Here, it's my turn to buy a round. All I'm trying to say is that even though we're sitting together in this bar, we come from different worlds. My early life is nearly as alien to you as the world of that Rigelian in the corner nursing his beer.

You want to hear more, though, don't you? Should I tell you about the afternoon that I rode my bicycle along the California beach, my nipples poking through my top, advertising my constant excitement? A man picked me up and took me up to his penthouse overlooking Venice. (That was a quirky little beach town near Lost Angeles. Before the Big One. Hippies and millionaires and body builders. There's really nothing like it now.)

He got me high (yes, I know you don't approve) and then screwed me for the entire afternoon. I came four or five times, and so did he. He was insatiable, the horniest guy I ever met. I can still visualize the curly black hair on his chest, the angry purple of his cock. I felt twinges in my deliciously sore cunt for days afterward.

As it turned out, I actually didn't like him much, once we started talking. He turned out to be intolerant and conceited. That afternoon, though, in that king-sized bed above the ocean, he was my stag, my centaur, rough and hard and unrelentingly physical.

You're blushing, you know. I understand. When the plague came, suddenly all pleasure became suspect. Forbidden. Denied. Improper. The media still sell using sex, but the images are impersonal, sterile. Flesh without warmth, sex without pleasure, and by subconscious implication, without risk.

I'm annoying you. But I'm turning you on, too. I can tell. Don't laugh. Like I said, I have a lot of experience.

Not all my adventures were of the casual variety. I made love to my husband the first night we went out together, and we stayed together for thirty years. He took me to a Burmese restaurant and told me wild, picaresque tales of his travels. My attraction to the exotic merged inextricably with my attraction to him. Later, near midnight, he lifted my skirt (I rarely wore underwear in those days) and fucked me on a street corner, bent over the hood of his car. I followed him literally to the ends of the earth.

Where is he now? What can I say? He's gone. Taken by the plague. He couldn't adjust, couldn't accept the constraints. The restrictions. He said that he'd rather die than worry if every fuck would kill him.

He got what he wanted, ultimately.

No, of course I'm not crying. That's the latest cosmetic enhancement – makes my eyes sparkle.

You're right, I'm a romantic, but don't you think the world today needs a romantic or two? Look, my conapt is just a few levels up. Wouldn't you like to come up and join me for a nightcap?

That swelling in your britches is answer enough. No, that's OK, let me get the tab. Come on now, don't be such a prude. You know that you want to.

Of course I have a supply of condoms, viricide, gloves and dental dams. I'm a woman of my times. But I hope that I can make you forget all that. I want you to relax, to trust me, to let me give you a glimpse, a taste, of what pleasure was like before the plague.

Because, so help me, if someone doesn't know, and remember, we're doomed. Or might as well be.

I Miss It Already

By Lisabet Sarai

I have a confession to make, one that may shock many of you who know me and have read my books.

I haven't had sex in more than two months.

And here's another stunner. I don't mind nearly as much as I would have guessed, if you'd asked me when I was younger.

I'm in my sixties now. My husband is more than a decade older than I am. Although we both are fortunate to be in excellent health, our sexual capabilities have significantly declined due to age. I won't get into the gory details, but let me just say that these days sex is a lot more work and a good deal less fun than it used to be.

There are remedies of course, that might improve the situation, hormones and lubricants, new positions and new techniques. We've tried some of them, with mixed results. We're still very physical with one another. People snicker when they see us, two old geezers holding hands or kissing on the street. Penetrative sex, though, is a significant challenge, one that we seem to be confronting less and less often (and oral sex has never been a favorite for either of us, for various reasons).

When I was in my twenties, my thirties, even my forties, I would have been appalled by the notion of such a long interval of celibacy. Looking back to my youth, it seems as though sex stood at the center of my universe. Every experience was drenched in eroticism. Any seemingly innocent encounter was enough to start me spinning fantasies. Most of my sexual adventures took place before the advent of AIDS and after the perfection of the Pill, during that brief period when true sexual freedom was possible. If I can quote from one of my own characters (the nameless narrator in “Before the Plague”):

It's nearly inconceivable to you, I know, the notion of spontaneous sex. No vaccines, no tests, no questions asked. No barriers – at least no physical ones. You might enjoy yourself, you might not. That was the only risk.

I lived in that age. The golden age, it seems now. You could revel in your own body, in someone else's body. Anyone you fancied. Maybe a stranger. Maybe your best friend's husband – or even your best friend herself! If desire called, you answered, as long as that was what felt right.

Every day was ripe with erotic possibilities. We moved through our world (well, perhaps I should speak only for myself) in a continual state of borderline arousal, ready to recognize and enjoy the next sensual adventure.

I wrote that story more than ten years ago. Even then, I was nostalgic, I guess, for what I felt myself losing.

The funny thing is, I've always lived more in my mind than in my body, even during those wild days when I was juggling three lovers plus being regularly propositioned by strangers. (I must have been sending out powerful signals. Definitely makes me believe in pheromones!) Eroticism, then as well as now, lived in the situation, in the relationship, in the sharing of fantasies, in the breaking down of barriers and the pushing of limits, far more than in the physical acts. I spent as much time writing about sex in my journal as I did in bed (or elsewhere) with my partners. The thrill of lust has always been at least as intoxicating to me as the activities it engenders.

And to be honest, I miss that thrill more than the actual fucking. Although I'm moderately well-preserved for my age, these days it's difficult to conceive of myself as an object of desire. I still have frequent sexual dreams. In those nocturnal sagas I'm usually young and nubile – probably between twenty five and thirty five, when I was at my peak. The other night, though, I dreamed that someone wanted to have sex with me, and I couldn't remember where I'd stashed the KY Jelly. Too often when I begin to spin a kinky fantasy for myself, recollections of reality intervene.

My DH apparently perceives me as sexy, despite my wrinkles, my sagging flesh and my joint problems. I'm grateful but sometimes I wonder whether he's blind. I still believe that imagination is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Imagining the erotic, however, is becoming increasingly difficult.

Of course I worry about how this will affect my writing. I yearn for the excitement, the freshness, that poured out of me in Raw Silk, a book that celebrates lust in all its guises. I suppose that it's natural to become a bit jaded, after fourteen years of penning erotic fiction. I console myself with the certainty that my skill has grown even though my passion has ebbed. Apparently I can still create sexual scenarios with enough light and heat to please my readers. However, I find that it's increasingly difficult to arouse myself.

I've always been of the opinion that sex is important – that carnal connections can provide not just pleasure but also wisdom and self-knowledge. I haven't changed my mind. That's one motivation for writing my stories. More and more, though, those tales are based on recollection rather than direct experience. I cling to my memories of how it felt to be overwhelmed by desire, as those feelings recede into the increasingly distant past.

If I were to be suddenly infected by the insistent, incandescent lust of my youth, I'd probably be alarmed. But I do miss it.

The Golden Age

I was born in the nineteen-fifties, into the world of McCarthy and Eisenhower, conformist and conservative. I reached sexual maturity, though, in a golden age – that fifteen or twenty year period after the invention of the Pill and before the onslaught of AIDS.

Women a generation before me indulged their sexual desires at the risk of becoming pregnant. (Perhaps they risked their reputation as well, but that was a far less tangible concern.) When contraception was unreliable or even illegal, surrendering to the moment could have dire consequences. Unwed mothers were ostracized and back street abortions claimed many lives. Premature marriage was safer, but often shattered a woman’s dreams of a higher education or a career.

Women of my daughter’s generation (actually, I don’t have a daughter, and I’m rather glad) bear an even heavier burden. These days, sex can literally kill you. What a horrible thought! Now sexual relations must be approached warily. They must be negotiated, predicated on the results of blood tests or the availability of “protection”. I bow to the indisputable need for safe sex, but I weep at the damage done to the joy and spontaneity of the sex that I knew.

The golden age. I don’t think that I’m romanticizing. In college, in graduate school and after I began working, I was free to explore who I was sexually, to discover what – and who – I really wanted. The so-called sexual revolution in the late sixties and the seventies was real and wonderful. I don’t want to turn this blog post into a sexual memoir, but I will admit that I had quite a few lovers during that period, including several serious relationships going on concurrently. True, this was a bit confusing emotionally, as well as creating some logistical problems. But it felt right at the time.

I had deep loves as well as my share of short-term flings. Looking back, I am intensely grateful for these experiences. Though I do wonder now where I got the energy!

How does all this reminiscing relate to “the new explicitness”? The opening of society to things sexual began during this golden age. Perhaps this was a reaction to the constraints of the drab fifties. Maybe it was just the natural cycling of society – after all, the nineteen-twenties was also a period of sexual freedom and explicitness.

Now, though, I believe that things have gone too far. A strange opinion, you may think, for an author of erotica. Nevertheless, I stand by it. These days, there’s too much sex in the media and on the Internet. Actually, the real issue for me is not the quantity, it’s the quality. There’s sex everywhere, nudity and kink, on the porn sites and in the evening news. Unfortunately, most of this sex is not arousing or erotic in the least. We’ve become habituated to the surface expressions of sex, and the emotion has slipped away.

Back in my golden age, sex was still naughty, exciting and fun. It could feed your soul and break your heart. Now, in the age of AIDS, sex has no mystery. It is used to sell everything from blue jeans to baby food, and the thrill is largely gone.

Indeed, it has occurred to me that the explosion of explicitness in the public sphere is a reaction to the terrifying reality of AIDS in the private psyche. We’ve deliberately de-sensitized ourselves, killing desire through over-exposure, in order to purge ourselves from the fear of dying through loving.

Maybe this theory simply reflects my history. Perhaps someone who has grown up with AIDS does not see it as the tragedy that I do. It’s not just that it has stolen the lives of so many millions. It has robbed the living, stealing the peak experience of irresistible, irrational passion. My story “After the Plague”, in my collection Fire, captures my feelings about this.

You were born to the plague. So were your mother and father. For you, making love has always been tainted by the threat of death. What a tragedy – an abomination! Can you even begin to imagine a time when two people who were drawn to each other could have sex without fear, without consequences, other than the fact that the emotional connection might or might not strike true?

It's nearly inconceivable to you, I know, the notion of spontaneous sex. No vaccines, no tests, no questions asked. No barriers – at least no physical ones. You might enjoy yourself, you might not. That was the only risk.

I lived in that age. The golden age, it seems now. You could revel in your own body, in someone else's body. Anyone you fancied. Maybe a stranger. Maybe your best friend's husband – or even your best friend herself! If desire called, you answered, as long as that was what felt right.

Every day was ripe with erotic possibilities. We moved through our world (well, perhaps I should speak only for myself) in a continual state of borderline arousal, ready to recognize and enjoy the next sensual adventure.

You're trying to be polite, but I can see your nose wrinkle with disgust at my "promiscuity". To you it sounds unthinkable. Irresponsible. Try to understand. Sex was safe – without drugs or viral inhibitors or any other "precautions". Oh, you could be hurt. You could fall in love with someone who didn't care for you, or with a stranger you'd never see again. But you were always free to try.

So how can an author of erotica evoke this kind of emotion, in our pressurized, impersonal, hyper-sexual world? I’m not sure. Speaking for myself, I try to capture the emotional essence of my own experiences and transplant it into my characters. I write on the fringes of the acceptable, using taboos to recreate the delicious sensation of transgression that I knew when I was younger. And I focus on the feelings – not the sensations of sexual intercourse, but the characters’ emotions as they allow themselves to sink into passion.

It’s a challenge, and I take it very seriously. I’ll allow the unnamed narrator of “Before the Plague” to speak for me:

You're right, I'm a romantic, but don't you think the world today needs a romantic or two? Look, my conapt is just a few levels up. Wouldn't you like to come up and join me for a nightcap?

That swelling in your britches is answer enough. No, that's OK, let me get the tab. Come on now, don't be such a prude. You know that you want to.

Of course I have a supply of condoms, viricide, gloves and dental dams. I'm a woman of my times. But I hope that I can make you forget all that. I want you to relax, to trust me, to let me give you a glimpse, a taste, of what pleasure was like before the plague.

Because, so help me, if someone doesn't know, and remember, we're doomed. Or might as well be.