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

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!

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.