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

So, currently I'm writing a story called "The Road To Aquibonya" which is a fantasy piece about a merchant who buys a dozen slavegirls who are half succubi in magic-enshrouded Callipygia to sell in a distant city in Aquibonya, a less magical (but not entirely unmagical) place.

The story looks like it's going to run about 30,000 words, and it contains a single sex scene that is 8000 words long. Now that's value for your money!

It was conceived of as a quickie story I could, ahem, pump out while I worked on marketing "The Visitor from Incel World," a novel-length story I've written in the Collar World series that is not erotica.

You see, it turns out that for non-erotica, you can't just write them and set them out there and let people read them. You have to market them, which is distressingly like work.

What's more, I have no idea HOW to market non-erotica, never having done so before. So I've been reading about that. Unfortunately, much of the information that's out there is clearly bullshit. It falls under the heading of sales blather, and there is a shitload of that stuff. I remember watching a video of a guy saying “When you have a potential reader interested, he is invested!” and staring at the camera significantly, as if that meant something.

But one bit of advice I did encounter that seems to make good sense is “Tell your readers about what you're working on to maintain their interest.”

This makes sense, and it also strikes me as a natural and direct way of marketing, just tell people what's up, let them figure out what they want to do.

So I'll try to post something every day and let you know what's up, and you can be interested or not, it's your call. Works for me.

So there's this new thing going around, climate-change science fiction, called Sci-Cli by some, god help them.


The idea is that climate change is going to fuck us up so thoroughly that science fiction writers HAVE to write about it. Judging by the way climate scientists are running around screaming about it like their hair is on fire, it's gonna be HUGE. I mean, the coral reefs are already dying out RIGHT NOW. Not someday, not in the future, right fucking NOW.


Unfortunately, in my experience science fiction that's written to further a cause is pretty awful stuff. It's not that SF can't have opinions about the future, or that it can't advocate for this or that, but the story has got to rule.


Utopia, for example, started out as the name of a science fiction novel written by Thomas More in 1516. It was about wonderful people who lived on a great fictional island and it's described as being similar to life in some religious monasteries, so you know it was one rockin' read! Well, for 1516, maybe. I think by modern standards, reading it is probably a lot like having dental work without anesthesia. Certainly, that's what reading most advocacy SF is like.


So advocacy SF, utopian or dystopian or somewhere in between, sucks. This is known. But thing is, climate change is happening now. I mean, back in the 1950s and 60s if you were writing about computers based on this nifty thing called a transistor that would someday give you the power to do differential equations with a device the size of a home refrigerator that weighed only half a ton, well you're writing SF, son. You're ahead of the curve.


But if you're writing about personal computers on a fucking Commodore-64 in the mid-80s, you're not doing SF, you're just fucking around. You are behind the curve, buddy.


And that's the thing, the coral reefs ARE dying off, right now. Scientists are coming up with panicky attempts to save them and even the morons that run governments are giving them money to give it a try, because coral reefs are worth fucking money. If you're not including climate change in your stories of the future, you're fucking up. You are behind the curve.


Even if you want to have things be about the same a century from now, you have to at least do some hand-waving to explain why your grandkids aren't living in underground silos trying to stretch a small bar of wobbly tofu into a meal and cursing the memory of their grandparents who couldn't be bothered to deal with climate change when it would have been doable. You have to say “The atmo-stabilizer plants cured the atmosphere and made everything good in 2065, to everyone's great relief” or something along those lines.


Thing is, I'm already writing sci-cli (god I hate that term, I hope it never catches on). In my sequel to “Visitor from Incel World” the people from Collar World have figured out how to open crosstime gateways to Incel World, and they're just fucking horrified at what they find, and I'm not just talking about all the vanilla sex. They figure our world has maybe a century before things really go to shit, with plenty of unpleasantness along the way that could accelerate things. They think we're violent (because of all the wars, you know) and we're run by corrupt thugs (because current events).


So I'm doing my part, so there! No grandkids swearing over their tofu at me!

Empire of Love

Writing as Barry Anderson, I've written a third book in the Collar World series which includes The Visitor from Incel World and The Love Invasion. Like the other two novels, it's not erotica (no explicit sex scenes) it's adult SF adventure. However, I have taken the lessons of John Norman to heart and placed plenty of fantasy fuel in the story. Hopefully everyone will lurve it. Or at least love it!

Here's the blurberino!

When Collar World’s time monitors discover a new timeline, they quickly realize they need out-of-the-box thinking and they need it fast. A brutal Old West theocracy on the alternate timeline, the Empire of Luvala, is hanging slaves for little or no reason, and with horrifying frequency.

So naturally the call goes out to the Laguna Beach Ladies’ Investigation Bureau, i.e., Nitro Wilde and Moxie Maven. After all, they helped head off a crosstime war between Incel World and Collar World when their timelines intermingled. And all they’re asked to do is sit in a conference room in Collar World and help come up with ideas to end the murderous reign of the Luvalans on Earth 4 (the newly discovered timeline) as quickly and with as little violence as possible.

Given enough time, the Collar Worlders could probably end the hangings with no violence at all. But every day’s delay means more innocent slaves will be brutalized and hanged. The clock is ticking and the sound is the fall of bodies through a gallows door.

Unfortunately, there was more going on on Earth 4 than meets the eye, and soon Moxie is struggling for her life while the leadership on Collar World may decide to abandon Earth 4 and everyone on it in the face of the possible destruction of Collar World itself!

It’s another exciting alternate world adventure that will keep you riveted as lives and the fates of worlds hang in the balance, as well as the fate of one innocent native American.

This 75,000 word novel is part of the Incel World series that began with “The Visitor from Incel World” and continues with “The Love Invasion” and this novel.