{"id":318,"date":"2014-12-17T00:36:27","date_gmt":"2014-12-17T05:36:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/circlet.com\/?page_id=318"},"modified":"2014-12-17T00:36:27","modified_gmt":"2014-12-17T05:36:27","slug":"best-erotic-fantasy-edited-by-cecilia-tan-bethany-zaiatz","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/circlet.com\/?page_id=318","title":{"rendered":"Best Erotic Fantasy edited by Cecilia Tan & Bethany Zaiatz"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bef-cover-iconsize\"<\/a>ebook $9.99
\nISBN: <\/b>9781885865625
\npaperback: $19.99
\nISBN:<\/b> 978-1885865618
\n[wp_eStore_add_to_cart id=6]<\/p>\n

The ebook edition is also available at: Amazon<\/a>, Barnes & Noble<\/a>, Smashwords<\/a>, Kobo <\/a>& AllRomanceEbooks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Buy the paperback edition!<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The editors at Circlet Press present a cherry-picked collection of only the best of erotic fantasy and science fiction. From over 300 entries, they have chosen the top 16, including the stunning winner by Allison Lonsdale \u201cVaster Than Empires.\u201d Vylar Kaftan\u2019s \u201cFulgurite\u201d and Jason Rubis\u2019s \u201cNow I Live On The Street of Women\u201d were the runner-ups. The stories in the anthology span many genres and sexualities, at times defying such categories. Entries were judged on writing quality, originality, and eroticism, the three virtues Circlet Press values most in all publications.<\/p>\n

\u201cCirclet Press publisher Tan (Best Fantastic Erotica) and debut editor Zaiatz present a variety of erotic tales both sensual and brutal. \u2026 The relationships are as varied as the settings, and the best stories are those with a strong emotional core.\u201d
\n\u2014Publishers Weekly on Best Erotic Fantasy<\/p>\n

Including stories by:
\nAllison Lonsdale
\nVylar Kaftan
\nJason Rubis
\nPete Peters
\nDeb Atwood
\nConnie Wilkins
\nGrant Carrington
\nBryn Allen
\nKal Cobalt
\nJean Roberta
\nBeth Bernobich
\nMaya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
\nEric Del Carlo
\nD.L. Keith
\nPaige E. Roberts
\nDiane Kepler<\/p>\n

Hot excerpt:<\/span><\/p>\n

Vaster Than Empires<\/p>\n

Allison Lonsdale<\/p>\n

The installation was called Viriditas, after Hildegarde of Bingen\u2019s writings on the divinity immanent in green things. It was a church as much as it was anything else. Synthetic voices whispered Dylan Thomas\u2019 \u201cThe force that through the green fuse drives the flower\u201d while flowers made of nanofabric opened and closed like sea anemones, like hungry mouths, breathing out molecules that sang of fear and longing when they hit the olfactory bulb, the oldest part of the brain. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil bloomed with scarlet orchids, followed by fruit in the shape of beating human hearts.<\/p>\n

The infrastructure was built on military\/law enforcement wares, very expensive when new and very cheap once obsolete. I was running this off a massive lie detector. Each person inside my little world was monitored: breathing, heart rate, pupil dilation, and skin temperature. Based on their reactions, I controlled lighting, air temperature, sound, scent, and the motion of the flexible structures.<\/p>\n

If I coded, I could have written the whole thing in sensory markup and had it compiled into a VR. But it\u2019s illegal to do olfactory stim in virtual reality, because of how strongly that part of the brain reacts to direct input. It\u2019s perfectly legit for me to release pheromones into the air through one of my creations, though. Every olfactory chemical in my projects is legal.<\/p>\n

They shouldn\u2019t be. In the hands of a competent artist, those molecules are dangerous. I have made sociopaths weep with compassion. I have made rational, efficient, gray-suited managers fall helplessly in love with a color of light. Once I even got someone with Asperger\u2019s Syndrome to understand the concept of \u201cspontaneous empathy\u201d, though she said she couldn\u2019t hold it in her mind after she left the gallery.<\/p>\n

Once I killed a man.<\/p>\n

* * * *<\/p>\n

Only a few people are allowed into one of my projects at a time. I can only manage so much, monitoring them through the interface. And after a few weeks working an installation, the people start to blur together, much as I love their reactions. This one made me sit up and pay attention, though. His body temperature was a big dark blot on my input: he was cold. I checked his breathing (fast and shallow) and pulse (too damn rapid). He was in the Field of Lilies, near the entrance; I couldn\u2019t figure out his reaction. Medical issues? A phobia? Who would keep a phobia in this day and age\u2013and why walk into a gallery of what they fear? That would be about the only explanation for his responses.<\/p>\n

The pupil monitor made it clear to me. Very dilated. I flicked back to the body temp. Yes. One pocket of fever heat on a body that was otherwise doing a classic fight-or-flight.<\/p>\n

His cock. He was so aroused it was probably physically painful\u2013and he was scared shitless.<\/p>\n

Discretion may be the better part of valor, but I am a reaction slut. I had to see the look on his face. I flicked to straight visuals.<\/p>\n

He was not handsome, but if a generation of cheap cosmetic surgery has taught us anything, it is that the packaging is only marginally relevant. And in the backlash against lovely, bland uniformity, many people are now wearing the faces and bodies that the genetic lottery gave them, flaws and all. I was looking at one. Unless his surgeon had a particularly quirky and minimalist esthetic sense.<\/p>\n

Pale skin, dark brown hair worn long and tied back. Clean-shaven. Tall oval face. Thin nose too long, gray eyes too bulbous. No cheekbones to speak of. Lips whose shape would never be compared to anything luscious. So why was I getting wet?<\/p>\n

Because beauty is surfaces, beauty is art. People are what\u2019s under the surface. And there were huge and terrible things under his surface, angels of the vast abyss doing battle. I saw the ripples of their combat across his face. Forgetting that he was being monitored, he did nothing to conceal the signs. Longing and fear were trying to rip him apart, and he was four rooms away from the pheromone spray that should have triggered those feelings. This was all his own.<\/p>\n

I wanted to reach out and comfort him. I wanted to amplify those emotions until they tore him apart, just to see what shining thing rose from his bloody husk. I wanted to taste his sweat.<\/p>\n

I checked the memory left on the system. There was enough. I had it record him in 3-d for the rest of his trip through the installation. I locked the main doors, not letting anyone else enter. When the guests ahead of him left, he was alone in here with me and my beautiful machines. He was mine.<\/p>\n

As he moved through Viriditas, his reactions got more powerful. I raised the temperature to comfort his cold skin, cut back on the awe-inducing subsonics, mixed home-safe-comfort molecules in with the other pheromones. He calmed, but not much. He was visibly trembling as he approached the Tree, and watching it made my nipples go hard. I had the visuals zoom in on his face. I did not quite believe what he did next. He took one of the scarlet, face-sized orchids between his hands and buried his face in it. He was kissing it, as though it were a woman. Then he backed away, sweating, and wiped his face on his sleeve. He looked as though something inside him had broken and he was drowning. I had already made my decision, and now I recorded and modified sound files and moved robotics-control sequences into my system\u2019s main memory. He almost staggered as he entered the Rose Cathedral.<\/p>\n

The wall of roses unfolded. Inside them were the faces of angels: modeled from averages of as many human faces as possible, they possessed unearthly beauty and symmetry. They opened their luminous eyes\u2013all made of synthetic jewels, and none of them in the colors of human eyes\u2013and sang the Durufl\u00e9 arrangement of \u201cUbi Caritas\u201d. I had given them the voices of castrati, the power and richness of full-grown male lungs and throats fuelling the high voices of boys. He was transfixed. I let them complete the vocal piece, down to the final \u201cAmen\u201d, and then I made all of their eyes fix upon him, and dilated their pupils. His own dilated in response. In chorus, they told him:<\/p>\n

\u201cRappacini, Rappacini, Rappacini,<\/p>\n

desires your company<\/p>\n

at the Rose of Monday.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then their faces settled into the repose of sleep, and the giant petals slowly folded back into buds, concealing them. His heart was racing, his pupils were still wide and dark, and his ragged breathing told me everything that I wanted to know.<\/p>\n

* * * *<\/p>\n

Back when I was a struggling aesthetic engineer trying to build a reputation, and he was a sensory coder working for a game design company, and we still used the names we were born with, Rex Monday and I were lovers. Together we tried Fuse, a cutting-edge (for its day) VR. Fuse was one of the short-lived genres of augmented VRs, meaning that you took a measured dose of a custom alkaloid before you plugged in, and the sensory input was designed to heterodyne with the drug\u2019s effect. Fuse was supposed to dissolve ego-boundaries, and it did a good job. Augmented VRs were later outlawed due to the number of people they put into psychiatric hospitals. Rex and I spent time in padded rooms, and neither of us can remember much of it. But when we came out, I had absorbed the artistic sensibilities of a brilliant sensory coder, and he had acquired my intuitive knack for manipulating an audience\u2019s emotions with memes on multiple levels. We reinvented ourselves, and took on the names under which we would both do our best work.<\/p>\n

I became Rappacini, after Hawthorne\u2019s story. Not Rappacini\u2019s daughter, the passive vessel of her father\u2019s destructive brilliance, but the old doctor himself, shaper of beauty and death. Because what have so many people worshipped, and killed for, and died for, but one who hung on a Tree, who died and went into the ground like a dry bulb and came back again like the narcissi pushing up through the earth in spring? Jesus, Osiris, Adonis, John Barleycorn\u2013there\u2019s a rich memetic language of beautiful sacrifices who are linked to the green heart of the world. Crowned in lilies or lotuses, hyacinths or hops, these beautypainlovedeath memes play deep chords on the place inside us that can be molecularly mapped, transmitter by receptor, but cannot be compassed or comprehended by reason. Which is why I am a designer of interactive aesthetic environments instead of a scientist.<\/p>\n

My old lover had also absorbed my fondness for dead languages; Rex Mundi, the king of the world, was an old name for Satan, used by the sort of Christians who believed that the kingdom of God was entirely separate from earthly experience. Who remembers that now? Those who recognize the joke at all think it points up the irony of VR fans that start to feel that simulated sensory input is the real world, and that the shadowy place where their bodies eat and shit and sleep is somehow false.<\/p>\n

In the process of reinventing himself, he built the Rose of Monday, another Latin pun. It was a shrine to me, and to the shared universe we had created inside the Fuse construct. Hosted on an offshore server, it used sensory coding illegal in the US. After all, what is the point of a garden in which the flowers have no scent?<\/p>\n

* * * *<\/p>\n

I came home from the gallery with a data spike full of recorded images in my sweaty fist. Normally I go straight to the shower after a shift at the gallery, but I skipped it, feeding the spike into my home system and then throwing myself on the bed and plugging the connector into the socket behind my ear. I dropped out of my body into my office. The key to Rosa Mundi was in a bud vase on my desk; code sent periodically from its home server altered its composition. Today it was made of steel, but its petals turned to glass at their outer edges. I lifted it from the vase, brushed it with my lips, and felt the shimmer of connection begin. Once, I would have had my home system enabled for illegal olfactory codes just so I could smell it, because the Rosa Mundi keys change scent as well as appearance. But experience with my own art had made me wary of pheromones. When I visit Rosa Mundi, I have my wares disable olfactory input. I miss a great deal of the beauty there, yes, but in Rex\u2019s domain I have to be careful. The construct was built, in large part, as a map of the inside of my head\u2013as it was fifteen years ago. I never enter it without taking a firm grip on my sense of self.<\/p>\n

I appeared in the antechamber, its floor tiled in a compass rose of precious stones, its walls the wings of angels with each feather a petal. I was wearing the masque Rex had designed for me, a pre-Raphaelite painting made grass-green flesh, with flowering vines for hair and a gown of leaves. Into the still, hushed air of the chamber (I still find it eerie how subtly the sensory textures of that place are coded), I said the words to summon him: \u201cSic transit gloria.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rex manifested in his classic masque, with top hat and tails, little horns, genteel white gloves, and polished hooves. His face was that of an archangel as Tamara de Lempicka might have painted it\u2013if she\u2019d been shooting up Yoshitaka Amano\u2019s RNA.<\/p>\n

I explained my situation, and he was very pleased for me. He is generally of the opinion that I spend too much time hunched over an array of components, and should get out of the studio, have a massage, do some drugs, and fuck something. \u201cA prey animal worthy of your refined tastes?\u201d he said cheerfully. \u201cFelicitations!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know that I disapprove of that term, my friend.\u201d One thing I had absorbed from him in Fuse was the tendency to divide the world into predators and prey animals. This bothered me, and I had gone to great trouble to eradicate it in myself.<\/p>\n

He sighed. \u201cThen shall we call him\u2013an herbivore? Surely that would be appropriate!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAs you wish. I\u2019ve invited him here. I want to make sure he\u2019s on the guest list.\u201d I sang a certain note that transferred a file from my home system, and the sound coalesced into an image I had recorded in the gallery.<\/p>\n

Rex\u2019s laughter told me that the man used his real face online, as I had hoped. \u201cA member of long standing, dear. And the scion of a wealthy, if tedious, family. In fact, he\u2019s a bit rich for your blood. It has never been your style to seek patronage.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHis finances are not relevant. He understands my work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cConsidering the amount of time he spends worshipping it here, I should think so. In fact, if he were a trifle less controlled, you\u2019d have a stalker.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd you didn\u2019t think of warning me because\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026you are a big girl and can take care of yourself. Besides, he\u2019s harmless. None of the wares here have picked up danger signs from him. He\u2019s courteous, well-behaved, respectful of others, and absolutely smitten with your work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think you\u2019re jealous.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course I am.\u201d Rex flashed me a mathematically perfect smile. \u201cHe sees how much of my talent is really yours, but he doesn\u2019t acknowledge how much of your talent is really mine.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * * *<\/p>\n

My wares alerted me when my invitation was accepted, some hours later. He was waiting for me in the Hall of Contrasts. Replications of Georgia O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s vivid and monumental vulva-flowers alternated with enlarged images of Robert Mapplethorpe\u2019s clinically precise black and white photographs of plant genitalia.<\/p>\n

He heard the rustling of my masque\u2019s leafy dress and turned to face me. He wore a dark, archaic suit, perhaps nineteenth-century.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow have I offended you?\u201d he asked contrition loud in his body language.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have not.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThen why\u2013I don\u2019t understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI know what you are,\u201d I said, watching fear and desire war on his face again. \u201cI know what you are, and I invited you here. Do the math.\u201d<\/p>\n

Something tense drained out of him. He looked like a bud tentatively opening. \u201cOh,\u201d he said, blinking in surprise.<\/p>\n

\u201cRex tells me that you have spent a lot of time here, looking at images of my work and what inspired it. And he tells me you are rich, easily rich enough to buy a ticket to the most expensive aesthetic engineering installations. Why did it take you so long to attend one of my gallery shows?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWorking up the nerve, I suppose,\u201d he said softly. \u201cTrying to get the self-control.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAfraid you might do something like, oh, try to make love to one of the orchids?\u201d<\/p>\n

He froze, looking at me with the eyes of a rabbit in truck headlights\u2013but a sentient rabbit, quite aware that it was about to die.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo I look like I\u2019m offended?\u201d I said. \u201cIt\u2019s quite plain that you\u2019re wired.\u201d I used the street term for a VR addict, but I meant it in another sense. \u201cWith bonsai wire,\u201d I added. \u201cI am fascinated.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI am\u2026flattered. I think.\u201d<\/p>\n

His reactions had been reading close to fully human, meaning that he had his expression transfer fully enabled. Time to fire a dart and see what it hit.<\/p>\n

\u201cLook at me,\u201d I said. I spoke a Word, which emerged into the presumably fragrant air of Rosa Mundi with the sound of silk tearing. After an argument about appearance versus reality years ago, Rex had coded this for me, a variant on the unmasque command.<\/p>\n

The botanical body stiffened, greens turned to browns, silken leaves harshed to flaking paper. The skin cracked, split, peeled away in fragments, vanished. Under it, the bare skin of my own body was revealed: not a masque, but a face, scanned and coded to match me flaw for flaw. I wore a short dress of white linen. I watched him watch me, saw my harsh unbeauty reflected in his eyes. My hair cut close to my skull, just a coating of black texture. The heavy lips, the broad nose, the round face. The thick legs, the flat breasts. My wares and I watched him closely. He was reacting\u2013but not with revulsion. His own choice, then, to wear what he was born with. Not just a distaste for medical nano, but values like my own: the container is not as important as the contents.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy name,\u201d I told him, offering a much more profound nakedness, \u201cis Catherine Sorayama.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI would unmasque for you, Catherine,\u201d he said, \u201cbut I am wearing my face. My name is Gavin Revell.\u201d He reached towards me, a wreath of leopard-spotted orchids unfolding out of nothing in his hands. A lovely piece of code, that, and I wished for a moment that I could smell it. He crowned me; I caught one of his hands after they released the crown and I planted a kiss in his palm. He froze again, but it was something very different from a rabbit in headlights that looked out of his eyes at me now\u2026<\/p>\n

To read the rest, download the ebook today!<\/p>\n

[wp_eStore_fancy2 id=6]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ebook $9.99 ISBN: 9781885865625 paperback: $19.99 ISBN: 978-1885865618 [wp_eStore_add_to_cart id=6] The ebook edition is also available at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Kobo & AllRomanceEbooks. Buy the paperback edition! The editors at Circlet Press present a cherry-picked collection of only the best of erotic fantasy and science fiction. From over 300 entries, they have chosen … Continue reading Best Erotic Fantasy edited by Cecilia Tan & Bethany Zaiatz<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":863,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-318","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/circlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/circlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/circlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/circlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/318\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/circlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}