The Collar: Advanced Science Fiction Thinking

Some of my most advanced science fiction thinking has been on the topic of collars and collaring, for my Collar World series, which is six books long now, counting works in progress. Already published are “Stolen Collar, Stolen Heart,” a novel, “Collar Dread,” another novel, “Crazy Aunts and Scary Uncles,” a 38,000-word novelette, and “Campus Slut Run,” a 9000-word short story. In the works are “The Visitor from Incel World” (a completed novel, but in editing) and Conquest of Incel World, which I'm about 60,000 words into, but will likely run to 80,000 words or more.

You can find the Amazon links to buy them all at my International Bookstore site.

I've invested a lot into Collar World, but that's primarily because I did some world-building before I set pen to paper. One thing I gave a lot of thought to was the technology of collars.

Currently, collars are inert pieces of metal that are often beautifully designed for aesthetic and functional reasons, but in my Collar World series, they're much more than that.

 This slave collar looks like it could hide the guts of three or four cell phones inside it and still be plenty thick enough to be an effective restraint.

In Collar World, collars are filled with all sorts of tech wizardry. They have GPS locators so their wearers can't get lost, they function as cell phones and as credit cards. They can also record video and conversations. Basically, anything a cell phone can do, a collar can do.

 This collar could probably hide just one cell-phone-equvalent's worth of electronics but one is all that's needed.

The collar can be linked to a dedicated controller, a screen or a desktop controller via cord, bluetooth or wifi, depending.

I don't see why any of this tech isn't possible right now with present day tech. Of course, the collar would have to be a large, thick one, either a leather collar with pockets to hold the electronics or a large metal collar with a hollow interior to hold the electronics. A thin wire necklace collar wouldn't do, though I'm sure if tech collars became popular, Apple would design one.

This isn't completely original with me. [In Second Life they have virtual collars](https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/RE-Inked-Collar-RLV-ENGRAVABLE-MESH-LUX-Collection/10234401) that can do all this and more besides, restricting the wearer's sight, hearing and ability to move around in the game, and making their body assume poses whether the wearer likes it or not.

But real life collars that have most functions of a cell phone are, to my mind, definitely possible. Frankly I don't know why we haven't seen them for sale in the specialty websites yet. Well, I do have some guesses, mostly based on ignorance.

For example, I remember reading about the electronic fields created by cell phones was at one time a concern, that having the phones on one's body could lead to sterility, etc.  I don't recall anything ever coming of that, so it probably is not a big deal, but I don't KNOW if that's true. Could be some concerns with wearing a microwave/bluetooth/wifi emitter around your neck. I don't know. But the guys at scifi worldbuilding might.

There may also be cultural barriers. If collars as phones or credit cards for subs became a common thing, phone services might not be willing to carry collar phones, and/or banks might not be willing to process credit transactions from collars.

I don't know that that's the case, just guessing that there might be problems. Banks tend to separate themselves from the sexy.

There might also be physical stresses on the electronics in a collar, but ordinary cell phones have to endure a lot of stress too, and they mostly do all right. And frankly, I think a large metal collar would provide much better protection for the electronics within it than your average cell phone casing, and still keep its wearer securely attached to the bed/post/whatever.

Well, there you have it. Advanced collar tech for the busy sub on the go. Probably not feasible because people get so freaked out about sex in our current culture. But there's no TECHNICAL reason why they couldn't exist, that I know of.

I've also given a lot of advanced science fictional thought to how widely accepted collars for slavegirls (as on Collar World) might work. More on that later.

In the meantime, one of you builders of collars get out there and make my techno-collar visions come true.

The Visitor From Incel World: Questions for Beta Readers

I've had The Visitor from Incel World posted to Wattpad for about a week and I've had almost 50 reads. Yay!

And 0 feedback from beta readers. Boo!

In thinking about why this might be so, it occurred to me that it would be intelligent of me to have some specific questions for beta readers to answer. So I made up a list of eight questions. Well, each question has sub-questions, but I don't expect every beta reader to answer every question, they're mostly just to jog readers' memories and to let them know what information I'll find useful, and change the story for.

Here are those questions, and here's the link to "The Visitor from Incel World" in case you want to give it a read.

1. General impression -- was the book a fast read? Was it a slog? Did you like it? Was it a fun read or did it bore you? That kind of thing.
2. Pacing. Did some sections just zip along, while others were a slog? If so, which sections were a slog?
3. Plot: do you feel the story resolved itself nicely? Were any major plot points left hanging other than those that were obviously intentionally left hanging? (Writing the sequel right now!) Were there any cases of idiot plot, where the plot will only work if someone does something really stupid?
4. Characters -- were the characters appealing and interesting? Were they realistic? Did they do some things that were obviously stupid and/or out of character?
5. Setting -- Was Collar World interesting? Did you wind up wanting to know more about it? Did everything seem consistent?
6. Craftsmanship -- Were there enough spelling or grammar errors to annoy you or make some passages difficult to read? Were there any particularities of style, such as using “slavegirl” instead of “slave girl” that were an issue for you?
7. Humor -- were the parts that were supposed to be funny actually funny? Did the humor make you laugh or at least smile? Was it out of place in some scenes? Did it detract from the dramatic tension of the story?
8. Sex -- Collar World is a very different place, sexually, where everyone is kinky and has no problem with public nudity or public sex. I tried to keep it from being too “in your face” but I also wanted to give Ariana something to react to. I also wanted it to give an otherworldly feel to Collar World. Did you generally find this successful? Or unsuccessful? Were there any aspects of the sexiness that you liked/disliked?

Thanks for reading “The Visitor from Incel World.” I hope you enjoyed it, and thanks for any input you can provide. We all want better books out there, you might be the one whose comment makes a difference in this case.

Achieving Differentness That Has An Internal Logic Of Its Own

It seems like only yesterday t hat I asked readers of this blog or whatever the hell it is to think about what a society where women didn't get raped or sexually harassed any more often than they get eaten by alligators or sharks. And that's because it WAS only yesterday.

My feeling is that under such circumstances women would be a lot more open, relaxed and easygoing around men. That's because rape and sexual harassment wouldn't be a commonplace issue. Most women, even if they haven't been raped or sexually harassed, have close friends and/or relatives who have. They know it's out there, it can happen to them, very easily. That's why women are cautious around men in our culture, especially around men they don't know well. Women are always vetting men, because they HAVE to, for their own safety. Most men aren't inclined to rape or sexually harass women out of the blue, but enough men ARE inclined to do so, to cast a pall of suspicion on all the rest of men.

What if this were not the case, though? What if men simply were not interested in raping and sexually harassing women, in a society where birth control was safe, effective and readily available?

You know the answer, it's obvious. Women would be a lot more open and relaxed around men, more sexually open, too, and more sexually active. How open? It's hard to say, because nothing like this exists in any earth culture or subculture that I know of. Some subcultures are more sexually open than others – imagine the gulf of sexual expectations and experience between the child of a Hollywood movie star and the child of a poor Christian fundamentalist – but the widespread nature of sexual harassment and rape is like a wind that blows everywhere, no matter what the local weather.

I think though, that if women didn't have to worry about being assaulted, it would manifest itself at a very fundamental level, at the body language level. It would be kind of the way women act around their gay male friends, but with one important difference – there would always be the chance that she might wind up having sex with a straight male friend. The difference is, if she did, it would be consensual sex that she wanted, so a fun, positive experience.

Under these circumstances, straight women would think of straight men as being … like candy. A fun, good thing. The powerful effect of sexual desire would still be there to attract women to men as well. There would probably be a lot more of what we now call “promiscuity” but which would simply be normal sexual attraction acting in an atmosphere of safety and openness.

People from such a culture, if they were transplanted to Earth, would be noticeable. Their body language alone would give them away, without engaging in any promiscuous behavior at all.

Now let's think about the men from such a world. What would they be like? Suppose you knew, as a practical matter, that if you want to get laid you can do so easily, anytime, without spending a lot of money or going to a lot of effort. You could go out to a bar or nightclub and meet a woman who wanted to have sex as much as you did, one among many such women. How would that change things? How would you feel if a woman from our current world were to come along and just assume you were sex-starved and would rape her if you had the chance?

You'd feel insulted. Why would you rape this woman when you could fuck a woman who liked you and you liked, very easily? You're not some damn scummy rapist, you're a fun, sexy guy, all the girls you hang out with think so. You like women. Why would a woman assume such a thing about you? Yeah, it's insulting, makes you feel like less of man than you are. Your response to such a woman would probably be massive disinterest. Why would you want to put up with that shit?

Men from such a world would be noticeably different from Earth men, too. Much less … anxious, as it were.

So that's how I write the characters from Collar World. When Ariana Hufflepuff comes to Collar World and accuses people of wanting to rape her, there is much rolling of eyes. No one wants to have sex with her, much less rape her, because she's clearly got mental problems, from their point of view.

Thought experiments like this are what makes alternate world stories interesting to me. I try to create a real culture that has believable people in it that are just different from us, because their background is different from ours. That allows me to write stories that have punch, and that surprise readers with their differentness, but a differentness that somehow makes sense, that has an internal logic of its own. That's the goal, anyway.

Portraying Socially More Advanced Societies

Suppose you traveled forward in time and visited a future Earth where human society was more evolved than ours. What would such a society be like?

This question has been answered in books, movies and television shows set in the future, and the answer is very clear: people in more advanced societies wear togas, talk a lot but don't ever use contractions or slang, and view both violence and sex as animal behavior. In short, they're basically a Victorian Englishwoman's idea of ladies and gentlemen, dressed in togas.

In creating Collar World, I came up with a different answer, encapsulated by Ariana Hufflepuff's observation that she felt that she “had wandered into a summer camp that thought it was a city.”

Of course, she was on a college campus, which does have a summer camp feel compared to most urban environments, especially the older ones. People do a lot more walking and riding of bikes on college campuses. They're also more relaxed generally.

I suspect the cities of the future will be similarly more relaxed and casual. People will not be expressing social status through clothing, and will exist at a generally lower level of anxiety, because their societies will be healthier. They will not be worried about staying fed, clothed and sheltered, that would be something everyone gets for being human in a  post-scarcity society.

Women would be more relaxed around men, because rape, sexual harrassment and violence against women would be almost nonexistent. In “Conquest of Incel World” my Nero Wolfe character notes the way this difference between the women of Incel World (i.e., Earth) and Collar World: “When a man shows up, their assholes pucker up so tight you can hear it.” Whereas Moxie Maven, the Archie Goodwin character and a free-use girl, thinks men are “like candy.”

That's why the men of Earth are so attracted to the women of Collar World – the Collar World women have a much more friendly and open attitude toward men generally because they aren't worried about being attacked, sexually or otherwise, by them. Earth men are like the Victorian sailors who discovered the women of Polynesia would have sex with them without having to be raped, tricked, drugged, married or even given money … they liked men and sex! Of course they went wild for them, in many cases jumping ship and taking up life on the islands. They knew a good thing when they saw it. I mean, rum, sodomy and the lash are all right, but are no substitute for a healthy sex life, especially if you are on the receiving end of all the lashing and sdomizing.

Earth people just gravitate toward Collar World people because they seem so nice … because they ARE so nice, coming from a healthier culture.

That's my approach. Let good mental health be the hallmark of the more advanced culture, and let your characters interact accordingly.

How Incel World Got Its Name

“Incel World” is what the inhabitants of an alternate world timeline call our world in my book “The Visitor from Incel World.” It's the story of a gender studies grad student who gets caught in an accident at a physics lab and winds up transported to an alternate timeline.

The inhabitants of that timeline call it “Earth” but to us, it's known as “Collar World” due to all the women there being willing sex slaves to the men. Basically, most people in Collar World are into BDSM, specifically, the maledom/femsub variety. There are dominant women and submissive men and gay and lesbian pairings as well, and they are accepted, they're just less common than the hetero maledom/femsub pairings.

In fact, most young adults don't pair up early, they spend years engaging in the “free use” lifestyle, which involves lots of promiscuous sex, called a free-use collar, because women engaged in it wear a “free use” collar that encourages others to have sex with them. 

Now, incels don't dominate our world the way collaring dominates Collar World. We got the moniker “Incel World” because the Visitor from Incel World, one Ariana Hufflepuff, was a gender studies major and hence more focused on incels than most people are. Her descriptions of incels made them seem more important to our world than they really are, and more dangerous, too.

And in a world where near-universal promiscuity among young adults is the accepted norm, the whole Incel phenomenon would seem a lot more strange and exotic than it does to us, and it does seem strange and exotic to many of us. It's an inaccurate name that kind of stuck, in part because, even though it's inaccurate, it does express the uneasiness that Collar World residents have for Incel World residents.

(The official designation of our world on Collar World is Earth 2. The official designation of Collar World on our world is Earth 2. It's a rare case of the official designation being a lot more confusing than the unofficial designation, and another reason everyone uses the unofficial desiginations.)

The people on Collar World, a pragmatic matriarchy that hasn't experienced war in centuries, regard the people on Incel World as violent, sexually starved (and often physically starved) rapists and murderers, thanks to Ariana's vivid (and distressingly accurate) descriptions of our world. I can't say I blame them!

There's a lot of fun to be had via misunderstandings when you are dealing with alternate world themes.

"Incel World" Explained

Cover for "The Visitor to Incel World." Barry Anderson is a psedonym. Explanation forthcoming soon.

“Road to Aquibonya” is finished and will be working on editing it today. This may seem amazing to you, but I proofread my stories three times before I publish them. Yes, and still mistakes get through. Sigh. But not nearly as many as used to get through.

Once I get through with editing “Road to Aquibonya in a day or two, it will be time to return to writing “Conquest of Incel World,” the non-awaited sequel to “Visitor from Incel World.” “Conquest of Incel World,” is non-awaited because I haven't published “Visitor” yet, so how could people be waiting for the sequel when they haven't read the original?

I'm eager to get cranking on “Conquest” though, but more about that later. I should probably explain what “Incel World” is. “Incel World” is what the inhabitants of Collar World call Earth … us, in short. They call Earth “Incel World” because their only contact with Earth has been through a feminist graduate student from a New England women's college, and so their understanding of Earth is filtered through her biases and perceptions.

You see, the Collar World books were the product of a thought experiment, which was initiated after some online discussions in the Sex Positive discussion group on Reddit, where I observed that real sex positivism was hard to even conceive of, because being raised in our current sex-negative culture, we all feel that strain of sex-negativism even when we strive to be sex-positive. It's like a constant cold wind blowing in from offshore, that you constantly have to lean against whenever you go outside. You get used to it, maybe you don't really feel it, but it's there, always.

So I thought about what it might be like to live in a world where everyone was kinky and sex-positive, and thus was born Collar World. I've got four stories published set in Collar World, an alternate world where everyone is kinky and sex positive and having a very good time, thankyewverymuch.

But after writing four stories set in Collar World, all of them erotica with strong science fiction themes, it occurred to me that much of the effect of Collar World was being lost because everyone took all the very strange goings-on for granted. If I wanted to get the contrast between Collar World and Earth as we know it to the max, I needed to bring in a character who could see Collar World through Earth eyes.

And thus was born “The Visitor from Incel World.” But when I wrote the story, something strange happened. I'll save that for tomorrow, though. Enough blathering for today.