A few weeks before the release of Crossing the Carnivorous Forest, I started worrying that the amount of sex in my science fiction series Gods of the New Wilderness would drive away readers.
I have certainly had readers suddenly start treating me differently after reading some of those scenes — a few admitting that they were caught off guard by some of the more explicit scenes.
This is something I have been sensitive to ever since 1988, when my horror story, “The Onion Test” (a twist on A Clockwork Orange — focusing specifically on sex crimes) appeared in Pulphouse the Hardback Magazine, issue one, volume one alongside stories from a number of my idols; including Harlan Ellison, Kate Wilhelm, Ed Bryant, Charles de Lint and Michael Bishop. One of my co-workers bought a copy of the book. After her fiancé read my story, he demanded that she quit the job immediately and stay as far away from me as possible. She refused, restoring my faith in people having the intelligence to discern fiction from fact and realize that we are not what we write. Horror fiction in particular makes the writer reach down deep to find what horrifies them — so what ends up on the page is indicative of their personality only insofar as showing us what they hate and what scares them most.
I still haven’t figured out how and why sex can be such a powerful trigger. Maybe it involves the unspoken taboos about the sharing of intimacy. Maybe it involves shame about our own lusts, compulsions, and kinks. And given how sexually conservative most of us really are, I have no doubt that part of our reaction is based on queasiness from being forced out of our happy place into areas we instinctively avoid. Some writers can be delightfully unselfconscious. I’m not one of them. Because the discomfort leads to awkwardness, which only helps feed the perception that most erotica is clumsy, apologetic, crude, unnatural, and/or add your own adjective here. It’s as idiosyncratic as humour and far less forgiving!
On top of that, few things are considered inherently less woke than the male gaze. Despite the current villainization of ‘wokeness;’ as a male writer, that’s something I couldn’t allow myself to forget.
The etymological definition of wokeness is “awareness of injustice,” especially regarding racial issues. The usage has broadened over the decades — picked up by the feminist and queer communities to remind people of the long histories of inequity and persecution that they historically faced. By the time it became popular in the mainstream vernacular, it had been twisted into a pejorative that dismissed all manner of social empathy and sensitivity as though awareness and avoidance of prejudice and abuse is a bad thing.
When self-publishing the first two books of this series, I had to fill out forms on Amazon, Ingram Spark and Draft2Digital that limited my potential audience. I had to come to terms with the likelihood that my books would not be available in libraries or to readers under the government mandated age of consent.
So, right from the start, I considered doing PG versions.
Not only are the sex scenes an enormous, self-imposed commercial handicap, those scenes have been a huge challenge for me to write, many of them from the points-of-view of female characters. So, I admit that the prospect of not having to write them was tempting to say the least.
But the more I thought about it, the more undeniable it became to me that sex is intrinsic to my plot lines and character arcs. Cutting or even softening the steamy scenes would do a disservice to the books because it contradicts the very point of them.
(mild spoilers ahead)
The events in book one, Remapping the Human Template, get underway when the intelligent trees of the BioGrid recover a lost clip of a sexual encounter that is more vivid and immersive than anything they ever experienced prior to that moment. It is a revelation that leads directly to the resurrection of one of the two central protagonists of the series. No sex, no resurrection, no story.
As intelligent as the trees are, they are acutely aware that they were created by humanity. The majority of the trees in the forest aspire to be human — a condition they consider unachievable until they serendipitously open a file — that enables any and every tree in the vast forest occupied by the BioGrid to share a moment of Raine’s ultimate sexual experience. Finding and restoring the program that contained the file becomes a priority within the BioGrid. It unlocks the personality matrix of Raine Naidu –the “human template” of the title.
It is different from anything the trees have ever known. The BioGrid database is filled with books that talk about sex and love and video clips of people pursuing and experiencing it in all potential variations.
The amount of attention the human race paid to romantic sex seemed absurd and incomprehensible to the artificial intelligences in the BioGrid until they share Raine’s first hand experience and discover that human sex offers a transcendence they could never achieve by themselves; a state they had never imagined — effectively driving all rational thought from their consciousnesses and replaced it with lust, romance and ecstasy.
The mentality of the forest changes fundamentally in that moment. Driven by the memory of Raine’s coming of age, sex (specifically non-reproductive human sex) becomes a central preoccupation within the BioGrid. Every relationship in that milieu leads to modified and recoded versions of physical sensations laid out in Raine’s freshly and compulsively reiterated sexual awakening/coming of age. It is enacted in endless variations throughout the BioGrid, based on everything from sweeping romantic sagas to the tawdriest illicit porn. But it all leads back to that single tiny file — the same moment of shared ecstasy. Decoded, recoded, but somehow never improved.
After his resurrection, Raine’s immediate dilemma stems from the realization that trees do not distinguish between male and female — because gender does not exist in their species, they regard it as inconsequential. But raised as a CIS male in a human society where gender and sexual orientation were big deals, it matters enormously to Raine.
Allowing it to dictate his choices within the BioGrid establishes and undermines his relationships with other central characters — especially with his saviour and mentor among the trees who cannot comprehend Raine’s intractability. This dynamic is central to Remapping the Human Template. Without it, the book/series would not and could not exist.
This dichotomy is perfectly illustrated in the AI summary of the book that I encountered when I searched online.
The AI refers to Raine as “she.” My immediate reaction is “That’s wrong.” And then I realized it was the perfect illustration of my central plot point. The sex or sexual orientation of the protagonist is NOT relevant to AI. Perhaps the ability to wrap their virtual heads around the importance of human sexuality will be the next step in making them sentient.
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