Bi+ Book Club Selection for January

Bi+ Book Club
Wednesday, January 8
7:00 to 9:00 pm
Quatrefoil Library: 1220 E Lake St. Minneapolis, MN 55407 
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Our next Bi+ Book Club Meeting will be Wednesday, January 8 from 7:00 to 9:00 pm at Quatrefoil Library (1220 E Lake St, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55407)! We will be discussing "Wetware: Cyberpunk Erotica" by Violet Blue.

(There will be no Bi+ Book Club Meeting in December.)

Summary: "Cyberpunk anti-heroes face global conspiracies, misused government R&D, thugs, drugs, true love, artificial intelligence, and vengeful sexbots in this collection's heady mix of sci-fi and sex.
 
Wetware shows how hot "high tech low life" can be when all the glittering and frightening possibilities of cyberpunk meet the crisis point of sexual need. Seven unpredictable stories depict hackers, transhumans, androids, pop stars, armed revolutionaries, government contractors and more who discover that sex is hotter with hacked, stolen and renegade tech -- especially when it's a high-risk proposition.
 
Some erotica writers have ideas, others have visions. Love is a side-effect of stolen, weaponized biotech in "Bishop to King's Pawn, Two" by Thomas S. Roche. In "Synthetic Skin" by Kendra Jarry, a government contractor steals secret field hardware for the sole purpose of seduction. A brainwave hacker's conquest in a club bathroom stall takes a turn in Cecilia Tan's "Rough, Trade."
 
 Lines are crossed and re-crossed when the household helper bot in Devyn X. Sands' "Never Say No" has had enough of her owner's perversions. "Sixty-Five Night" by Stephen Stavros charts a dangerous AI experiment that pushes one woman into a seedy neon ghetto for a public transhuman sexual encounter -- under the shadow of a murder conspiracy.
 
Cyberpunk's sexuality has always been transgressive and prescient; this collection brings the genre's tradition into the current state of cyberpunk affairs. Wetware isn't a typical erotica collection, nor is it a typical sci-fi anthology. It's also a rich celebration of hacker and cyberpunk culture, within the hallmarks of this culture's rich and diverse sexualities and genders. It's a tech-savvy, philosophically-rich, erotic anthology artfully spiked with cyberpunk-themed cocktail recipes and recommendations for sexy cyberpunk films, books, and anime.
 
Blue's introduction "Coded in Spirals and Pheromones" features story excerpts in an essay examining cyberpunk sexuality, and how our fantasies of a gilded cyberpunk future have arrived -- while at the same time, something has gone horribly wrong with the way technology was supposed to empower us. Blue explains exactly why "it is our growing sense of things gone terribly wrong that gives the stories here their power, anchored in one of cyberpunk's most defiant agents of change: Sex."
 
This book contains adult situations, including BDSM, domestic discipline, gender fluidity in sexual situations, backdoor and oral play, power exchange, role-play, spanking, bisexual men, and explicit scenes. The book also depicts non-monogamous relationships and sexual activity (and penetration) involving more than two individuals."