Book Review: The Bachelor Machine by M. Christian

Her Tangh-i-ness Does read other things besides Erotica. But since we're on the subject—there's always time for more recreational Smut. Creatives are some of the most highly-sexed beings on the planet; I mean near everything they produce is the result of an orgasm of the Creative Mind.

Take this M. Christian guy, for example. Yeah. Yeah. I started with his short story collection Skin Effect. This guy, he just keeps writing more…more...reasons to moisturize the underthings or try and hide the evidence of stimulation upon the erogenous zone of choice. There's lots of male on female action, female on female, a genuinely happy foursome (two males make out with the females and also each other). For pure male on male, do refer to M.Christian's other short story collection, one being, Dirty Words.

However, for the People of Color in the Reading Audience, be aware this collection does contain Triggers. These are Sistah-shaped ones both golden, black, and brown. I hear ya'll saying just what does she mean? Read and find out. Just remember Her Tangh-i-ness saw that the work went there and got to the end of the book. Just saying. By the way, she kept reading other M. Christian works. Consider what the author has to say about himself: "For me, being a pioneer in this area, I feel like I have to create my own respect, in a way. I'm like a missionary – at first no matter what tribe I visit, I get the hairy eyeball." So it's obviously time to start eyeballing this dude until he creams in his pants or something.

To make it easy for potential readers of this collection, Her Tangh-i-ness will return to the following rating system that came in mighty handy when describing M. Christian's Skin Effect and other works.

TAMTT *Take A Minute to Think* This means the sexiness might have to grow on you.

WT *Wet* Self-explanatory. No?

H/OA *Hand/Object Assisted* Requires immediate action after the story climax.

FAPP *Find a Partner Pronto* Try this one at home, Folks.


*Spoiler Alert*

Her Tangh-i-ness greatly appreciates pithy plot summaries. However, for those who must have a virgin reading experience, read no further, and eyeball elsewhere.


*Spoiler Alert End*


STATE

WT *Wet* Fiction. M/F Action. She-Machine meets with man. The idea of exciting the man makes the She-machine cum. And when it's over and done with all the She-machine wants to do is sleep? Ok. Can we point to this story as an example of reverse gender post-coital physiology? Maybe the real reason to read this story can be found in the music of this sentence: "Too quick, maybe, too sudden, probably, but he was hanging way down, his breathing was quick and deep, his legs were columns of meat and tension." What does ya'll think?

HACK WORK

TAMTT *Take A Minute to Think* Fiction. M/F Action. This is the story where Her Tangh-i-ness counted to a thousand before she turned the page to the next story. Yup. This is the one of the Oh-No-He-Didn't-Go-There! stories. As the dear, departed writing instructor, Blake Snyder of Save the Cat fame once told me, Her Tangh-i-ness Ain't in the Target Audience. Those that are—ya'll know who you is when you read it. A female shares her consciousness with her paying fares and finds herself taking a young Black woman for a session with a riding crop.

WINGED MEMORY

TAMTT *Take A Minute to Think* Fiction. M/F Action. Dusk, a desperate young man named without prospects sells off painful sexual memories in order to afford the cyber-whore of his wet dreams. Each time he does this. He keeps losing more and more of his essential self until the only thing left is to turn the tables on the memory merchant to whom he dealt all his unrecoverables.

EULOGY

WT *Wet* Fiction. M/F Action. Jeff and Julie, two survivors of a broken triangle comfort one another rather orally. Find more of those musical sentences here. "Our breaths synchronized, and we steamed together like a pair of heavy engines." This is the second of the mouth-whore stories.

BUTTERFLIE$

H/OA *Hand/Object Assisted* Fiction. M/F Action. Virtual sex for a female character where thee division between self and other and even male and female gets blurred. Can we say—extreme nipple action? The point of this story is to demonstrate the unbelievable roller coaster that only a Total mindf*ck can deliver.

EVERYTHING BUT THE SMELL OF LILIES

TAMTT *Take A Minute to Think* Fiction. M/F Action. This is the second of the Oh-No-He-Didn't-Go-There! stories. The POV flips from third-person into two first-person streams of consciousness: one is the ambulance driver with an unsavory Kink and the other is the biracial (Black & an unnamed race) hooker whose talent lies in appearing to die so her paying johns can get their f*cks on. You guessed it. The ambulance driver decides upon helping himself to a freebie. The upshot is that Jasmine, the hooker, is the only character still breathing by the story's end.

FULLY ACCESSORIZED

H/OA *Hand/Object Assisted* Fiction. F/F Action. Grrrls getting it on. Val and Cox can Do it much better because Val is a sexy cyborg with the serious Enthusiast level of an attachment. And Cox knows her way around clitoral accessories as well. There's a little something for the fisters and the f*ckers out there.

BABY BLUEBELLE

WT *Wet* M/F Action. Gen-Xers in the audience remember Nightrider and the intelligent car KITT? Throw in a car chase and oral sex while driving with a virtual babe and maybe Roger should have tried harder to stay on the right side of the law.

THE NEW MOTOR

TAMTT *Take A Minute to Think* M/F Action. Inspired Engineer meets with Spurned Woman near Lynn, Lynn that city of Sin. Man's love of gadgetry clashes with a scheming mistress. Didn't Spear remember the old saw about female fury?

GUERNICA

FAPP *Find a Partner Pronto* In a Society where Kink is Capital Offense, Kinky men and women gather together to act out their secret, forbidden desires. By the end of their night and the end of their story reveal the very, realest thrills. This story is a political nightmare for open Kinksters.

HEARTBREAKER

H/OA *Hand/Object Assisted* F/F Action. What happens with an opponent who takes the struggle to the bedroom? Read on. Kusa the hardened female cop encounters a red-headed vixen called Nine. They fall into bed, Kusa busts Nine afterwards, but Nine lets the reader in on the mega-doublecross pulled off by the eponymous, gender-switching Heartbreaker

SWITCH

TAMTT *Take A Minute to Think* F/M Action. One could ask the career Submissive what brings her back again and again to the experience of being owned and point to this story as an explanation.

INTERCORE

H/OA *Hand/Object Assisted* M/F Action. Hmmmn. Public acts of indecency need an electronic eye, a digitsl peephole, to zoom in close and closer. This story holds up the assertion that a dildo is a girl's best friend. The best and most quake-tacular cums are the ones she can give herself.

TECHNOPHILE

H/OA *Hand/Object Assisted* Cybernetic cock anyone? M/M Action. Young chicken (jailbait) meets with a doctored rooster. The boy birds connect in the only means left to them when the Long Thrust can't get it up. Another mouth-whore celebratory tale.

SKIN-EFFECT

TAMTT *Take A Minute to Think* Fiction. M/F Action. Pepper the survivor of a "wilding" offers wounded veteran Lionel Guardino a new lease on Life as her jacked-up companion and the shiny, new enforcer of her revenge. Topping from Below.

SIGHT

WT *Wet* Fiction. M/F Action. Aliens, called the Elgin, Cortez, a middle-aged, human artist, and Rosalinda, a young woman combine to complete the artist/aesthete/inspiration circuit.

THE SHOW

WT *Wet* Fiction. M/F Action. Exhibitionists out there ought to know the pinnacle of erotic performance is conducted in the heart of the city that never sleeps. You didn't think they were going to do their porno in Philly didja?

THIN DOG

FAPP *Find a Partner Pronto* Action. Music and sex are always an irresistible combination. But the idea of hearing music along with the sensation of being made love to/loving your favorite rock hero/ine sounds like a recipe for making Woodstock, Lollapalooza, and South by Souwest Music Concert combined sit down.

THE BACHELOR MACHINE

TAMTT *Take A Minute to Think* M/F Action. An abandoned synthetic woman pays for weekly sex sessions with a human male. In her clinging to the sexual exchange as the prelude to emotional and social intercourse, the nameless android proves herself as human as the lovers who rejected get once she was no longer new.

EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL PAINTED DOLL

TAMTT *Take A Minute to Think* Fiction. M/F Action. As a creative person, and a figure painter, I can appreciate M. Christian's fondness for combining artistic expression and arousal. And why not set this story also in that land of great opposites: public restraint and private passions: Japan. Makes this reader want to run and find a pretty, geisha-boi and have at him.

HOT DEFINITION

WT *Wet* F/F Action. Neko, another biracial: Asian and Black protagonist hopes to escape the sentient electronic Daemon pursuing her and her female lover. Neko makes it to the end of the story, but the Daemon has made off with the one person most precious to her.

NEW BEDFELLOWS: SEX & SCIENCE FICTION

The essays that seem to close out M. Christian collections are worth perusing for fertile, fiction-bent minds. Here is a conversation with the great Cecelia Tan and M. Christian waxing from what's wrong with much of the sex in SF to the future of Erotica. Even one disagrees with the suppositions, the essay makes for stimulating reading.


Note: This copy of The Bachelor Machine was an electronic edition provided by the author. Her Tangh-i-ness usually reviews on a for-the-love basis. No lucre has been involved.