Mate by Lauren P. Burka, Circlet Press
BDSM isn’t my usual; I don’t claim to understand what makes either side tick. But I have to stand in awe of Lauren Burka’s Mate.
Why did I read it? I got lucky, won a contest. She said the prize was an ebook, a collection of short stories. Lauren, you didn’t say the half of what I’d won.
World building-how the hell did she draw such a vivid picture of a future world, one we’d recognize but was clearly beyond us, in such a few deft strokes? Complete with a history, a future, and impending disasters, personal and public? A sentence here, a fragment there, and this somehow future popped off the page. Finding the bones in the story is how I read since I started to write, yet I didn’t want to look at the skeleton, I wanted to look at the beautiful corpus, the whole.
The protagonist-how did she show us his heart, his despair, his hope, using sex that normally leaves me cold? Not just sex, but computers, something lifeless that still has personality, sometimes malevolence?
I won’t spoil it for you. I’ll just tell you to go buy it. Now. Here.
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