Fantastic Erotica: The Best of Circlet Press 2008-2012 - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1613900449 ISBN 13: 9781613900444

Publisher: Circlet Press, 2013

Synopsis

Circlet Press celebrates its 20th anniversary with this "best of" anthology of erotic science fiction stories. The leader in the unique literary genre that is erotic science fiction and fantasy, Circlet Press continues to draw the best talents and hottest erotic voices to their fold. This anthology showcases the very best of those authors who have published with the company since the advent of the ebook. The digital publishing world is full of uncurated self-publishers and exotic pioneers, but Circlet Press continues to maintain the quality of literature that has brought them praise from Publishers Weekly, Salon, and many other publications in their 20 years of publishing. With topics ranging from shapeshifters to space travel, FANTASTIC EROTICA contains only the very cream skimmed from the top of all the many anthologies published digitally by the company in the past five years. Harnessing the power of the reader, the top stories were ranked by Internet poll on circlet.com and the final selections from among the top-ranked stories were then made by Circlet's experienced team of editors.

About this title

About the Author

Cecilia Tan is the preeminent editor and writer of erotica in her generation. Editor of hundreds of anthologies of erotic fiction, author of dozens of novels and books, as well as hundreds of short stories, her mark on both the erotica and the science fiction genres is indelible.

Bethany Zaitz is assistant editor at Circlet Press, and the editor of numerous erotic science fiction anthologies.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Fences, by David Hubbard

Everyone expected the world to end with a bang: nuclear war, alien invaders, even zombies would've been fun. Instead, it was with a whimper; the smallest of sounds, really, a virus of all things. Dubbed the X1N1 virus, X for short, it was the most virulent strain of swine flu ever seen, and no one knew where it had come from or how it had become so lethal. I like to think it was just Darwinism at its finest. Survival of the fittest, and this time around humanity wasn't all that fit. Almost the entire population had already become infected before the virus had even been identified and named. But X was a clever little bug; it didn't always kill its host immediately. Sometimes it would just lay dormant: weeks, months, sometimes even longer. Like years, in my case.

The body count skyrocketed into the millions in the first few weeks after the initial discovery and diagnosis of the X virus. This of course brought on all sorts of responses: transportation was severely restricted in an attempt to slow the spread of the disease; the global economy crashed and burned; people panicked, and riots broke out at every grocery store and Walmart nationwide. News coverage attempted to continue where it could, though as time went on, it became more and more sporadic. Eventually only one network continued to broadcast, and all those fancy TVs were showing nothing but white snow or colored bars, in 1080p HD, of course. Martial law was inevitably declared, but unlike in most apocalypse-themed movies, it actually helped the situation.

Things finally settled into a kind of stunned calm. When the inevitability of the disease finally hit home, we all just learned to deal with it. There were several mass suicides among the scattered "End World" religious cults that sprang up almost as fast as the infection, but once they were gone, everyone else returned to their lives as best they could.

Even me.

About this edition

• Publisher: Circlet Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1613900449
• ISBN 13: 9781613900444
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 244
• Editor: Tan Cecilia, Zaiatz Bethany