Pat Powers's Blog: Pat Powers Goes BEYOND Outer Subspace! - Posts Tagged "collar-climax"

Collar Dread

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So one of the problems of creating a utopia in a story is that they can be dull reading. Happy happy nice nice forever is great for the protagonists, but it's dull for readers. That's why romance novels always have the HEA (Happily Ever After) at the end of the story.

My favorite solution to this problem is the one devised by Ian Banks for his Culture novels. The Culture is an interstellar empire where everybody leads a wonderful life because some very smart, very capable artificial intelligences actually run the society and handle all the heavy stuff like warfare. But the Culture is surrounded by less desirable human civilizations that range from early medieval civilizations to full spacefaring civilizations whose leaders aren't willing to cede power to any artificial intelligences.

The non-Culture civilizations run the gamut from well-run civilizations that get on quite well with the Culture to real crapsack worlds that the Culture tends to interfere with to minimize human misery. It falls to a section called Special Circumstances to deal with such civilizaitons, and most Culture novels are about Special Circumstances agents having a perilous time dealing with crapsack worlds.

Collar World is definitely a utopia of sorts, and I've had to think how to keep the stories from being dull. The first Collar World story was easy, it was a Young Adult erotic romance that had built-in conflict. Romantic issues can happen even in paradise.

And for my next story, I decided to go with using the very feature that makes Collar World a utopia, the Collar Climax. A deep and life-changing psychological transformation that occurs when a submissive is collared by the right Master (or Mistress, if that is her inclination), Collar Climax has changed civilization on Collar World for the better. It is a combination of going into subspace, falling in love and experiencing an epiphany that leaves the slavegirl feeling calm and clear of thought. It may not make her more intelligent, but it makes her sane, better able to access her own intelligence for her own sake, and the sake of others she cares about.

(Disclaimer: although Collar Climax is based on psychological effects submissives have reported, particularly entering subspace, its long term effects are entirely fictional, so far as I know.)

It occurred to me that deep and long-lasting psychological changes incurred by collaring could be scary. One moment, you are you, the next moment Collar Climax has transformed you into someone else.

And that's when I came up with the idea of Collar Dread. For most women, Collar Dread might exist just as a sense of mild anxiety that you might get with any major psychological change, no matter how eagerly anticipated. But for some it's an overwhelming dread that can lead some of them to extremes, even suicide.

So the protagonist of Collar Dread is an orphan who has turned 18 and had to leave the orphanage, and now faces imminent collaring. For most female orphans this is a happy moment, when she will be able to find a Master of her very own to love her and be loved by her.

But for Arlette Spencer, it was a time of Collar Dread. An orphan, she knew the worst could happen to her, because it had. With a powerful libido, she knew her body's ability to control her. Extremely bright, she feared her mind shutting down when she took a man's collar, becoming a sex zombie, capable of nothing but lusting after the man that owned her.

The story is about Arlette trying to deal with her Collar Dread, finding a way out before she was involuntarily collared or fell to the dark forces that preyed on girls who could not find a collar.

Collar Dread has been one of the best sellers from my back catalog. I'm not surprised.

Subspace is an interesting phenomenon. I don't think there's anything like it in vanilla relationships. I've read descriptions of it, and listened to them on Youtube as well, and the nearest analog that occurs to me is that they are like the high you can get from meditating, entering a psychological space that is very unlike normal consciousness, overwhelming, and conveys great calm and relaxation, despite the sort of things that are often done to subs in subspace.


Being a science fiction writer and all, I thought, “What if I turned this baby up to 11 and added other stuff besides?” And thus, the concept of Collar Climax was born. The idea is that when a woman in Collar World is collared and has absolutely mind-blowing sex, she sooner or later will enter Collar Climax while she is having said mind-blowing sex. Collar Climax is a variant of subspace in which the sub experiences a great sense of joy and peace and stillness in their mind, as well as a sense of total acceptance. They have accepted their collar, their owner, and their place in the world, and found great joy in all three. The experience does not go away ... ever, necessarily. That joy and stillness remains within them and makes them calmer, saner people.


Most women on Collar World experience a Collar Climax, which has had the effect of raising the collective IQ of Collar World, because although Collar Climax does not directly affect intelligence, by making the women who experience it saner, hence giving them greater access to whatever intelligence they have, it amplifies the effect of intelligence, which may be more useful for them and the society they live in than a simple intelligence boost. Let's face it, in our world there are an awful lot of very intelligent people who are so crippled by depression and other mental illnesses that they can't really use their intelligence.


Collar Climax subs are more effective human beings, and in the early days when they were slaves in fact, it made them greatly sought after as advisors, and gave Collar World a leg up technologically and most especially socially. Society became more egalitarian, warfare ended, and other good things happened over time.


Of course, Collar Climax is a totally made up thing, except of course that mental health really is a good thing and more of it would undoubtedly make for a better world, made up or otherwise. Especially among the leadership, who so often seem to be psychopaths here on Incel World.