I really think I hit it out of the park on this one. In the Politically Sexy comments I explain exactly what sort of scenes I as able to write, in a way I couldn't here or on Amazon's promotional pages. (Amazon has all sorts of insane rules about what you can and can't say about your books to promote them. Amazon LURVEs the money they make from erotica writers but feel they have to mess with erotica writers to keep the prudes at bay.)
Anyway, read the Politically Sexy blog to get the straight stuff, but there is one aspect of the book, a very important one, that I can talk about here, and that's the world-building I did to add richness and depth to my stories. I know that for many erotica readers plot and background are a hindrance to the raunchy stuff they read for, and nothing more. But I think plot and background can add a LOT to a raunchy story and not get in the way of the good stuff, if it's handled right. And world-building helps a lot in that respect.
I've posited a future in which automation and robots take over the job market worldwide at an ever-increasing rate, following on the ideas of Marshall Brain. This leads ultimately to a worldwide global depression because the unemployed are no longer able to buy things and the consumer economies collapse. The One Percent, who have been to say the least, disinterested in the plight of the unemployed, are suddenly up in arms when their corporate profits start plummeting. Corporate oligarchs by this time pretty much control the US government as well as most other Third World nations. The oligarchs turn to Basic Income, an allowance given to every citizen of a country just for being a citizen, no qualifying beyond that as the solution to their problem.
The idea, from the oligarch's point of view, is to make consumers of the unemployed, which they have by now realized will ultimately be 90 percent of the population. Basic Income will give the 90 percent money to spend on nicer clothes, boats, guns, toys, computers, all the products that make corporations rich, and which poor people can't afford. Basic Income has to be generous enough to let everyone live a comfortable middle class lifestyle, not because the oligarchs have the slightest interest in whether or not the 90 percent are comfortable, but because they want the peasantry (i.e., the 90 percent) to be spending that Basic Income on the products and services their corporations provide, keeping them profitable and themselves rich.
(How does it all get paid for? Basically, it's a tax on the automation and robotics that have replaced human laborers. Productivity has gone nowhere but up thanks to automation, even with all the unemployment. In fact, this represents the arrival of the post-scarcity society, which in my opinion, we are already on the outer fringes of.)
The implementation of Basic Income is not an easy or painless process, there is much human suffering that occurs in the process. “Doin' Time In The Blue Shadows” shows an example. As the economy collapses, more people are forced into illegal and semi-illegal trades: robbery, kidnapping, drugs, smuggling and prostitution all go through the roof as people desperately try to support themselves in a collapsing economy The protagonist is a woman who was once a pharmaceutical salesperson who got automated out of a job while her husband got out of his middle-management job at the same time, and turned her good looks from peddling pills to prostitution, about the only job prospect for her as she is basically a peaceful person and not inclined to kidnap or rob people. She winds up in jail, ironically now prostituted by the goverment to pay for her upkeep as a prisoner. Only she gets no money for her "service."
The criminals and kidnappers at work are seen in “The Wrangler,” with Savannah, Georgia, cited as a relative safe haven for the rich from kidnapping, which has become a huge problem in the US in the story, as it now is in some Third World nations.
MacCammon's time comes near the end of the social ills, as the conservatives and libertarians who hate the whole Basic Income concept come up with a trick to delay its implementation: they convince people that the Great Recession is a product of all the moral decadence that has led to so much prostitution and porn. In other words, they convince people to confuse cause with effect. MacCammon is the figurehead of the movement, working with social conservatives and feminists to stamp out prostitution and porn which they see as victimizing women. The old and stupid, the biggest voting block, went for it wholesale, hence The Houmouth Series.
And of course, the United States is not the only country in the world. There are people in Europe and some Third World countries who adopt Basic Income easily and live in a post-scarcity society while Americans still struggle and suffer. There are people starving and dying in some Third World countries who only adopt Basic Income when they are literally forced into it by their neighbors, who are sick of massive immigration from the countries that don't have it.
Of course all this is a huge block of exposition that would slow a plot to a crawl, not to mention your average sexual interlude, if you tried to introduce it all at once. But if you build the world in advance and slip it in as the story progresses, it hardly makes a ripple as it makes the story richer and deeper, and suggests all sorts of nice details and scenes that drive the plot. Corporations grown powerful enough to control governments plus legalized slavery or de facto slavery as people become desperate enough to do anything for money equals corporate slave kennels, as seen in Slave Girl President, Billionaire's Toy. Easy as pie.
Do I think this IS the future? No. Do I think it COULD be the future? Yes. Do I think it's LIKELY to be the future? God, I hope not. But the advances in automation and robotics that could lead to widespread unemployment are happening now, and nothing is more predictable than that they will cause more and more unemployment as they improve. How that will play out, and how far it goes, and how fast it happens are slippery things to predict, but plenty scary enough for the needs of mere erotica writers, and slipperiness helps as well … gives me a flexible base for my stories, as well as a strong one.
World-building … it's not just for interstellar science fiction any more! Now in Erotica!
A wholesome image to start things off. Note grazing cows! It don't get no more peaceful, bucolic and wholesome than that! This is not a painting, by the way, it's an image of the now-defunct Second Life sim Tyr's Fist Stronghold, which unlike a painting, is also a place you can move around in and visit. Take that, bucolic paintings!