Queerpunk, which features my short story “Upload”, is now available in a variety of different formats from the following places:
Amazon Kindle store
Smashwords
Scribd
All Romance E-books
Circlet is still having shopping cart issues, but it will be up there ASAP as well.
Queer sexuality has long defied the conventional standard of sexual expression; intersecting with the tech-driven backdrop of cyberpunk, it has now rewritten the rules completely. Queerpunk, with its collection of stories that revel in a near-futuristic vision of our own time, investigates the evolution of Queer sexuality under the smog-covered umbrella of urban and technological advancement. When the human body becomes a customizable canvas, either through mechanical implants or three-dimensional internet avatars, sexuality is given even more outlets from which to evolve. As the old social order succumbs to cyberspace’s commanding hand, Queer identity finds new nooks and crannies in which to root.
The stories that follow–“Rescue Wounds,” “Blindwire,” “Upload,” “The Real Thing,” and “Virgin”–craft worlds in which human connection punctures cyberpunk’s isolationist veil. In an otherwise impersonal and anonymous world, the bonds the characters forge through sexual expression shine a small bit of light onto the smoke, and a shred of warmth that pokes through the streams and pockets of internet data. Featuring authors Kal Cobalt, Eric Del Carlo, Sunny Moraine, R.E. Bond, and Kannan Feng, Queerpunk confronts this intersection and the question of what it means to be Queer in a world where the matter of identity has been revolutionized completely.
I love cyberpunk. I have since I was a freshman in high school and watching Ghost in the Shell for the first time and just starting to work out who the fuck William Gibson was. Cyberpunk is something that lends itself naturally to transgressiveness–of place and time, of geographical borders, of identity, of what’s real. So it also lends itself naturally to sex, and in this case to sex that reaches outside the norm of a lot of what I see in erotica. There’s death in here. There are sociopathic people, and sex that has very little meaning outside of two pieces of meat slamming into each other. There’s sex that provides a kind of healing to a profoundly damaged person, with faint echoes of The Matrix. There’s technology fetishism in here, which I found especially evocative, and which made me wonder: if a lot of sexual expression is culturally constructed, what will people’s kinks look like in fifty years? In a hundred?
Almost all of these stories are also about power and resistance, which is interesting in itself. Corporate power, governmental power, the power of massive institutions, and then the power that individuals exert over each other, and the power that someone can have over themselves. The power that the past has over the present and the future. The possibility of resisting external and internal control.
My story is very blatantly about resistance–my two main characters are the leaders of a gang of anti-corporate revolutionaries–but I wanted to particularly explore how cyberspace makes place and body and identity malleable, and to look at the vanishing line between humans and machines. Nothing very new, especially not in this genre, but I think I did pretty well with it. Hopefully you’ll think so too.
This is my third anthology with Circlet Press so far, and I have to say: I think it’s my favorite. And not just because I’m a contributor. There’s just so much to love in here. Circlet always puts out quality stuff, but I really think this is top of the line even for them. This isn’t just good porn, these are great stories, and I’m very happy that mine is among them. I can’t recommend it enough.
SFW excerpt under the cut.
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Charlie isn’t reckless. She’s not a woman who takes chances. But when the gorgeous, curvy brunette in the bar proposes a personal demonstration of a trick that will knock Charlie’s socks off, the offer is too intriguing to turn down.
