My newest book Wetware: Cyberpunk Erotica is a labor of love — from myself, and all the authors I worked with to create the collection. To share with you what’s in it, I’ve included the introduction in its entirety — a full free chapter — in this post, below. I hope you like it.
Wetware was was meant to be more than an erotica collection, but also a commentary on the state of cyberpunk culture today. And according to the reviews, the book is more successful in this goal. In fact, the reviews are blowing my mind, so I have to share a few choice snippets with you before you dig in.
Best erotica collection of 2015: Simply put, Blue’s collection is one of the best erotica anthologies I’ve had the pleasure of reading. Gorgeous prose, from Blue’s intro on cyberpunk lit to each erotic story. These stories blur the lines of gender, of sexuality, and of what it means to be human. –Rebecca
Over too soon: Everything was hot, the plots underneath them all varied more than I’d imagined, and the small bits of cyberpunk culture recommendations in between worked wonderfully as transitions. This is the level of substance I want to read in more erotica collections. The lack of any stories that made me cringe or skim through only adds to it. The one time I thought a story would be gross is the time my expectations got tossed on their head. Wetware is simply fantastic. –Ken F
The Future Cannot Come Soon Enough: Each story presents a different version of the future; universes where technology and discovery are seamlessly coupled (pun intended) with unabashed sexuality. The sex is raw, often rough; the characters are needy, hungry, vibrant…real. The collection offers variety in voices, settings, and couplings, all the while maintaining the uniform sterling quality of writing.
I would have a hard time picking a favourite story: I enjoyed the flawless integration of the world building in Sixty Five Night, the twist in Never Say No, and the insight of Synthetic Skin. The prologue, an essay on cyberpunk and sexuality by Violet Blue herself, is not to be missed. –TheJulia
And with that, here’s the first chapter of Wetware:
BY VIOLET BLUE
Cyberpunk sexuality is revolutionary. It always has been, and always will be — this is one of its most threatening, exciting, and arousing aspects. And yet, cyberpunk is so very different than it was a decade ago.
“High tech, low life” is cyberpunk’s front-facing motto. It used to suggest an underclass — in station, gender, sexuality, skin color, ability, or circumstance — a snapshot of the possibility of hacked tech (or biotech) facilitating change, vis a vis the protagonist hacker’s complicated gifts. Contemporarily, the slogan conjures visions of rich corporate tech assholes slumming it in Bay Area dive bars, wearing hoodies that read “hacker” — while there’s not an ounce of punk in them, and their distinct interest is in preserving the financial and moral status quo.
As you’ll see in this collection of erotic short fiction, cyberpunk has changed, and its dystopia has assimilated the hypocrites, the privileged and the assholes. Tech didn’t empower us to even the stakes, it just gave us a window with which to watch Neuromancer, Blade Runner, and The Matrix come true. And new cyberpunk erotica embraces our recalibrated urge to smash the state. Or as Thomas S. Roche puts it in Bishop to King’s Pawn, Two: “The war machine is a fog machine, it always had been.”
A story, interestingly, where love is a side effect of stolen weaponized biotech:
Behind Winged Victory, he was chatting with either Arkady Bougarin or Jovan Stijovic. The latter’s company, SerbArms, manufactured the new Celikkrik, or “Steel Scream.” Did that handshake mean a shipment of ultrasound cannons would be loaded onto an Antonov bound for Athens first thing in the morning?
Bishop put her eyes on him with such intensity that he couldn’t help but notice. That was one of the things these ex-spooks brought with them into their tenure in the shadow government: Peripheral vision that preceded on intuition. Bishop had it in spades, too, though she’d gained it in different environs.
Bishop gave him a subtle smirk, her eyes emitting a knowing glow. Jesus, she loved him. She loved him so much she could feel it like a volt from her brain stem to her stomach, which flipped with the realization, and sent the current to her pussy, which warmed and juiced simultaneously. This was definitely something fucking new for Bishop. She wanted to fuck him right now, with everyone watching.
She practically did. He saw her. She eyefucked him. He eyefucked back. Fuck, fuck, fuck, she was so in love with this fucker that it hurt to look at him.
—Thomas S. Roche, “Bishop to King’s Pawn, Two”
Like more than a few people, cyberpunk fiction was where I finally reconciled with feeling like an outsider in my own body. Beyond its pivotal fantasies of transhumanism, cyberpunk’s sexuality embraced the gender spectrum in a way that actually felt like it could make sense: Individuated.
By the time Snow Crash came out, we were all beyond buying what we were told was “right” and “wrong” about sex, and love, and gender. We knew it was a trick to maintain gender roles and economics, a means of control that would soon cease to make sense. Cyberpunk, when at its best, embraced this. Here, binary belongs to code, not gender, and while it’s arousing to watch Trinity and Neo fuck, it’s great cyberpunk because it’s describing something hot — not prescribing gender, desire or behavior.
Neve sighed.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.”
She smiled at the joke, but it made me cold inside. Not just because of the obvious cultural echo, but because Neve has never been allowed to call me by name. Even when Olivia and I had first purchased her, I was always “Master.” It took on a new and deviant meaning once I had started to play with her privately, when Olivia wasn’t around. But when Olivia left, that’s when I’d truly become Neve’s Master.
My eyes bugged out.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I said I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t let you out of the apartment. Not until after I’ve taught you a lesson or two.”
–Devyn X. Sands, “Never Say No”
This isn’t a typical erotica collection, nor is it a typical fiction anthology. It can’t be. Cyberpunk must remain true to itself, for that is its ethos and heart, and so it must also be about culture as much as techno-wank. This book has hot sex in it, yes. It’s cyberpunk genre fiction, yes; it relies on technology or biotechnology to tell its edgy stories.
But each story is bookended with an interstitial that brings you back to cyberpunk culture, and the things that make those of us who grew up there who we are today, in a wholly celebratory way: little cheers for our cultures and our sexualities, for they are most certainly and wonderfully entwined.
The systems still suck, and our complicated gifts don’t make anything easy, but we deserve pleasure where we can find it.
Casey made his way past a table of Annex guys. There was Jack Newton. His face was pink with a half-dozen drinks or more. He checked Casey out with blatantly non-professional interest.
Casey had not expected anyone to recognize the suit; if they had, then it wouldn’t be much of a damned exfil suit, would it? But everything had been tense as hell at the Annex since those Code Safety activists attempted a backdoor into the Hardware Dev Team’s system a few weeks ago.
Ironically enough, it was Casey’s clean-up of the incursion path that got him the opportunity to falsify the sign-out log and get the Mark V out of the equipment locker. He had the Code Safety crew to thank for his walking into the Smith & Jones bar and seeing Jack Newton and Mike Stanley both damn near pop boners when they caught sight of him.
Casey breathed easier. Newton and Stanley led the Annex’s FBI counter-terrorism liaison team, on TDY from the J. Edgar Hoover building in downtown DC. Sitting with them were Andy Korowski and Mark Blunt, two on-site Annex security contractors. It was Andy who always gave Casey shit when he wanted to prop open the door to third-floor south so Casey didn’t have to ring Andy’s cell for an “exfil” when he was done taking a shit. Andy didn’t spot the suit, either. Ironic, wasn’t it?
Andy and Mark checked him out, too. Those weren’t the looks of Q-Clearance guys spotting their tech on the run; those were guys lusting after a hot blonde piece of ass twenty years their junior.
Casey felt a warm glow. His tension lightened. He rabbited for the back room, trying to look like he wasn’t rabbiting.
—Kendra Jarry, “Synthetic Skin”
This book’s stories reflect the current places that sex and cyberpunk have found themselves in, and that, to me as an editor, was a really interesting thing to discover. Like many who felt that cyberpunk fiction and films spoke directly to their experience, the old-school brand of hard, noir, transgressive, anti-hero fiction was a thing that made sense to me. I grew up in San Francisco; my biological mother was the only blood relation I knew for any length of time, and she was a Stanford engineering grad who was supervising military contract work in Silicon Valley by the time I was nine.
She was a single mom, and also a drug addict whose life spiraled out of control, partying with game designers and hackers (who must be in coder retirement homes by now). I wasn’t allowed friends my own age, so spent my time with her friends and boyfriends, whose computers, magazines and book collections gave me escape into green DOS screens, games and sci-fi.
Things got really bad, and I ran away at 14 to live on the streets with gutter punks my age, whose home lives made mine look like a cakewalk. There, sexuality was fluid and respect was earned. I emerged having replaced my only family member with punk street values—to then find a natural fit with the freaks, phreaks, hackers, career criminals, and evil geniuses at Survival Research Laboratories, my home for over a decade.
It was developing tech, of course. Nate emphasized that there was no quality control.
Protective measures, Nate had cautioned her, must be taken. Don’t give your connectome-reconstruct Marcus control over anything dangerous. Precautions, precautions, precautions.
Amira took none.
A week after she first booted her new Marcus, she visited the Elective suite on Twenty-Two Medical. She went for the whole suite of Skinteractives. Nipples, clit, labia, butt-cheeks, butthole, face, mouth, fingers, earlobes, toes… trachea, even. Everywhere they’d install them.
–Stephen Stavros, “Sixty-Five Night”
I saw many flavors of cyberpunk life as part of SRL, working almost daily at our San Francisco machine shop, and internationally, with the earned title of machine operator at our industrial machine art shows that were performed worldwide.
Many names familiar to cyberpunk (and punk) culture spent time with us. William S. Burroughs had a birthday party at our shop. Hunter S. Thompson slept on the couch (and had to have a flame thrower taken away from him on one occasion). Bruce Sterling fled during production of one of our shows, in what we all joked was abject terror from the loud, drunken butch-dyke lesbian sex that happened on the cot next to him late one night in an abandoned Phoenix warehouse (which we’d commandeered to sleep in). 2600 and Rotten crews (among many others) brought us “presents.” There are so many more stories like these, but you get the idea.
Some of them log out and run at this point. Not many, to be fair.
“Okay,” he says, his voice betraying strain. “This is a dream, right?” He’s tall, in the flesh, with nut-colored hair that sticks out at the front and a square face just starting to soften about the chin. He’s wearing a Heavy Metal T-shirt, but it’s nice and new and clean. No over-muscled warrior then, but attractive enough.
“Of course it is,” I answer soothingly, stroking his ballsack and feeling it tighten in my hand. I can see a room full of files and books and DVDs behind him. It looks like a domestic scriptorium. A study — yes, that’s the word. “Do you like it?” I ask.
“Uh. Yes.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes. My … everyone’s gone to bed.”
“What’s your real name, Curelion the Hallowed?”
“Joe,” he whispers. His eyes look glazed. I can see him groping at his crotch, but he can’t intercept my hands. He can only feel the effect they’re having, and it’s making him buck and bite his lip.
“Would you like to fuck me, Joe?”
—Janine Ashbless, “Grinding”
Cyberpunk is different now. It was already sophisticated both technologically and socially beyond what society could handle—and it reflected a real, living, breathing culture.
But it has lived to see itself become attainable and popularized, and this changes the whole conversation. All the things that cyberpunk hated are now more part of its worlds than ever. Things have become amazing, and tools of oppression (like gender and sexuality) are being upended — while at the same time something has gone terribly wrong with the way technology was supposed to empower us.
There, in the pale light, I saw her skin begin to blossom, on that single spot at the edge of her right buttock. To my sinking dismay, a drop of blood had appeared.
She sighed, moaned softly. I thought for a second she was going to laugh, but she didn’t.
Something was wrong.
I touched my fingertips to the place on her ass, lifted my hand and inspected the drop of her blood.
It was the wrong color, not quite red enough, too thin. I licked my finger and my mood darkened. I threw the whip down.
Grabbing her hair, then, pushing her head forward. I felt for the lump, knowing it was there. It only took me a minute to find it.
Madeline had engineered this. But why? I worked back the thin plastic covering buried in Coreen’s hair. She grew silent.
“Playing against the rules?” I asked as I exposed the tiny jack, and chuckled.
Coreen remained silent, then let out a faint spray of laughter. Her naked body shook with it.
I left her for a moment and returned with the necessary equipment.
—N.T. Morley, “Dangerous Circuitry”
It is our growing sense of things gone terribly wrong that gives the stories here their power, anchored in one of cyberpunk’s most defiant agents of change: the human sexual connection (even in this book, where the sex isn’t always with humans).
The title of this anthology, Wetware, was considered with express acknowledgement and cyber-nod to Rudy Rucker’s 1988 biopunk sci-fi novel of the same name, itself the middle of the Ware trilogy. Wetware as a genre in hacking indicated biological hacking, of which there is plenty of in the stories here.
The authors whose stories were selected for this collection have all been very patient with me, and deserve a special thank you for putting up with every maniacal edit I requested. I put myself in your seat, dear reader, and us pervy technoweenies are a demanding bunch. I hope you enjoy the selections here as much as I do.
Violet Blue
San Francisco
Find Wetware on Amazon, or buy it direct as a .pdf on Digita Publications.
