$14.95
ISBN 1931160163
available through Amazon

Reviewed by William Dean
(10/08/03)

When mega-names in the science fiction world like Mike Resnick and Paul Di Filippo praise your work, you know you've gone supernova. When someone like Cecilia Tan writes the introduction for your latest collection, you know the included tales are white hot, sensual, and as erotic as it gets. Such are the credentials, among others, of M. Christian's just published The Bachelor Machine.

After an uncertain time, their moans and cries and incoherent bursts of near-speech, near-philosophical-balderdash, synched perfectly then climbed, a pair of syncopated screams, toward a deity that they hoped to perhaps outdo with their engineered divinity, their mechanical savior.

The machines, the bio-engineered, the alien, and the passionate humans in this collection of stories are, indeed, on a trip to tomorrow where the lusting may not always be easy, but the resulting orgasms are transcendent. I haven't read such syncopated prose since Filippo's The Steampunk Trilogy nor such riffing sensual descriptions since Samuel R. Delaney's now classic Dahlgren. M. Christian here writes, as Cecilia Tan says, like jazz, improvising on themes and taking the mind on a light-speed journey into the human erotic psyche and beyond.

Too often, science fiction can drag with polemic pseudo-dogmas or the hackneyed plots of space westerns with a lone hero standing tall against phantasmal enemies. You'll find nothing like that in The Bachelor Machine. Instead, your erotic particles will be deconstructed, sped up incredibly, and collided with a vision of sex and sensuality that is Tantric in scope.

She was beautiful. Stretched out on her huge bed, a midnight expanse that all but filled her bedroom, she looked up at me with huge earthen eyes -- lit by quivering desire, a pulse-pounding fever.

Her mouth was on my right nipple, painting it with the gleam of her wet lips, making it harden almost to the point of pain. I felt the ghostly nipping of her white, white teeth. Then she really sucked, and I felt my legs turn to rubber and my cunt get heavy, wet, and hot.

In my hand, the crop was light, all but intangible.

Like all fine quality erotica, The Bachelor Machine goes past outdated concepts of gender and identity and sends its exploratory probes into the core of sexuality and desire, deep beneath the surface we normally skim across in our day-to-day imaginings. This is the territory of off-world living, cosmic, and magical. While the high-tech bits are fascinating in their own right, it is in their union with the erotic impulse where the reader finds his or her ordinary orbit shifted. Odd, even bizarre, circumstances evolve into encounters that challenge the characters' notions of love and want, self and partner, genitals and psyche.

The sender was a flaming hot number in the cybersea, a dominatrix icon that played games with the boys' heads, and played them ultimately well, and safe. She'd earned, not taken, her ID: bytebitch. She wasn't a girlie milking her tits for all the drooling boys. She was a hard dealer -- no-nonsense and straight. They didn't like that, expecting sugar and spice, not razors and sure, clear percentages.

Jump into the slipstream of The Bachelor Machine and M. Christian will take you for a joyride -- down into the places where nanoseconds seem to last an eternity and the orgasms are as big as Jupiter. Strap yourself on his rocket ship of soaring prose and fantastic plot, where your co-pilots have any gender, all gender and whose mission is to leave you breathless with desire and safely exhausted with satiation. Let The Bachelor Machine speed you on your way...

I think, I dream, I wish -- but it's not even a memory, because I'm not allowed any. I stretch out on my simple bed, in my simple flat, and spin my wishes of what they might be like, their faces, their rough hands, their cruel implements, their...cocks, in my mouth, in my hands, in my so-wet cunt.

I think, I dream, I wish...

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