Why Did I Write A Parody of the EarthCent Ambassador Series?

So, my new novelette, "Late Nights At Onion Station" is a parody of the EarthCent Ambassador series by I.M. Foner.

I have not done any parodies before, though it's very clear I like humor and I read a LOT. Almost all of my stories have been completely original works, no fannish stuff among them. I have my own stories to tell, thankyewverymuch, and although I've taken some humorous jabs at this and that, I've never outright parodied anything.

And like most parodists, I'm a fan of what I'm parodying. I've read and enjoyed the entire EarthCent Ambassador series. But the definition of “parody” explains why I did it: “a parody targets or mimics an original work to make a point.” And I wrote “Late Nights At Onion Station” to make a point about something that bothered me about the original work: its libertarianism. I'm more of a socialist.

The libertarianism in the Earthcent Ambassador series is very subtle, well buried in the story. But once you see it, you can't unsee it: the EarthCent Ambassador series is a pure libertarian fantasy at heart. There are little clues: the protagonist, despite being the chief representative of humans on Union Station, is paid very little money, so little that she lives in a slummy area of the human sector of Union Station and has to save up money to buy a comfy chair.

Why is she paid so little despite her important government position? Because she's a government official, of course, and government is not important in libertarian fantasy land. While the protagonist of Union Station makes so little money that the food at diplomatic receptions is an important part of her diet, all her friends and acquaintances who are independent businesspeople make huge amounts of money from their activities. They can't do anything at all without making huge piles of money. Because they're independent entrepreneurs, you see: the good guys.

As a socialist, this was annoying, but what was REALLY annoying was the usual libertarian obliviousness to the fate of those who don't work out well in his paradise. This is in fact my major problem with libertarianism in general: their focus is always on those who succeed in libertarian society, with a general feeling that almost anyone can succeed if you put forth a little effort, gosh darn it!

Most libertarians, in fact, have little or no interest in what happens to those who don't do well in their libertarian fantasy. Often you get a sense that they would be fine with people who aren't good bargainers in the free and open markets starving to death and dying, that they would happily kick their bodies aside on their way to the bank.

You can see this by the way libertarian authors focus on the successes in their stories and ignore the losers. The successful entrepreneurs who make scads of money and get loads of power in their lives are the FUN part of the libertarian fantasy. Of course that's who gets all the attention in a libertarian story.

But if you don't pay attention to what happens to all the other people in your society, you're basically building a hell on Earth, and honestly, that's what I think most libertarians are doing. They don't WANT to create a hell on Earth, any more than the original Communists wanted to create the Soviet Union from Imperial Russia, but as the Soviet Union demonstrated (and China) if you're at all sloppy in thinking about how you get to your paradise, you can so very, very easily wind up with a dictatorship or an oligarchy that commits crimes against humanity without so much as blinking.

And libertarians are even worse than Communists in this respect. They really, really don't want to deal seriously with the hard part of their fantasy, which is how do you handle the people who don't do so well in the free and open marketplace? The phrase “ideological blinders” was invented for this phenomenon. Libertarians are like architects who want to build a skyscraper that will truly scrape the clouds, but have little or no interest in building a solid foundation.

The problem is, when you look at any group of human beings statistically, for almost any set of abilities and skills, including success in business, if you graph the results it forms a bell curve, with the bulk of people falling in the middle of the curve, and a considerable portion (half, even!) falling on the wrong side of the halfway mark. That being the case, you need to ensure that your system, whatever it is, provides a decent standard of living to the people who fall on that wrong side, not just the lucky winners.

Just assuming that everyone will magically be above average in a libertarian scheme is ridiculous, but a lot of libertarians do just that.

I think the reason that libertarians aren't willing to address the “ground floor” issues is that it may require making an exception to their rule that every problem can be solved by the invisible hand of an unfettered marketplace.

It might require some crude actions like taxing the very rich and successful (the beneficiaries of the invisible hand) at higher rates to fund housing, food and medical care for the poor. It might require, in short, some form of socialism.

It's time to call the belief that the invisible hand of the marketplace can solve all social problems and allow people to live free of government of any kind what it is: magical thinking.

And that's what really bugs me about libertarians, that they let this magical thinking fuck them up time and time again, because you know, if they took the time and effort to work out how a libertarian society could help the losers in the marketplace, they might just have a robust ideology that could compete successfully with democratic socialism.

But they can't, they won't and they don't, and so they remain a fringe, though a markedly more successful fringe than their ideology deserves, because many parts of it (the economic parts) dovetail very nicely with traditional conservatism.

And so you have many, many science fiction books written with this profoundly dumb, magical thinking, wish fulfillment hoo-ha presented as a wonderful basis for a society to exist on.

I found a very nice way to dramatize the problems with libertarianism in the story. I also manage to point out how adherence to libertarian principles makes one inherently blind to the suffering of others. And I ramped it all up to 11, to make it funny. And by damn, it IS funny. Some of the best humor comes from annoyance. I hope you enjoy it.

Somebody Has Written A Parody of "Date Night On Union Station" and I'm Pretty Sure It Was Me

Click here to go to Amazon. Free on Kindle Unlimited!

If you LOVED Date Night On Union Station (Book 1 of the EarthCent Ambassador series) you'll LOVE Late Nights On Onion Station the sexy, sexy parody of "Date Night on Union Station" written by the infamous Pat Powers, author of Crazy Aunts and Scary Uncles and Jenkie Jenkins, Interstellar Sex Reporter.

Onion Station lies in the outermost reaches of human-explored space, a gigantic artifact created by the alien Zuks, artificial intelligences that are so badly programmed that they are extreme libertarians. They run Onion Station with a fine disregard for safety, comfort and well-being of the various alien species that dwell in their station, including the humans.

But it's the beings who live in Onion Station that make it the unique, exciting and strange place that it is, and when the Earth Ambassador to Onion Station starts dating an actual human man (much to her mother's relief) everything changes on Onion Station. This simple act of dating will bring together a fascinating group of characters:

Kitty Reinhardt, the human ambassador to Onion Station, is totally dedicated to her work. She earns the 25 cents an hour that the tight-fisted Zuks pay her the hard way, i.e., attending diplomatic receptions and helping Earth firms negotiate trade deals with the many other alien races in Zuk space. She's proud of what she does for humans in her role as ambassador (but it is too bad about the starving people who die regularly in the lower corridors of the human sector of Onion Station). But it's her relationship with her more than just comfortable chair that is a source of deep shame to her, even though she's not at all guilty about her taste for kinky maledom/femsub bondage sex.

Mike Bonus, the trader with a heart of gold who buys the contracts of starving humans by the dozens on the cheap at Onion Station and sells them off to slave traders on crapsack worlds for a fat profit – and who is revered as a saint by the humans whose contracts he sells.

Kitty Reinhardt's chair, which seems sentient to Kitty, given that it converses with her and does things to her that previously were confined to safely nonsentient machines like vibrators -- but which the Zuks SWEAR is not sentient.

The Sisters of Mercy, who rescue starving humans crawling through the mean corridors of Union Station ... but whom many starvelings would describe as anything BUT merciful.

Dweezil the Dreddarian, a six-limbed otterlike alien with a sharp eye for info-trading and a very commercial approach to friendship.

The Fringe, treelike aliens who have a taste for Earth epiphytes to hang in their canopies.

And the Zuks, the artificial intelligences who run Onion Station and live in fear of the massive artificial intelligence that runs the station itself, because it's definitely one of your more godlike artificial intelligences, and it's just as benevolent as the Zuks who created it.

But most of all, you'll have fun, and lots of it, as a favorite series is parodied senseless by someone who has read and enjoyed every book in the series.

What can I say, I'm a sucker for space opera!

So go ahead, dig in already. And if you have not read "Date Night on Union Station" go ahead, get over there, dig in, you'll enjoy it! The whole series is on Kindle Unlimited! It's sexless, but it's fun. And "Late Nights On Onion Station" well, it provides all the kinky sex an adult mind needs to ... adult ... and it's ALSO on Kindle Unlimited!

Two Great Books About Feminists On Alternate Worlds

So, I noticed that Annalee Newitz, one of the founders of IO9, has written a science fiction novel about feminists engaged in a war with misogynists over control of their timeline. Feminists on alternate worlds, gee, sounds familiar ... wonder where I've encountered that before? Oh, right, I just wrote a book with the exact same theme (though a very different approach).

Of course, Annalee Newitz is someone with a little name recognition, and her book is being published by a traditional publisher with all sorts of marketing clout, whereas I am an unknown outside a circle of deeply disturbed fans (Go, fans!) an indie publisher whose only marketing clout is his wits, which is to say, virtually none.

So I decided to emulate traditional publishers and hitch my wagon to a star! (I mean, really, I don't know HOW many publishers announced that THEIR darling's latest magnum opus romance with just barely enough kink to it to even be noticeable was "The Next Fifty Shades of Gray." But I know it was practically all of them.)

So here's my latest publicity effort for my books. Note that I am promoting Newitz's book, too. Just bein' a stand-up guy:

Have you read The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz? (Sadly, not available on KU) It's about a group of brave feminists at war misognyists to control their timeline, protecting womankind from a future that makes “The Handmaid's Tale” look like a picnic.

Want another book about feminists on alternate worlds? Try The Visitor From Incel World by Barry Anderson, which is totally available on KU!

Thanks to Barry Anderson, you don't have to wait for Ms. Newitz to get around to writing a sequel. In “The Visitor From Incel World,” Ariana Heppelwhite, a gender studies grad student at Lacy Swanson Women's College, is caught in the aftermath of a physics experiment gone wrong and catapulted into another world, which she names Collar World because all the women in it run around naked except for their collars. And their cuffs. And their shackles.

Ariana finds this an alarming sort of world, and a confusing world. And the inhabitants feel the same way about her, with her tales of crazed incel rapist wannabes everywhere and child armies and constant warfare and sex and money being intertwined. Earth, which they named Incel World in honor of its bizarre sexual practices, frightens them. They fear invasion by the barbaric hordes of Incel World, and some of them, being very logical, decide that they should kill Ariana so she can't return to Incel World and tell them about Collar World!

Will Ariana survive? Can she change Collar World by teaching the women of Collar World how great it is to be equals with men in all things? And what about the surprisingly appealing incel (a phrase she ever expected to use) she met back in Bayport?

Only one way to find out: get the book … it's free on Kindle Unlimited. And if you haven't read “The Future of Another Timeline by Newitz, get it, too. You can't have too much mind-bending SF.

Enjoy my story "The Night That Christmas Got Real" now free on Amazon through Dec 25. And Merry Christmas!

Hot freebie, coming up! Here's the Amazon USA link! And if you're outside the USA, here's a link to all the Amazon stores in the world!

Da blurb:

Simiyuki Simmons was an Asian-American who was a long way away from her country of origin, culturally and personally. She thought of herself as an all-American California girl. But she also longed to be the right guy's hentai heroine, doing all sorts of kinky, sexy things while totally under his control. Unfortunately, there were an awful lot of wrong guys out there. She had never met one that even came close to being the right one.

Joe Culpepper was a gamer, leading a lonely and impoverished life as an auto parts picker. He was a large, powerfully built man, but was still very shy around women. What if he spoke the truth of his heart to them, that he wanted to dominate them in bed and make them do all sorts of deliciously sexy things? They might think he was pervert. And he wasn't a pervert. He was just kinky.

Christmas magic will have its way with these two, and help them learn that love and trust are the true sources of Christmas joy, in a way that will warm more than their hearts.

This story is 13,500 words long.

Creating the Cover For "Tiny, Big" -- Yes, you, too, can create bad cover art

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

"Tiny, Big" An Erotic Fantasy Novella, Is Available on Amazon

(All the links in this post are NSFW to one degree or another. Don't say you weren't warned.)

International Bookstore link to “Tiny, Big”

Amazon Bookstore link to “Tiny, Big”

I'm very proud of the opening line to my new novella “Tiny, Big.” It is “Why would I want my arms and legs cut off? That seems a bit extreme even for me.”

If that doesn't make you want to turn the page, nothing will.

Never fear gentle reader no legs and arms were harmed and the creation of the story. As is often the case with all great works of literature this story was inspired by a porn photo. You can see the photo by following this link. The actresses involved are 5 foot tall Penny Pax and 5 foot 11 inch Dylan Ryan. The image is clearly created to appeal to fans of lesbian macrophilia and microphilia, along with fans of lesbian bondage, lesbian sex, and general perversion.

(Sound of a record scratch)

Wait … what? “What are macrophilia and microphilia?” you almost certainly may ask.

Macrophilia is being sexually attracted to someone who is very tall. Microphilia is being sexually attracted to someone who is very short. Interestingly, there does not appear to be any term for finding images of very large and very short women having sex appealing.

But there is a subreddit for it named http://www.reddit.com/r/samespecies. Wouldn't you know it, a subreddit would exists for a perversion long before it even had a name? r/samespecies is full of images of very short and very tall women standing next to one another, generally just smiling at a camera, sometimes nude, more often clothed, though there ARE occasionally pics of naked women of different size having sex.

I've found that the Your Fantasies Unlimited format works very well with porn images to create short porn stories and novellas. And I'd like to claim that the Dylan Ryan/Penny Pax image alone was responsible for the plot of “Tiny, Big.” And it is a very evocative image, especially expressions on Penny and Dylan's faces – they really know how to act bondage.

But I have to admit, I had another source of inspiration, the work of the Swedish artist known only on Grigbertz. Here's his website with lots of drawings.  Grigbertz's stories almost always have a theme of short women, often elfin and ALWAYS naked and in bondage, generally with a mythical medieval background. Here's a very nice example of Grigbertz's artwork that fits what I've described.

In one of Grigbertz's storylines, women who don't reach a certain height by age 18 (or whatever the age of consent in Sweden is) are enslaved. The women are standard Grigbertz tinies, and they are enslaved by taller men and women, who molest them, much to everyone's great pleasure, including the tinies.

Well say no more. I didn't exactly copy Grigbertz's mythology, because what fun would that be? And in Grigbertz's case, it would be hard because his text is fragmentary and not well developed, based on what I've seen. Being a writer, I tend more toward text, for whatever reason. And I work out my ideas in greater detail. But Grigbertz's skill in communicating his fantasies with a few pencil lines is not to be ignored.

You can read my precis of my story on my Amazon page, but I have to filter it very heavily for Amazon's sake, plus I have to keep it brief. Here's the full story:

In the magical land of Corliandra, human beings are divided into three different body types: Tinies, three to four feet tall, averaging 3'6”, Normies who run five to 6 and a half feet tall, in short, human beings as we know them on Earth, for the most part, and Bigs, who grow to eight to nine feet tall, averaging eight and a half feet tall. Tinies, Normies and Bigs are not distinct species at all, they can interbreed. Tiny mothers can have Big children, Big mothers can have Tiny children, and the same with Normies. It's just a matter of which genes are dominant, with about one in five humans being Tinies, one in five being Bigs, and three in five being Normies.

All three groups get along together fine, because of the interbreeding. Most families are a mix of Tinies, Normie's and Bigs to one extent or another, especially large families.

This, the protagonist Laura is a Tiny, has a Normie brother, a Tiny mother and a Big father. And the protagonist Gina is a Big, with a Normie brother (just a coincidence) and a Big father and a Tiny mother. Both families are happy and healthy and love one another (though Normie brothers can be annoying, whether you are a Big or a Little).

The fact that both Laura and Gina have Tiny mothers and Big fathers is not coincidence: by tradition from time immemorial, Bigs sexually enslave Tinies when they turn 18. It's not an ironclad thing: sometimes Tinies enslave Bigs and sometimes Normies enslave Bigs, etc. etc. But mostly Bigs enslave Tinies, because that's how most Corliandrans are wired. Literally, they are magically/instinctively compelled to do these things, and to love one another afterward. (God, fantasy makes character-building easy. Why do they do it? Magic!)

The excitement of the action in Corliandra depends on Laura and Gina's relationship, what kind of fun sexual things they get up to and how they respond to them. But there's also the Your Fantasies Unlimited action in the real world. It turns out that things that happen in the fantasy world of Corliandra have some effect in the real world, and gives me some fun playing off my real-world characters against their fantasy world counterparts.

I guess what I'm saying is, get this book, or rent it using Kindle Unlimited (for free, in essence). It's one of my best works ever.

In future posts, I want to talk about how the cover was built, and I also want to talk about how I cast the characters to give them their voice and look. In the meantime, here's da blurb:

Laura was by all accounts the feistiest and talkiest Tiny in her village in the magical land of Corliandra. (But she wasn't the tallest, she was just an average Tiny at 3'6” tall.) And Laura was SURE she would never turn into a simpering love slave like most of the other Tinies did when they turned 18. She would never fall for some beautiful nine foot tall Big, because being a Big's love slave was so wrong, even if everyone else, including her Tiny mother and Big father, assured her that it was so very, very right.

But Tinies, Normies and Bigs all wanted Laura as their love slave, because she had a curvaceous body that along with her passionate personality, set lust lights glimmering in their eyes.

Gina was a Big at 8'6” tall, and she was the most accomplished huntress and archer in the village, and also quite beautiful. She loved to listen to Laura talk (Laura was a great and frequent public speaker). She dreamed of the day she would collar Laura and listen to her talk for hours, generally after Laura had used her tongue in other ways. And unknown to Gina, Laura had eyes for her, perhaps because of the grace with which Gina moved, or her knowing half smile that hinted at a tantalizing world inside Gina's shy exterior.

When Gina makes her move on Laura after she turns 18, Laura discovers the magic of love. Finally, Laura know the joys of being a Tiny love slave, and Gina knows the joys of having a Tiny love slave. And these discoveries may Somehow lead Laura and Gina into a whole new world of erotic possibility, of lesbian bondage, public nudity, erotic dance and bondage orgies, which may Change Everything – even in the real world outside Corliandra!

This novelette is just over 21,000 words long, and is Book Two in the “Your Fantasies Unlimited” series.

WARNING: This books is infested with humor, has a pleasant and fun approach to sex and sexuality, and contains graphic sexual content of the sort that those who enjoy graphic sexual content will enjoy. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!

A New Short Story From Pat Powers: "So This Is My Life Now ..." Femdom/femsub a go-go and do you know real real from virtual real? Because I have NO idea what I'm doing here ...

Click here to buy the book while you still have some grasp of reality!

I have started outlining my novels, though the outline tends to get fairly worked over by my subconscious as I write. But when I write novellas and short stories, I'm still a seat-of-the-pants writer, which means that often, I have no idea WHAT the fuck I'm doing. I just sit down with an idea, start banging things out, and see what happens.

The amazing thing is, I think my subconscious is a better writer than my conscious mind is, and it has PLANS. Plans I have no idea of!

Take my latest story, “So This Is My Life Now ...” It was inspired by porn. Really. It was inspired by this particular porn image. (Which, being a porn image, is NSFW.) The idea was to use a striking bondage image to create a story. And I looked at it, and my mind did as it sometimes does when it sees a striking bondage image, and it created a backstory for this video (which is, in full, about a cop who gets the tables turned on her and becomes a lesbian mistress' slavegirl).

The Mistress' outfit looks kinda like a uniform, so I immediately had an idea: the Mistress is a rebel warrior and the submissive is the cop who got the tables turned, just like the video. I had a vision of the Mistress fucking the slavegirl on the table as in the video, smirking merrily, with people walking by, making the submissive feel so humiliated, with her huge tits squished against the table and her round ass hanging over the edge, tied down and gagged … oh, it was nice.

So then I start writing, and I start writing about a skinny corporate executive buying an implant that gives you dreams that are experienced like real life, from a snarky, class-conscious, non-sentient salesbot.

What the fuck? Where the hell did that come from? I have no idea. But I keep writing because I kinda wanna know. And because, while on a few occasions when something like this happens, it's gone nowhere, most of the time I come up with a better story than I anticipated.

And damned if this wasn't what happened here, because this story turned out to ask the question, “What if your fantasies were better than real life in every respect?” It dealt with the nature of dreams and reality, how they are experienced and how they affect you. The story got into the erotica very fast, in fact, almost all of this story is erotica, with tons of lesbian domination and submission and public sex, nudity, bondage and humiliation – all the good stuff. Stuff that's better than real life ...

Check out the blurb below:

June Jetson was just an ordinary executive, single and married to her job in a time when jobs were becoming increasingly scarce. Head of a corporate human relations department, she discovers that many of her company's lower tier employees are unaccountably happy. They shouldn't be happy: her corporation, like most, is cutting wages and extending hours for the ever-shrinking pool of employees it hasn't yet fired.

So what makes these wretches so happy? A bit of research leads June to discover that her happier employees are all customers of companies like Your Fantasies Unlimited. June decides to conduct some personal research, and life gets very strange when she discovers Mistress Suzy, a Lesbian Janissary of the Thongan Resistance, a dominant warrior woman who knows exactly how to make submissive June bend to her every whim.

What will happen to June? Can she cling to her rung on the ever more precarious corporate ladder when she discovers an erotic fantasy world that is so much better, so much more fulfilling, more thrilling, and just as real, as her “real life?”

“So This Is My Life Now” is mostly erotica. But it's also science fiction. And it's social commentary. All bundled into one juicy story that will grab you by the genitals and fling you in to the future!

“So This Is My Life Now” is also just over  10,000 words long and part of the Basic universe. Enjoy!