Science Fiction Double Feature (#scifi #review #williamgibson)

By Lisabet Sarai

Scifi was one of my first loves. Eleanor Cameron’s Mushroom Planet books form one of my earliest literary memories I grew up reading Bradbury, Heinlein and Asimov. My husband introduced me to Fritz Leiber and Philip K. Dick. I still recall my sense of amazement when I finished The Man in the High Castle. A decade or so later, I met a whole new set of authors when a friend who taught literature at a local university organized a science fiction reading group. Once a month, we’d meet at someone’s house for wine, delicious potluck, and a discussion of some novel by Joanna Russ, Sherri Tepper, Greg Bear, Pat Cadigan or Ursula Le Guin.

I was born soon after Sputnik and was in grade school when Alan Shepard circled the earth in his tin can. Back then, I was a science whiz and aspired to a career as an astronaut. Nevertheless, I tend to prefer “soft” science fiction, books that focus on alternative societies or on how changes in technology affect social structures and human interactions. One of my all time favorite scifi titles is an obscure book by Kate Wilhelm entitled Welcome, Chaos. This mostly realistic novel posits includes a single science fiction element: someone has invented a technology that allows human immortality. The book brilliantly explores the radical social impacts of this discovery.

These days, most of my non-erotic reading is serendipitous, depending on what we find available on one of our occasional binge trips to the used book store. I was thrilled a few months ago when my DH came home with Zero History by William Gibson. In case you’re unfamiliar with his work, he more or less invented both the term and the concept of cyberspace in his 1980’s novel Neuromancer. I hadn’t read any Gibson in years, but I remembered really enjoying Virtual Light and Idoru. Gibson’s description of the decommissioned Golden Gate Bridge turned into a rambling, multi-level city/slum which houses the cast-offs of society still sticks in my memory (at a time when many things are slipping out).

I didn’t realize at the time that Zero History is the third book in a trilogy. Of course, with a skilled author, that shouldn’t matter. Every book should stand on its own.

At the moment, I’m more than two thirds of the way through the book, and I have to admit I am underwhelmed.

Gibson’s a master of prose, alternating between enigmatic brevity and obsessive but fascinating detail. Maybe that’s why I keep reading, because to be honest, neither the premises of this novel nor the action have turned out to be particularly compelling. I guess at some level the book is a classic quest story. The object of the quest is so trivial, however, that it engenders yawns, at least in me.

Reluctantly working for the secretive, manipulative, chaos-loving fixer Hubertus Bigend, ex-rocker Hollis Henry and her mysterious sidekick Milgrim travel the globe, seeking the source of a shadowy but much coveted brand of clothing called Gabriel Hounds. Various competitors and bad guys attempt to thwart this quest, while occasional opportunistic allies assist.

I can’t make myself care.

It may be that I haven’t given up on this tale because I want to find out more about Milgrim, the former drug addict (supposedly) who has no memory of his past. (The novel’s title refers to his lack of recall.) Without question, he’s the most intriguing character in the book: mild-mannered and studiously polite, aware of his mental lacunae and doing his best to adapt, fiercely intelligent and unexpectedly resourceful. I really do hope that the author reveals the truth about him. Otherwise, I’ll be seriously annoyed.

The book falls short in its visions of society as well. This may be partly due to the fact that it was written in 2010, not long after the time the iPhone was first released. Gibson imagines a society dominated by mobile communication and social media (he repeatedly mentions Twitter), at the mercy of rumor and dominated by explicitly constructed and manipulated branding. However, the world he portrays falls far short of today’s reality, where trends rise and fall in mere hours and truth has pretty much ceased to exist. This is of course a risk in writing scifi set in a near future, but it further reduces the impact of the book, at least for me.

Oh well.

Before starting Zero History, the most recent scifi I’d read was The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu. I actually ordered a copy of this novel new, from Amazon, after encountering a review in the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s journal Science. The Three Body Problem won the Hugo award and was nominated for the Nebula. I was intensely curious to read a Chinese science fiction novel, partially set during the Cultural Revolution. Although the review suggested that the book was heavy on physics theory, it also implied some interesting societal insights.

My reactions were mixed. The book covers more than fifty years, beginning in the sixties when disgraced young physicist Ye Wenjie is assigned to a menial position at a remote radio telescope installation, in punishment for her father’s supposed counter-revolutionary tendencies. (In one of the book’s most chilling scenes, he is murdered by a fanatical crowd of Red Youth.) Ye discovers what appears to be a transmission from another star system and risks her life and position to send a reply. Her actions make the advanced extraterrestrial civilization of Trisolaris aware of Earth’s existence, and set the stage for our planet’s doom.

Trisolaris is a (relatively close) planet existing within the gravitational influence of three stars. The forces exerted by these three masses cannot be predicted (this is the “three-body problem” of the title), thus the civilization swings between Stable Eras when it prospers and develops, and Chaotic Eras when the suns are too close, burning everything to a crisp, or too far away, dropping temperatures so low that no life can survive.

Once Trisolarian society learns about Earth, it begins the long process of abandoning its own nearly-uninhabitable planet and invading ours. As part of this effort, the Tri-Solarians implement a plan to recruit the support of carefully selected individuals on Earth, to prepare public consciousness for their arrival. One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is the schism that develops within the secret Earth-Trisolaran Organization (ETO) between the Redemptionists, who believe the technologically advanced Trisolarans will save humans from themselves, and the Adventists, who expect and desire that human civilization will be wiped out of existence.

The Three Body Problem is full of vivid descriptions and intriguing ideas. Despite its scientific rigor, it explores some fascinating and disturbing notions about humanity and social organization. Toward the end of the book, the author shows us a Trisolaran’s wistful view of Terran society. Trisolaris is an unrelentingly authoritarian society, where the good of the many totally outweighs considerations of the individual. In order to survive their brutal environment, Trisolarans are trained to suppress all emotion and to obey authorities without question. By comparison, the people of Earth seem beautifully free.

(I couldn’t help wondering whether this was a veiled commentary on the nature of Chinese society, even today.)

The main weakness in this novel lies in its characterization. Liu can describe a nano-technological attack on a super-tanker with breathless clarity, but his human beings feel stiff and unrealistic. They declaim rather than engage in realistic conversation. They spend pages on information dumps in order to acquaint readers with facts the author wants us to know. They act in ways that seem unmotivated and implausible. I felt as though the characters were chess pieces that the author was moving around in order to advance his plot, not real people. Or perhaps a more apt comparison would be to computer-generated characters in an immersive game, who follow some simplified logical model that doesn’t quite match actual human behavior.

Despite this flaw, The Three Body Problem offers an intriguing read. It’s quite different from most Western scifi that I’ve read. The author appears to have deep concerns about the ecological catastrophes wrought by humans. When I finished the book (a few months ago), I decided I had no interest in reading the next volume in Liu’s trilogy. Reviewing it now, I’m not so sure.

You might wonder, given my love of scifi, why I haven’t written more of it. Aside from some short stories, I’ve penned exactly one science fiction novel, my dystopian MM erotic romance Quarantine. It was such a difficult task I’m reluctant to try again, even though I left the door open for a sequel. As an avid reader of scifi, I’m terribly aware of the pitfalls awaiting the author of speculative fiction. Perhaps no sub-genre makes such demands on the imagination. Time and again as I was writing, I felt I was coming up short, making choices that were obvious rather than surprising. 

 

This may reflect my own prejudices when reading scifi. As you can guess from this post, I can be a harsh critic. When I find a science fiction book that really works for me, though, it’s like having a new lover.

The Thrill of Discovery

By Lisabet Sarai

For the next two weeks here at Oh Get a Grip, we're going to be talking about what we've been reading lately. The timing is fortuitous, since only a few days ago I finished one of the best books I've read in very long time, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.

My husband picked up this fat science fiction opus at a used bookstore. Although we often confer about our finds before purchasing them (conserving funds – and space – means buying books we both would consider reading), I didn't really look at this one. I think we might have been in a rush. Anyway, he began perusing the book before I did. We'd sit in bed together reading, and I'd hear “Wow!” or “This is really dark!” or “I can't believe this guy isn't Thai” coming regularly from his side. He kept this up through the entire five hundred odd pages. I knew I had to read it.

The Windup Girl takes place in a dystopic world perhaps a hundred years in the future, during “the Contraction”. Humanity has used up all the petroleum on the planet, leaving biomethane, coal and animal (or human) power as the main sources of energy. Much of humanity hovers on the edge of famine as a few Monsanto-like corporations (the “calorie companies”) control most of the world's genetic material, producing sterile (and of course patented) U-Tex Rice, TotalNutrient Wheat, HiGro Corn and SoyPRO. Genetic modification (“genehacking”) has also produced new plagues and pests that have devastated the ecosystem, making the world even more dependent on the calorie companies. The book implies though never states that at least some of these blights were deliberately engineered to decimate natural genetic diversity and increase dependence on AgriGen, PureCal and their ilk.

Thailand, however, has been spared from the worst of this ecological disaster, largely due to the vigilance of the powerful Environment Ministry, which works to keep unauthorized GM products and raw materials for generipping out of the kingdom. Anderson Lake, an AgriGen employee, visits Bangkok under false pretenses, trying to locate the source of the old-fashioned, natural fruits and vegetables (tomatoes, eggplants and other items unseen for generations) that regularly appear in Bangkok's markets. Lake plots with the Ministry of Trade, Environment's traditional enemy, to undermine the Environment Ministry and uncover its hidden seed bank.

The “calorie man” Lake is only one of many vivid characters in this drama, however. There's Captain Jaidee, known as the Tiger, a former Thai boxer who now leads Environment's enforcement – a man who earns both his real name (which means “good heart”), for his generosity and sense of humor, and his sobriquet, due to his ferocity. His somber, dutiful lieutenant Kanya is his polar opposite, grimly pursuing her own understanding of justice. Hock Seng is Lake's lackey at the factory that serves as cover for his genetic researchers. A former wealthy merchant, Hock Seng is now a stateless refugee after horrific massacres of the Malaysian Chinese by Muslim Malays. And at the center of the story is Emiko, the “windup girl” of the title, engineered in Japan as a secretary and companion but then abandoned by her owner in Bangkok. Emiko is in some sense the ultimate fruit of the genetic manipulation that has crippled the earth, but she may also be the planet's future.

The last scifi book I read before The Windup Girl was China Mieville's The Scar. When I reviewed that book, I commented that it included some brilliant ideas – possibly too many of them. Paolo Bacigalupi strikes just the right balance, throwing out fascinating notions about possible futures but never straying too far from his central themes. The book is very tightly written (if you can say that about a 500 page novel!). It kept me on edge to the very last page; I really couldn't predict the (surprisingly positive) ending.

All of the above would be enough to make me recommend The Windup Girl. However, on top of intriguing characters, a shocking yet plausible premise, and plenty of action and intrigue, this book demonstrates an incredible understanding of Thailand – environment, culture, politics and psyche. I know Thailand well. I lived there for several years in the eighties and now I visit it often. I can scarcely believe how perfectly Mr. Bacigalupi has captured the realities and the contradictions of the Thais. They embrace technology and yet they continue to guard their economy from outsiders. They're peaceful Buddhists and violent thugs. The competition between Trade and Environment, the double-dealing and corruption, could have been taken from today's headlines in the Bangkok Post.

Bacigalupi is spot on in his description of the environment, too – the heat and humidity, the vibrant street markets, the noise and the strange oases of quiet. His depiction of Bangkok holding the sea at bay with massive flood walls and coal-powered pumps may be only a decade or two away. Certainly, I could imagine it perfectly, having walked along the banks of the Chao Phaya River and seen the City of Angels meters deep in water.

This amazing verisimilitude made reading The Windup Girl almost a peak experience for me. I do wonder whether readers without my familiarity with Thailand will have the same reaction. On the other hand, the book won both the Nebula and the Hugo awards in 2010, the year it was published (a fact neither my husband nor I knew when we bought it), so I guess a good deal of the brilliance was obvious even to the uninitiated.

When my husband and I have both finished one of our used-book-store finds, we normally donate it to a charity for resale. The Windup Girl, though, has earned a place on our “keeper” bookshelves, along with Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe, Gilbert and Sullivan, D.M. Thomas, Haruki Murakami, and Shakespeare. We've already sent one copy (new, of course) to a friend as a gift. I expect that will happen again.

If you enjoy intelligent science fiction – if you're concerned about environmental issues – if you have any interest in, or experience with, Thailand – read this book.

Stretching

By Nobilis Reed (Guest Blogger)

 

I write science fiction and fantasy erotica. As shocking as it may sound, I’ve never owned a sex robot, I’ve never magically transformed into a woman, and I’ve never had sex in zero gravity. I have not had the pleasure of fucking a space alien, or an elf, or a tentacled horror.

I can hear your collective gasps. Shocking, isn’t it?

As far as I’m concerned, straight women writing gay erotic romance, vanilla folks writing kink, men writing from the point of view of randy college girls―those folks have it easy. There are a thousand blogs out there written by people who are living those lives. It’s easy to empathize with someone who’s living on Earth in the twenty-first century, because we have so many things in common.

Try imagining you’re a woman who has just discovered that you’re descended from a hermaphrodite that came to Earth from another dimension. Imagine that you now understand why you have a penis-sized clit and magical powers, unlike anyone else but your mother. Imagine you travel to your ancestor’s home dimension, where you’re not a freak, but rather a member of the aristocracy.

Or imagine you’re a young man in the distant future, who has just been recruited by an interstellar courier service whose ships are powered by sex. Imagine you’re a Roman procurator who is exploring the Great Lakes in a steam-turbine ship. Imagine you’re an engineer who has fallen in love with the woman who wrote the software for your nano-tech garment that can turn into any item of clothing.

Try researching that.

It's a real stretch for the imagination. Not only am I working out the minds and hearts of individual people, I'm working out cultural norms for entire societies. I'm not just breaking taboos, I'm setting them up in the first place and giving them reasons for being there to boot. Science. Technology. Government. Religion. All of these things need consideration, because all of them bear on the character’s experience.

Sure, there’s research that can help with that effort, studying real culture and history of places that might be something like what I’m dreaming up. For the ‘magical hermaphrodites’ setting I’ve found ‘third gender’ traditions in various cultures around the world that can help shed some light, and even though we don’t have wizards blasting fireballs at their enemies, we certainly have legends and magical traditions where fantasy writers have found their building blocks.

And certainly there are many who have gone before in creating alien cultures. There’s probably no better resource for creating good speculative fiction than to read a wide variety of good speculative fiction. I’m certainly not copying other folks’ work, but the imagination is nourished by the imagination of others.

In the end, though, when I create a new universe to set stories in, I’m the first person to write about it. You can’t get much more “other” than that!

Now I admit that there are advantages to writing speculative fiction. For one thing, I am the ultimate authority of reality in my constructed universes. I get to say how things work. There are no outside authorities to tell me I got some historical details wrong, or that my geography is out of whack. There’s a certain amount of freedom there.

Ultimately, though, stories are about people and if the people don’t come across as essentially and consistently human, then the reader is not going to connect well with them, and the story will fail. This kind of failure is sometimes overt; the reader shouts, “People don’t act like that!” and puts the book down, but this can also manifest as simply a mild distaste. “I just couldn’t get into it,” she might say. “I couldn’t get into the characters.”

That’s the challenge every author faces. Like anyone else, I use research, empathy and imagination to make that happen. I’m just stretching a little farther when I do it.

* * * * *

A few years ago Nobilis Reed decided to start sharing the naughty little stories he scribbled out in hidden notebooks. To his surprise, people actually liked them! Now, he can’t stop. The poor man is addicted. His wife, teenage children, and even the cats just look on this wretch of a man, hunched over his computer and shake their heads. Clearly, there is no hope for him. The best thing to do is simply make him as comfortable as his condition will allow. Symptoms of his condition include two novels, several novellas, numerous short stories, and the longest-running erotica podcast in the history of the world. Find his site at www.nobiliserotica.com, and his audio podcast at nobilis.libsyn.com.

Check out Coming Together: Arm in Arm in Arm - tentacle erotica for charity, coming this month!

The Book That Almost Wasn't

By Lisabet Sarai

Last Monday saw the release of my seventh novel, Quarantine. I've been so busy setting up promotions (while simultaneously preparing for an overseas business trip!) that I haven't really had time to be grateful. And yet, it's a minor miracle that this book has actually been published.

I came very close to abandoning the project halfway through. I guess I can thank my stubbornness (plus Garce's inspired muddling) for the fact that my gay scifi romance is finally available.

Many authors live and write in a constant state of self-doubt. Not me - at least, not usually. I know I'm competent, if not the most creative writer on the planet. I have enough publication credits that a rejection doesn't set me back too much. I've never had a best-seller (even within the narrow confines of the erotica genre) but given the amount of time I devote to my writing (far less than many of my colleagues), I can't really complain about my royalties. When I sit down to produce a story, I'm generally confident I can complete it by the deadline, barring emergencies or acts of God.

With Quarantine, though, my usual self-confidence simply evaporated. The first half dozen chapters went really well – the scenes that comprised the initial seed of inspiration. Then I started to feel I was way out of my depth.

I love reading science fiction. I know the key to a great scifi book is a plausible, richly textured alternative world, along with a “big idea” that drives the story conflict. In contrast, my fictional world felt thin, unconvincing, far too much like the present to snag a reader's interest. Indeed, the original concepts for the story came from the past – the Nazi concentration camps, the WW II internment of Japanese-Americans, the AIDS crisis – and it seemed I hadn't done enough to extrapolate beyond those events and their consequences. Once my heroes escaped from quarantine, I didn't know what should happen next.

I managed to squeeze out a few more chapters. I found myself switching to other projects, avoiding the novel where I was so badly stuck. The longer I went without working on Quarantine, the deeper my sense of inadequacy grew and the more resistance I felt to picking it up again.

Months went by and I hadn't added a single word. Finally, I asked Garce for a crit of what I had so far. I was nervous but grateful that he agreed to help. Few authors are as good at formulating and expressing big ideas as C. Sanchez-Garcia.

We began a dialogue around the story and the characters. Garce came up with lots of questions (many of which I'd never even considered) as well as some wild plot proposals (a few of which I ended up adopting). Garce's critiques helped make my vague feeling that the book was weak a lot more specific.

Our exchange went on for a couple of weeks. But I still didn't resume writing. Nevertheless, I went back to thinking about the book, working on a scene list, roughing out a time line. Finally, about eight months after I put Quarantine aside, I was able to pick it up again.

I'd love to be able to say that everything went smoothly after that point. In fact, I continued to slog along, feeling as though I was wading through knee-deep mud just to finish each chapter. My self-doubts resurfaced. I pushed them away and kept at it, determined that the effort I'd put in so far (and the time that Garce had invested) wouldn't be wasted.

The more I wrote, the more the end of the story seemed to recede. I'd originally expected the book to be about 40K words. It ended up almost 70K.

I finally finished and submitted the book near the end of 2011. I wasn't surprised it was accepted – to be brutally honest, my personal standards are considerably higher than those of many publishers. I was grateful, though, that I could put the unpleasant effort that went into producing the book behind me.

So now the book is out. The readers and reviewers will decide whether the struggle was worthwhile. Ultimately, I'm moderately pleased with the book, though I know it's better romance than it is science fiction. It certainly won't win a Hugo – but perhaps it will succeed in making readers care about Dylan and Rafe and their uncertain future.

Why was this book so hard to write? Looking back, I think I approached it too seriously. It's true that the novel deals with difficult issues and has plenty of dark moments. However, I've found that I write best when I treat the process as play rather than work – exactly the opposite of the way I wrote Quarantine.

I'm trying to apply that lesson as I move on to new projects and new challenges.

(You can buy Quarantine at Total-E-Bound.)

Possible Futures

By Lisabet Sarai

The year is 2045. The sexually-transmitted Plague that killed a third of the U.S. population and left half the survivors sterile has been under control for more than seven years, but the country is still suffering. American technology, already on the decline before the disaster, has fallen further behind the competition from India, Brazil, and other powerhouse economies. People huddle in the deteriorating cities on both coasts; the center of the country belongs to bandits and the survivalist communities who saw the crash coming. The birthrate continues to drop, despite government propaganda and the availability of fertility boosting drugs. Scarred by memories of horrible death and devastating riots, and still afraid of residual contagion, people prefer the simulated sexual experience provided by EyePorn to the real thing.

The Guardians of American Greatness blame the crisis on homosexuals. The Plague first appeared in the gay community, and gay men were the first to die. When existing institutions collapsed, the Guardians stepped in to provide order. They rounded up every man whose profile revealed the homogene, imprisoning the captives in remote quarantine camps patrolled by robot wardens and surrounded by moats of toxic waste. At a time when the mobs were screaming for gay blood, the Guardians called the quarantine solution humane. Now people barely remember the existence of the incarcerated gays, though homosexual activity is still a capital crime.

Twenty four year old Dylan Moore has spent nearly a third of his life in desolate Malheur Camp, in the barren reaches of eastern Oregon. He's determined to escape or die in the attempt. A genius with electronics, Dylan manages to subvert the prison security systems and catch the attention of one of the two human guards in the facility, Rafe Cowell. Rafe is an ex-gang member, forced to work at Malheur as an alternative to a jail sentence. Although he's H-negative, Rafe finds Dylan disturbingly attractive and ultimately agrees to help him flee.

When Dylan's clever plans fall apart, the two men both end up as fugitives. They make their way to the partially ruined city of Sanfran, hoping to emigrate to Brazil or Thailand or some other gay-friendly country. However, they become entangled with the underground Queer Resistance as well as the ambitious city mayor, darling of the Guardians, who has his own private agenda.

This is the world of Quarantine, my M/M erotic romance novel due out in July. It's not so different from our own, and that's very deliberate. It's only a small step from the virulent anti-gay rhetoric one encounters in the U.S. media to a future that includes places like Malheur Camp. That may seem far-fetched, a gross violation of the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, but we've seen those guarantees savaged before in a crisis or emergency. Remember the American citizens of Japanese descent confined to internment camps during World War II? My scenario is not nearly as unthinkable as one would like to believe.

There are other aspects of my dystopia that are far too plausible for comfort. In Rafe's and Dylan's world, many citizens are not literate. Pictures and symbols have begun to replace text on public signs. Huge video screens loom over the city buildings, displaying non-stop images of peace and plenty. The Guardians deliberately cultivate nostalgia for the nineteen fifties, supposedly America's golden age of prosperity and power. Pictures of beloved "Uncle Ike" hang in every public place.

Surveillance devices are everywhere. A microchip buried under the skin of every individual encodes his or her identity and genetic profile. Robotic soldiers prowl the sidewalks, transmitting data back to Guardian headquarters. The only obstacle to complete control of the population is the unreliability of American-made technology.

It took me more than a year to finish Quarantine. I lost confidence about half way through and stopped writing, convinced that my vision of the future was simply too ordinary and obvious to be compelling. There are no starships in this book, no nanotechnology, no cyber-implants that can enhance your intelligence. The most sophisticated invention I describe is the EyePorn pod, a virtual sex device that interfaces with the limbic system and injects genetically tailored hormones into the user's bloodstream. Not too original - I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this available within five years.

I want to thank Garce for helping me get through that bad spell. His "muddling" was invaluable. It also helped to remind myself that I was writing erotic romance first - that the scifi aspect was perhaps less important than the relationship between the protagonists. In any case, Quarantine definitely falls into the "soft" category of science fiction. I'm mostly concerned with societal attitudes - and how they can be manipulated - in particular, attitudes about sexuality. A friend recently compared Quarantine to The Handmaid's Tale, and I think that's apt. Like Margaret Atwood's heroine, Dylan and Rafe are victims of a hypocritical system that demonizes their natural urges.

Here's an unedited excerpt from the book. Dylan and Rafe have made it to SanFran, and have been told to seek out the head of QR in the Castro exclusion zone - the former center of gay culture, now supposedly contaminated with Plague prions.

****

As they approached the corner of Market and Dolores, a wall of gray steel slats, nearly two stories high, rose in front of them. Red-lettered signs plastered the hoarding: "Contaminated Area. Extreme danger. Do not enter." plus scowling skull and crossbones icons for those citizens who couldn't read. The official notices were augmented by coarser, more casual notices: "Die fags!" and "Kill the queers". Dylan was used to such sentiments, but Rafe's body stiffened as they approached the barrier.

The fence ran left along the west side of Dolores as far as they could see. Meanwhile, it stretched for blocks along Market. It appeared at first to be impenetrable, but at Castro there was a closed gate, wide enough for a bulldozer. Dylan was surprised to find that the entry was bolted but not locked and there no guards. He scanned the power poles and neighbouring buildings. He didn't see any cameras, though that meant little.

Market Street was momentarily empty of both people and vehicles. "This is our chance," he told his companion in a loud whisper. "Now!" He slipped the bolt and cracked open the door.

"Wait—maybe we shouldn't—the Plague..." Rafe hung back as Dylan stepped partway inside.

"Come on!" Dylan hooked Rafe's upper arm and yanked him into the shadows on the other side of the door. Rafe stumbled on a heap of debris. Dylan steadied him. Nervous sweat beaded the black man's brow.

Sympathy tightened Dylan's chest. Poor Rafe. Despite his gang background, he wasn't used to being hunted. Plus he still believed the Guardians' propaganda. Dylan pulled off his mask, stuffing it into his back pocket, then moved to do the same with Rafe's.

"No!" The ex-guard backed away. "I'll keep it on."

"Don't be silly," Dylan laughed, snatching the mask away and planting a kiss on Rafe's mouth. He felt his lover relax a bit. "I'm sure we're being watched in here. We need to show who we are, so they know they can trust us." He pushed the hood back, exposing Rafe's scowling face.

"But the Plague..."

"Artemis said it was safe, that the disease has died out. Don't you believe her?"

"Um—I'm not sure..."

"Well, I do. She's one smart lady. I think the Plague is the least of our worries." He held out his hand to his hesitant partner. "It'll be okay, Rafe. As long as we're together, we're okay."

Rafe grunted in reply, but he allowed Dylan to lead him deeper into the exclusion zone.

The devastation was more extensive than anything they'd seen so far. The streets were pocked with grenade craters and lined with heaps of charred rubble that had once been buildings. In some places it was difficult to walk. They trudged uphill, dodging piles of debris, scanning for any signs of life. It was eerily silent. The babble from the vidscreens didn't seem to penetrate here.

Dylan checked the map, then turned left onto a narrower street. Half-demolished wooden structures leaned at crazy angles around them. "This should be Church," he told Rafe as they took a right. "And that should be Wilde Baths."

He pointed to a three story, stucco building across the road. The roof had caved in on the left, but the right side of the edifice appeared to be intact. Splintered boards shuttered the windows. Weeds sprouted on the sills. Despite its dodgy appearance, however, Wilde Baths had a very solid-looking front door.

Dylan knocked, three long, two short, one long, the way Artemis had instructed. Sixty seconds went by. No one answered. The buzz of a helicopter sounded overhead. His heart slammed against his ribs. Could Artemis have betrayed them?

As though sensing his unease, Rafe put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. Dylan took a deep breath and knocked again.

Hinges creaked and the door opened an inch or two. "Yeah?" The unseen man sounded annoyed, even angry.

"We're friends of Oscar," Dylan answered with the pass phrase. "Artemis sent us. We need to talk to Hammer."

The gap widened another few inches. A slender man with a trim goatee glared at them. "Hammer's not here now."

"Can we come in? Wait for him?" Rafe interjected. The engine noise grew louder. "It's not safe for us out here."

The man's eyes flicked over them, weighing the risks. Finally he nodded. "Okay." Stepping back, he let them enter, then bolted the door behind them. "Here." He handed each of them a folded, dingy-looking towel and a key, then pointed down a dimly lit corridor. "Locker room's at the end of the hall. Baths are in the basement, massage on the second floor. I'll come find you when he gets back." Dylan didn't expect the grin that twitched at the man's thin mouth. "Have fun."

"Wait a minute..." Rafe tried to return the towel.

Dylan grabbed his hand and pulled him down the hall. "Thanks," he called back. "We really appreciate it."

Rafe struggled to extricate his hand from Dylan's grip. "Stop," he hissed. "No way I'm getting naked in front of a bunch of queers."

"Oh really? Do you want to go back outside, then? Well, go ahead." Dylan was suddenly furious. How could he love such a damned homophobe? "Maybe that copter wasn't looking for us after all. Anyway, you're not queer. You don't have to worry. You can explain it all. How you were tricked into helping some Plague-infected perv escape quarantine. It wasn't your fault, was it? Sneaky little fag must have drugged you or something. You're straight as Uncle Ike, right?"

*****

Quarantine is scheduled for release some time in July. Don't worry - I'll let you know when as soon as I hear!

First Love

By Lisabet Sarai

Almost as soon as I could read, I started reading science fiction. I couldn't have been more than seven or eight when I discovered Eleanor Cameron's Mushroom Planet books. At this point I don't remember the plots at all, only my emotional reactions – an overwhelming sense of wonder and excitement. (It's fascinating to read adult reviews of these books on Amazon. Clearly I wasn't the only child thus affected.)

Then came Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. When I was perhaps twelve or thirteen, Asimov was a guest on a local radio talk show, and I called in to ask him some question about the relationship between modern politics and the world of the Foundation trilogy. This might not seem surprising unless you knew that I was the shyest child in the world, absolutely terrified of making telephone calls.

Meanwhile, I suspect that Stranger in a Strange Land, which I devoured when I was fifteen or so, may be partially responsible for my personal attraction to polyamory.

My husband introduced me to Philip K. Dick. I started with The Man in the High Castle, Dick's subtle exploration of an alternative world in which the Japanese and the Germans won WWII. I used to think I'd read everything Dick ever wrote, but new titles keep coming to light. Just a few months ago I finished the weird, apocalyptic and sexually charged Dr. Blood money. (I supposed I could have omitted the adjectives “weird” and “apocalyptic”, since they apply to most of Dick's oeuvre...)

In the eighties we joined a science fiction reading group. Every month a dozen of us would get together for wine, potluck, desserts and discussion. We read Sheri S. Tepper, Olivia Butler, Greg Bear, Harry Harrison, John Barnes, Pat Cadigan... a whole new universe of authors. After a year or so, the group fizzled, but not before it had rekindled my early love of the genre.

Recently I discovered Jonathan Lethem. He might not characterize his own work as science fiction, but Gun, With Occasional Music, in which farm animals have achieved a near-human level of intelligence and individuals require custom blended drugs to survive, certainly fits my criteria for the genre.

I'll read almost anything that calls itself scifi, but my favorite tales focus more on people than technology – so-called “soft science fiction”. The best books, in my opinion, start with a relatively simple premise and then explore its societal implications. I read a book in the eighties by Kate Wilhelm, which is an ideal example. (Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the title. Sometimes things that predated the Internet seem to drop into a black hole.) The world passes through a cloud of interstellar dust. At first it appears that there are no negative effects, but soon people begin to die. It turns out that the dust causes water to become more viscous. Since humans are mostly composed of water, exposure to the dust is fatal – and the thickening produces a variety of other consequences as well. Society begins to fall apart, in a most convincing way

As you might expect, I also have a particular fondness for speculative fiction that plays with changes in gender and sexuality. The 1997 Circlet Press anthology Genderflex is my touchstone in this area.

So, now I'm a writer. Given my love of science fiction, one might ask why I don't write some sci fi of my own.

Well, I'll be honest. With all the fantastic models from a lifetime of reading the genre, I'm just plain intimidated. Science fiction demands a level of imagination that I'm not sure I can deliver. I've read so much scifi that all my own ideas feel stale or derivative.

Furthermore, it's not enough to create a vivid, surprising, different alternative universe. Your fictional world must also be at least somewhat plausible, and internally consistent. In science fiction, details matter almost as much as they do in historical fiction. Indeed, writing historical fiction might be easier, because you can consult external sources when you get stuck.

Writing sci fi is hard. I know because, finally, I just finished my first science fiction novel, and it required a level of pain far beyond anything I've experienced with any other book.

Actually, I'm cheating a bit here. Quarantine is sci fi erotic romance, not “pure” science fiction. It will be judged as much on its sex scenes and the bond between its heroes as for the dystoptic future it presents. So in fact, it doesn't feel quite real. Nevertheless, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't somewhat proud of the book. For one thing, it focuses on changes in society and their implications for the characters – the sort of soft sci fi that I personally enjoy.

Quarantine is set some thirty years in the future, after a plague has decimated the population of America. The epidemic had its start in the gay community before spreading to heterosexuals, and thus gays are blamed. All surviving men with a genetic marker for homosexuality have been rounded up and sent to remote quarantine camps in places like eastern Oregon. (If you've never been through eastern Oregon – it's flat, empty, dry and desolate – and that's before the effects of global warming.) One of the heroes is an inmate who has been imprisoned in the camp for seven years. The other is a camp guard, an ex-gang member sent to work at the camp in lieu of a prison term. The inmate seduces the guard, who helps him escape. They both end up as fugitives, hiding in Plague-ravaged San Francisco where they are forced to help the queer underground in its battle against the homophobic, nationalistic Guardians of American Greatness.

Ugh. When I describe the book, it sounds like a million other stories. And indeed, it's not such a stretch of the imagination to move from today to my imagined future, which seems all too plausible. Oh well. I suspect that my erotic romance readership will enjoy it anyway. It's likely that most of them did not cut their reading teeth on Bradbury and Heinlein.

I had planned to conclude with a brief excerpt – but I couldn't find one that was obviously science fiction. My fictional world is too much like our own. Instead, I'll give you a snippet from the only other sci fi I've published, a novella called Bodies of Light. This is a bit of space opera (with plenty of sex thrown in), but even so, it's no more than half a century in the future. I guess I don't dare boldly go where no one has gone before!

The bridge was as silent as the suspension bay. However, a survey of the blinking panels and rotating 3D displays revealed that the ship still had power. The pods had been some kind of anomaly. Relieved, Christine settled into the pilot’s chair (Sven Harlsson, gone like all the rest) and searched the cluttered controls until she found the viewport activation button. The curved shields slid open, revealing a hemisphere of blackness. For the first time, Christine gazed out into the emptiness of interstellar space.

Terror tightened her throat. She was falling into the immense void before her, drowning in the utter absence of light or form. She closed her eyes, trying to summon the scientist within her. No one had seen this before, the vast reaches of the universe outside Earth’s solar system. She was the first.

She forced herself to peer into the darkness, pressing against the transparent carbon-crystal of the viewport. As her vision adapted, she found she could see faint glowing clouds that must be galaxies and pinpricks of light that were distant stars. The universe was not totally empty, after all. She swallowed her fear and tried to speak.

“Request interstellar coordinates.” Her long-unused voice came out as a croak, but Archimedes understood her command.

“359˚ 56’ 39.5’’ galactic latitude, -2˚ 42’ 46.3’’ galactic longitude,” the ship replied crisply.

“Request distance from Sirius cluster.”

“Approximately thirty-four-point-seven light years.”

“What?” That was farther away than they’d been when they started! “There must be a mistake! Recheck your calculations.”

The ship’s computer hesitated for a fraction of a second—almost as though it were offended, Christine thought. “There is no error. Current position is 34.68643 light years from Sirius, 41.321966 light years from Terra. Current speed is .917 c. Heading is 22˚ 13’ b by 9˚ 2’ l.”

Forty-one light years from Earth! Had they overshot their goal? Of course, a tiny miscalculation in their initial trajectory would be magnified into an increasingly large discrepancy the farther the ship travelled from its starting point. “How long has it been since departure?”

“Four years, sixty-two days, four hours and twenty-two minutes,” the ship intoned.

Only four years? “That’s not possible,” Christine objected. Given their maximum velocity, they could not have travelled anywhere near this far. Something was very wrong.

“Run full self-diagnostics,” she ordered. “Report any faults.”

The computer was silent for about ten seconds. Christine stared out of the viewport, wondering whether any of the faint, flickering points of brightness might be Sol.

“Self-diagnostics completed,” Archimedes announced. “No faults detected.”

Christine leaned back in the padded chair with a weary sigh. Pain pounded in her temples. Her usually nimble mind felt stiff and rusty. She had to figure this out.

Once again, she saw Ravin’s blank, lifeless face. She had not loved him, but she had respected him, and he had given her pleasure during their pre-launch familiarisation exercises. She found that she missed him. “The crew are all dead,” she murmured to herself. “I’m the only one left, and I’m lost in space, billions of kilometres off course.”

“All suspension pod power was terminated,” the ship commented. “A collision with unidentified debris damaged the electrical distribution cables in the hull. Backup systems failed to engage.”

“What? How long ago did this happen?”

“Sixty-two hours and seventeen minutes ago.” Less than three days! If she had awakened a bit sooner, she might have saved them. The impact must have triggered the reactivation sequence in her own pod. Or perhaps the backup had kicked in to handle the life support for her pod alone.

“EVA is recommended to repair the breach,” Archimedes added. “Probability of atmospheric loss over the next twenty-four hours is point-four-six.”

Christine collapsed on to the control panel, her face buried in her hands, squeezing her eyes tight to hold back the tears. The ship wanted her to risk her life, venturing outside to patch the hole before the air escaped. But why should she bother? She was dead one way or the other.

The vastness of space weighed on her, even when she was not looking at it. The unending blackness threatened to smother her. She felt as empty and hollow as the universe stretching into infinity on every side.