Double Helix News

Chapter 17 didn’t quite get the reception I am used to. I thought, if anything, the biggest complaints I would get would be about the plot not advancing much, since the chapter only covers the space of a day. Instead, some people were unhappy with direction of the relationships. That relatively poor reception is the main reason that I decided to move on to chapter 18 rather then continue writing Lamia 03. Put simply, I want to make it clear that the story is moving forward and not wallowing in relationship drama. I’m close to about the halfway point now.

Lamia: What Does It Mean?

The second part of my story, Lamia, is up on Literotica. A few people have asked what the title has to do with the story. Unfortunately, I can’t reveal that without spoiling things. I never start writing without a pretty good idea how it will end and knowing the major events and plot twists That will occur. I’ll only say that the title relates to the central conflict of the story and an as yet unrevealed antagonist, which I hope to get to in part three or four.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the story so far. I got pretty deep into the philosophy on my first draft of part two, but scaled that back to keep from diluting the focus. I hope to get more into that in the next part, and of course there will be lots more robot sex.

Writing Again

I have been uncharacteristically productive lately. Part of that is due to some loosening of demands at my day job (which has me working nights and weekends on a regular basis) and part of that is that I was inspired to start a new story.

The inspiration for Lamia comes from looking for and failing to find any well-written erotic stories involving androids that go beyond the basic wish fulfillment formula. That seems like an odd omission to me, since I’m fairly certain that sex with androids will be commonplace well before the end of this century. So, as any writer inevitably does, when I think of a story I would like to read, but it hasn’t been written, I have to write it myself.

What was great was that, almost as soon as I got Lamia published, I started working on Chapter 16 of Double Helix. I finished my first draft last night, but I’ll need a few days to edit it. However, I decided to start publishing my work here, so readers visiting from Literotica will get to see it a few days sooner here than over there. I’m going to start posting from chapter 1 for the sake of chronology, but it won’t take me long to get it all posted.

I would also like to give Kindle another shot, for those that have asked about buying my work. I’ll give more details when I have them.

Holy Shit, It's 2016

It's been a very long time since I updated this blog. Part of my problem is all of the crap that's been going on. For a while there, I was getting home from work and then having to work on one thing or another, run errands, and so forth, until it was time to crash so that I can get up in the morning to do it all again. Part of it is that I just haven't felt much like writing.

I hate that feeling, by the way. It's the feeling you get when you sit down to write, but instead of the words just bubbling from the tips of your fingers, you're having to drag them out, clawing and kicking. It gets better, of course. Writing is not much different from a job that you enjoy doing. When you are in the middle of it, it's great. Sometimes it's hard to stop. Once you stop, though, the longer you stay away, the longer you dread returning. You know that it's going to take time to get back into the right frame of mind, and you know it's not going to be fun at first.

Here's the status of some of my projects:

Double Helix

I've been making some progress on the next chapter. I had most of a chapter written, but didn't like the result. Sometimes I find myself writing sex scenes out of a sense of obligation to the reader to deliver the on the "erotic" part of erotic fiction, but then I remind myself that with science fiction, the story really has to come first, and most readers will forgive a bit less titillation  if the story and sense of wonder are otherwise carried forward. So I cut the two somewhat length sex scenes and went for plot development instead. I'm probably about halfway through, which means that I could be done this weekend or next month.

In related news, I've decided to post the story here as a serial. This will be the edited version of the first book with shorter chapters that I submitted to the Amazon store. I intend to edit down the chapters that I have written thus far in the second book to match, incorporating some needed editing and rewrites as well. I plan to start posting each chapter a day or two apart, starting later this week.

Cybercock

I love this little series, and I really need to get going on it. I'm going for novella length with this one, though it might turn into a short novel. I'll have to see. It incorporates a lot of the ideas I have about how technology will change our experience of the world, and I feel like I've only scratched some of that surface so far. I won't promise anything yet, but if I can deliver the next chapter of Double Helix soon, I'm thinking I'll be ready to flip back over to this story for another chapter.

Unnamed Erotic Fantasy Story

Catchy title, right?

This is the story of a barbarian warrior who is captured by strange travelers from an empire across the sea. Hoping to take advantage of the mercy shown to him by the immortal empress, he devotes himself to learning the ways of these people and delves into the secrets of the empress' powerful magic.

I got a good ways into this story before someone spilled a drink on my laptop keyboard. I ordered a new keyboard, which took about three weeks to ship in from Hong Kong (wtf?). Anyway, by then I had lost the spark of interest and was in the middle of various disasters in the making, so I only got about 6000 words in. Still, I transferred it of the laptop's drive and into Google Docs, which was a good thing, because someone again spilled their drink on my laptop keyboard. Yeah, I was pissed.

I'm going to edit the hell out of this one and probably post it in serial format here exclusively. If people like it (and I ever get around to really promoting myself), I may put it up on Amazon.


That's about it for now. Check back here for further updates.

Double Helix: Some Historical Background

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

Technology and the Declining Price of Sex

I'm going to talk economics in this post, so be brave.

At the risk of getting myself in trouble, I'm going to declare that sex is an economic good, just as much as chocolate cake is an economic good. We can test this by substituting one word for the other in a paragraph and seeing that, while probably funny, it still makes sense. The fact that there is a whole (generally informal) market to supply this good is further evidence of this notion.

At further risk, I'm going to declare that sex is valued more highly by and sold more cheaply by men than women. This is not a slander against men or women, but rather a simple observation of the costs and risks involved. Women bear the risk of pregnancy, and they have a greater risk of contracting many sexually transmitted infections. Beyond that, there is the social consequences of having sex. For men, they are almost nonexistent, but for women, they can be crushing.

Technology will no doubt put pressure on the market to equalize the demand between men and women in various ways. The process already began with the advent of contraception. That removed one of the major risks of sex. During the 20th century, until HIV appeared on the scene, there wasn't any serious STI that couldn't be cured with antibiotics. Substantial progress has been made on pushing back that particular menace, and a disease that 25 years ago would have been eventually fatal can be held at bay indefinitely. More recently, a true vaccine may finally be in the works, and there is a proposal to use existing antivirals and drugs to stimulate expression of dormant stores of the virus to eliminate them. Potentially, such a treatment could cure someone of HIV.

In my previous post, I made the case that virtual, partnered sex would reduce the risk of having sex. The possibility of anonymity in such a marketplace will remove the social cost for women and the consequent risk. Since risk is one of the factors that increases the price of sex, the price should be driven down and the gap between men and women should partially or totally equalize. What all of this means is that, in the near future of 10-20 years, having a virtual sexual experience that seems just as real as actual sex will be exceedingly inexpensive. Prostitution, if it is to survive, will have to offer an experience that is unique or truly exceptional, and male and female prostitutes should be about equal in number.

The end result of all of this should be an upheaval in the current social order. Slut-shaming should disappear, and men and women will both be able to express themselves sexually without fear of social repercussions. Of course, there are dangers that more than the social order could be upset. What if virtual sex is just as good as real sex, and it is software, rather than a partner, that you interact with? I'll talk about this more in a future post.

Virtual Partnered Sex: Bringing People Together, Removing Risk

Human beings are weird creatures. It seems like any time there's the potential for a technology that will be transformative and life-enhancing, somebody is going to look at it skeptically, decide that it undermines "what it means to be human", and go on to show through literature, movies, or journalism, that the promises of this great thing are hollow.

Virtual sex is one such technology.You get the typical stereotyping about how lonely nerds are going to be the only people who embrace the technology (probably because they are still virgins who don't know any better). It will destroy intimacy, we are told. Sex and love will cease to be meaningful.

You'll have to pardon me if I think that this is all a bunch of self-important, mystical bullshit, and I'll tell you exactly how this tech is going to change our lives over the next few decades.

The Tech

We already have the groundwork laid for some of this. Real-time motion capture technology like Microsoft's Kinect will probably play a role early, since you'll want to capture every thrust and roll of the hips. More subtle motion, like the use of the tongue and fingers, will be trickier. Probably there would need to be small, disposable sensors used, though I'm prepared to be completely surprised by new tech, as usually happens.

The visual interface is likewise well on its way. We're going to want a full 3-D representation of your partner, which means either stereoscopic video, or more likely a full-body scan and 3-D render. 3-D imagery, after years of skirting the uncanny valley, is just about ready to plunge in and emerge up the other side. Sophisticated scanning models will likely accelerate this process, which itself will be driven by the demand for creating digital actors for movies and television.

We will see two general ways in which the tech can fork. Augmented reality will overlay a digital representation of a person on your field of view of the real world. Virtual reality will create a virtual, shared world, but the essential interactions will be the same. I think that some people will prefer one or the other, but most will indulge in both as the mood suits them.

Haptics brings the possibility of actually feeling another person. As with most things related to the internet, porn will be an early driver of the technology. In fact, there have already been some attempts at pornography that simulates sex through a physical device, but they are predictably flawed and crude. Haptics, which is closely related to robotics, uses mechanical manipulation to simulate touch, pressure, and potentially heat or cold sensations. Virtual sex will, at least initially, require some kind of form-fitting clothing with apparatus for directly stimulating the genitals. Models will continue to be crude in the near future, but as the field of robotics becomes more sophisticated, sexual haptics will begin to rapidly advance.

There would still be limitations, since your body still wouldn't actually take up space in the virtual or augmented world, but I think that people would develop conventions and techniques to best utilize the interface. And, while early systems would no doubt be crude, just as display resolution gets better every year, tactile "resolution" would get better as well.

The ultimate virtual sex experience will arrive when we understand the brain well enough, and have fine enough control, to directly stimulate the nervous system. Eventually, all senses could be stimulated in this manner. While the body is placed in a state of relaxation, the brain would receive the sensory experience of a sexual encounter in a virtual environment.

Distance Won't Matter

Imagine that you just got a new job. You're excited about it, but it will require that you move 2000 miles. Meanwhile, your fiance has two more years of college at a very good school, so it makes no sense for you both to move. You can try to maintain a long-distance relationship, seeing each other every few months, or you can break it off, knowing that the time spent apart will put a serious strain on your relationship, quite likely resulting in a painful break up later on.

That's where virtual sex comes in. We already have virtual sex, limited though it is. It's called "cybersex" and allows couples to perform mutual masturbation over long distances. I've never been very happy with that term. It's a bit like calling a beat up Toyota a shuttlecraft, or a bra an anti-gravity device. It's just way more pretentious and cool-sounding than it actually is. Well, bras are cool, but only for what they contain.

I think the meaning of the word "cybersex" will soon start coming into its own, though. We've gone from chat and instant message, to voice chat, to video chat. The next step will be augmented reality and virtual reality. There are a lot of advantages of these two closely-related concepts over video chatting. To illustrate, I'll describe how you might see it in action.

You and your fiance are 2000 miles apart and you ask to telepresent. He or she accepts and you sit on  your sofa and start the session. A camera, possibly multiple cameras, or some other imaging technology, captures each of your images and sends them to each other. Your significant other appears right on the sofa next to you, rendered perfectly into your field of view by your heads-up display. Sound is likewise captured and projected from each environment to the other. There's no sense of touch or smell. The two of you reconnect, talking like you really are in the same room together. One of you suggests sex, and you both undress and tell each other what you want to see the other do.

Safe, Casual Sex

Virtual partnered sex is likely to make casual sex much more common. For one thing, the risk of STDs and pregnancy is gone. The risk of being attacked or stalked will be much lower (though you will still need to be careful how much you reveal about yourself). This is one reason why I think that women, though initially cautious, will jump in as active participants once they realize that there is nothing to lose, but everything to gain.

You could imagine anything from web services which simulate a bar, club, or formal party, where you're expected to be chaste at all times, to MMO-style queues where you're dropped into a room with someone who fits your desired characteristics and you get right to it. I think that there will be a place and a time for both types of interaction, and many others we can only speculate on, such as realistic virtual sex games.

Some might warn that this will destroy marriages, but I am quite confident that the opposite will be true. The ability to have new, fresh sexual experiences will keep the passion alive for many couples that might otherwise burn out. For those that do burn out, sex need not even be a foundational component for marriage. Sharing the duties of children and a household might be enough to hold an otherwise compatible couple together, once the pressure of sex is removed from the picture.

Here's Where it Gets a Little Weird

With the ability to render images so perfectly, there will be the ability to make subtle alterations to conceal your identity from the other person, likely to be common in casual virtual sex. Or, you might fabricate an entirely new persona, even swapping genders by manipulating your voice and scripting in changes to how your avatar moves and feels with a different body. In the beginning, we  may see a lot of men having virtual lesbian sex with each other, never realizing that each are lying about their gender. As I said before, women will likely be slower to adopt it, because traditionally they have borne more of the risk, but this will no longer be the case. And, honestly, I think most people will stop caring. If the person you are having sex with looks, sounds, and feels just like a sexy member of whichever gender you are attracted to, and you have no way of finding out otherwise, does it really matter?

Sexual experimentation will be everywhere. People will try things that they were too afraid or embarrassed to in reality. Anyone who watches porn now will likely graduate to virtual porn when it is available. There will be moral questions and legal questions. I think that prostitution will appear immediately, some women transitioning from live sex to virtual sex, others getting into it who would otherwise never take money for sex. I would hope that sensible societies would see the pointlessness and destructiveness of outlawing it. Even the weak arguments the currently keep prostitution illegal would no longer hold, making it entirely a moral religious argument.

The meaning and form of relationships themselves may change. Take my example of a temporary separation and go further. Couples may choose to have long-term, committed relationships, even marry, without ever being in the same physical location. It don't know if it will be common or rare, but I am certain it will happen.