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

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.

Some of my most advanced science fiction thinking has been on the topic of collars and collaring, for my Collar World series, which is six books long now, counting works in progress. Already published are “Stolen Collar, Stolen Heart,” a novel, “Collar Dread,” another novel, “Crazy Aunts and Scary Uncles,” a 38,000-word novelette, and “Campus Slut Run,” a 9000-word short story. In the works are “The Visitor from Incel World” (a completed novel, but in editing) and Conquest of Incel World, which I'm about 60,000 words into, but will likely run to 80,000 words or more.

You can find the Amazon links to buy them all at my International Bookstore site.

I've invested a lot into Collar World, but that's primarily because I did some world-building before I set pen to paper. One thing I gave a lot of thought to was the technology of collars.

Currently, collars are inert pieces of metal that are often beautifully designed for aesthetic and functional reasons, but in my Collar World series, they're much more than that.



This slave collar looks like it could hide the guts of three or four cell phones inside it and still be plenty thick enough to be an effective restraint.

In Collar World, collars are filled with all sorts of tech wizardry. They have GPS locators so their wearers can't get lost, they function as cell phones and as credit cards. They can also record video and conversations. Basically, anything a cell phone can do, a collar can do.



This collar could probably hide just one cell-phone-equvalent's worth of electronics but one is all that's needed.

The collar can be linked to a dedicated controller, a screen or a desktop controller via cord, bluetooth or wifi, depending.

I don't see why any of this tech isn't possible right now with present day tech. Of course, the collar would have to be a large, thick one, either a leather collar with pockets to hold the electronics or a large metal collar with a hollow interior to hold the electronics. A thin wire necklace collar wouldn't do, though I'm sure if tech collars became popular, Apple would design one.

Second Life virtual collar ad

This isn't completely original with me. In Second Life they have virtual collars that can do all this and more besides, restricting the wearer's sight, hearing and ability to move around in the game, and making their body assume poses whether the wearer likes it or not.


But real life collars that have most functions of a cell phone are, to my mind, definitely possible. Frankly I don't know why we haven't seen them for sale in the specialty websites yet. Well, I do have some guesses, mostly based on ignorance.


For example, I remember reading about the electronic fields created by cell phones was at one time a concern, that having the phones on one's body could lead to sterility, etc. I don't recall anything ever coming of that, so it probably is not a big deal, but I don't KNOW if that's true. Could be some concerns with wearing a microwave/bluetooth/wifi emitter around your neck. I don't know. But the guys at scifi worldbuilding might.


There may also be cultural barriers. If collars as phones or credit cards for subs became a common thing, phone services might not be willing to carry collar phones, and/or banks might not be willing to process credit transactions from collars.


I don't know that that's the case, just guessing that there might be problems. Banks tend to separate themselves from the sexy.


There might also be physical stresses on the electronics in a collar, but ordinary cell phones have to endure a lot of stress too, and they mostly do all right. And frankly, I think a large metal collar would provide much better protection for the electronics within it than your average cell phone casing, and still keep its wearer securely attached to the bed/post/whatever.


Well, there you have it. Advanced collar tech for the busy sub on the go. Probably not feasible because people get so freaked out about sex in our current culture. But there's no TECHNICAL reason why they couldn't exist, that I know of.


I've also given a lot of advanced science fictional thought to how widely accepted collars for slavegirls (as on Collar World) might work. More on that later.


In the meantime, one of you builders of collars get out there and make my techno-collar visions come true.

Collaring has a great deal of psychological meaning for many kinky folks. For some it is an analogue for a wedding band for kinksters, symbolizing the collarer's ownership of the collar wearer. And for others, it's just another bit of bondage gear. There are no civic structures for kinky relationships like there are for vanilla relationships (i.e., marriage) so these things vary.

This turned out to be important and useful when I decided to create an alternate world where everyone is into dominance and submission. I figured most would be into maledom/femsub stuff, like here on Earth, but there would also be femdom/malesub relationships, as well as gay relationships, asexuals and so forth. There just wouldn't be any, or very rarely, vanilla sexual relationships. It's not that there is any bigotry against vanilla sex, it's just that most people on Collar World wouldn't find it nearly as fun and sexy as kinky sex.

Plus, I didn't want bigotry to be a major theme in the world. “Bigotry is bad”is a good lesson but one well known to most who are into kinky sex. I wanted it to be more of a thought experiment: what kind of world would a world with just kinky people in it be? How would kink culture express itself if it were the dominant culture?

And that's where collaring comes in. To start with, of course, there's a personal collar, where a Master or Mistress gives a sub a collar proclaiming her or him the property of said Master or Mistress, with text that typically says, “XXX, property of ZZZ.” It would probably be the most common sort of collar, and the most sought-after collar.

There would also be Free Use collars, for women who want to have sex with just about anyone, anytime, with some kind of clearly visible hatching that lets Free Use collars be easily identifiable in a crowd or on the street.

There would also be institutional collars, or work collars, that let people know the wearer is on business. Women who have personal collars might have a work tag they hang from one of their personal collar rings, or maybe they'd wear two collars. It would be a matter of taste and practicality.

But work collars would also serve to let women who want a collar but aren't currently in a relationship go about their day without being collared by Masters looking for slaves.

And there would be asexual collars for men and women who don't want to be bothered, or whom are actually asexual, and Temple of the Collar collars for those in service or claiming shelter at a Temple of the Collar, as in the opening of Collar Dread. (I'll save a full explanation of the Temple of the Collar for another post.)

Of course, most Mistresses and Masters wouldn't wear collars at all. They'd be putting collars on the submissives. The lack of a collar would suffice to declare their status.

The point is, on Collar World most people can find a collar (or lack of one) that they are psychologically comfortable wearing. Everyone who wants to feel owned, and most women on Collar World do, can feel owned, generally by a personal Master or Mistress.

I did do one thing in my Collar World stories that I had to for the sake of their salability in the marketplace. And I made some other changes as a result, but more about that in another column. I think I've laid the groundwork here.

People who have done kinky RP on Second Life will recognize the term “Temple of the Collar.” Second Life is a virtual reality game, virtually all of whose objects and programming and A group of Second Life builders got together and created collars and other bondage toys that share common Open Source scripts that allows people to cheaply and easily share their skills and toys for kinky RP, chief among which would be collars. Designers created all kinds of designs for collars, scripters created all kinds of scripts for collars and as a result they were able to offer them cheaply, and in some cases for free, to Second Life Rpers, making kinky RP a lot more user-friendly if you know what I mean, wink-wink nudge-nudge.


I didn't need the objects and scripts for Collar World, but I did borrow the name and the sense of generosity and inclusion for the Temple of the Collar. On Collar World, the Temple of the Collar serves as a social safety valve for those whose collars do not rest comfortably on their necks.


Some people will be misfits and will have a hard time in a relationship and feel the need to run away or “break a collar” which is the term for ending a personal collar relationship. At the Temple of the Collar, slaves without collars can get food, a place to sleep, safety and counseling, even a new collar of they want one. The Temple of the Collar collar allows a slave to recover until they want a new collar. Some slaves even take on a Temple collar permanently, finding it very comfortable.


The Temple shows up prominently in two of my stories, Collar Dread about a slavegirl who is fearful of the psychological changes created by collaring, and “The Visitor From Incel World” about a woman from Earth transported to Collar World by a physics experiment gone awry (which is still in editing).


Oh, did I mention the psychological aspects of collaring? Well, I did go into a lot of science fiction thinking there, too. Yet another blog post coming on that one.