So a little while ago, my erotic dystopian Torquere Sip “We Are Such Stuff” went out of print and the rights reverted to me. It’s definitely not the best story I’ve ever written, but I have a certain fondness for it, so I went back through it, did a little editing and made a few minor changes, and I’m re-releasing it through Smashwords.
It originally sold for $1.99 but now you can have your very own spiffy DRM-free Smashwords edition in a wide variety of formats for only $.99.
Reyes is bored. A young man in a bleak future city of endless rain, he finds his entertainment in packed clubs, one-night stands, and the occasional drug. But when a mysterious young man catches his eye, he is led on a chase through a nighttime world of dreams and dreamers, a chase that could end in frustration… or a new kind of pleasure.
And have an excerpt.
cold, (apparently) dead thing that it is today. I immediately thought “hey, I could do that,” and stupidly set out to try to do so. The result has–so far–been sort of like The Martian Chronicles by way of The Road, a story of the last survivors of a colonization attempt by an alien species, an attempt that, predictably, went horribly awry. The last generation of survivors–most of them, anyway–carry no clear memory of their homeworld, or of how they lived before their colony disintegrated into infighting and starvation. What they do carry are “ghosts”, the fragmentary memories and personalities of the people they have killed and eaten in a highly complex cannibalistic ritual referred to as “communion”. My idea is that this ritual arose as a way to combat the combined losses of culture, community, resources, and meaningful ties to the past. It does interesting things to the meaning of death on this version of Mars (called “Hadeva” by its inhabitants)–anyone may be killed and eaten at any time, for any reason, and people have very little cause to trust one another, though small isolated settlements still exist. But by the same token, slaughter and consumption are deeply meaningful, even respectful, and communities share their dead together. When someone is attacked and killed, they often take comfort in the fact that their killer will commune them and carry their memory. To die uneaten is the worst possible fate.
