Best Erotic Fantasy & Science Fiction by Cecilia Tan

Some women find him and pimp him out, and he comes to accept it because they take care of him when no one else will. There’s been a war, and the protagonist was injured and left mostly paralyzed on the streets.

“Now I Live on the Street of Women” by Jason Rubis – This one has a post-apocalyptic feel to it. Some obvious metaphors going on, and it made me feel as if the protagonist was mentally unbalanced rather than in a story with fantasy elements, but still interesting. “Fulgurite” by Vylar Kaftan – A college-aged virgin makes the decision to have sex with her boyfriend after a unicorn-cockroach vision tells her that she will be struck by lightning that day. It’s imaginative, and Lonsdale perfectly captures the personality of an eccentric and tormented artist and juxtaposes it with the digital world. I enjoyed this one a lot, and I felt that the world that the author describes is a logical continuation of our own (and I’m basing this in part on my own observations from when I decided to briefly check out Second Life a few years back… for every artist/company/visionary creating stuff, there are at least a handful of people seeking to use new technology to fulfill formerly impossible fetishes).

She has an affair with a man with a fetish for flowers. “Vaster Than Empires” by Allison Lonsdale – This is the story of a woman who is a creative and slightly crazy virtual reality artist. There’s not much that I can say about the book as a whole, so here’s a brief look at each of the stories that it contains: The idea of mixing erotica with SF/F appeals to me because it means that authors have stepped outside of the rules of our own universe to create something new and imaginative, and each story is inherently a part of a larger world. I’m not the type of person who is turned off by adult content in stories, but I do expect there to be some measure of a story and not just sex, otherwise I get bored rather quickly and go back to reading about dragons and robots and space pirates instead. I don’t normally read a lot of erotica, but this title caught my eye while I was at BEA.

Best Erotic Fantasy & Science Fiction by Cecilia Tan