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If you look back at my life, it's obvious I was destined to become a maven of erotic science fiction. The early warning signs were all there. Who was my favorite Batman villain? Catwoman. What was my favorite Star Trek episode? It's a toss up between the one where Spock kisses Uhura and the one where Kirk and a sexy beast woman are made into slaves. How about the original bisexual space oddity, David Bowie? I grew up in the seventies reading Roger Zelazny, masturbating, and waiting for adulthood to arrive.
Then, in 1991, when I was twenty-four, I moved to Boston and discovered

Best of Sci-Fi Sex
		The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood "Arousal and orgasm are no longer necessary; they would be a symptom of frivolity merely, like jazz garters or beauty spots." So Long and Thanks For All the Fish by Douglas Adams "They had emerged at the top of the high-stacked cumulonimbus, and now began lazily to drift down its contours, as Fenchurch eased Arthur in turn from his clothes." Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein "Valentine Michael Smith grokked that physical human love was not simply a quickening of eggs." The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin "I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainishnorm one-sexed human beings . . . " Evolution's Darling by Scott Westerfeld "He could have used filaments so thin that they wouldn't have triggered a gag reflex, but he wanted her to feel it."

two subcultures at once: science fiction fandom and the bondage/SM/leather community. I was working a day job in book publishing while trying to start my career as a writer by scribbling at night. My main problem seemed to be my inability to finish a story. When writer's block hit, I would spend my time participating in Internet newsgroups and mailing lists about bondage and SM, learning about the lifestyle, fantasizing and wondering — when would I get a chance to smell the leather myself, to spank and be spanked, to grovel at someone's boots? I'd had about enough of the usual writer?s torment — self-flagellation — and wanted to get in on the fun.
     My dual pursuits eventually led me to a story idea that combined science fiction with an explicit SM scene — what if a couple who could read each other's minds attended a wild bondage party? — and "Telepaths Don't Need Safewords" was written in a single sitting. Two more smut-filled sci-fi tales followed in quick succession, which I quickly posted to my Internet groups. Feedback from readers was tremendous — I felt I'd finally written something worth reading, but I was left with the dilemma of where to sell this kind of work. There was nowhere for me to sell a story with three sex scenes, telepathic characters and a kidnapping and rescue in the middle of it. Too much plot for porn; too much sex for science fiction; too much of everything else for literary erotica. What was I to do?
     I did what I've done every other time in my life when what I wanted didn't exist: I created it. When I was a teenager and despondent that there was no English-language source for news about Puerto Rican teen supergroup Menudo, I started publishing a bi-weekly newsletter on my manual typewriter and founded the largest Menudo fan club in the world. This time the technology was a bit more sophisticated, but the project was essentially the same. I coined the name Circlet Press, got an ISBN prefix and became a publisher.
     Circlet's mission statement was "celebrating the erotic imagination." Our first book was a hundred copies of my "Telepaths Don't Need Safewords" chapbook, and our "printer" was the photocopier in the basement of the publishing house where I worked during the day. I bought a behemoth-sized stapler, sat on the floor of my studio apartment, saddle-stapling them by hand, and carted them to a science fiction convention near New York City.
     I came home with none, and orders for two hundred more. By that summer I had manuscripts overflowing my mailbox, mostly from science fiction writers telling me they had a ton of stories home in a drawer that were too erotic for the mainstream. A month later we released a second chapbook, three stories by Boston writer Lauren P. Burka called "Mate," and announced plans for a series of four anthologies on various topics: TechnoSex (erotica with a high-tech, futuristic slant), SexMagick (sexual energy could work magic), Forged Bonds (whose working title was "Elves in Bondage") and Feline Fetishes (because, well, both I and my partner have this thing for cats).
     It was in Circlet's first year that I finally had my first SM experience — at a science fiction convention. I met my first girlfriend at a panel on gay themes in sf, and the man I'd later call "master" at the costume competition. My first SM play party took place at a science fiction convention, as well. My aforementioned play partners, a few other folks from the Internet newsgroup alt.sex.bondage (a.s.b) and I realized we were all going to Gaylaxicon in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. We reserved some connecting hotel rooms and posted one sign on a bulletin board that read simply "a.s.b party" with the room number. Close to seventy-five people showed up. Someone started tickling me, and the next thing I knew, I was tied up and blindfolded on the bed. The details are a bit of a blur to me now, but I distinctly remember nipple clamps, cognac and a fish scaler. Late into the night, an expedition of party-goers went out to the parking lot to light one another on fire — since they figured the hotel would frown on that indoors. It was sometime after the sun rose that those of us remaining locked the door, pulled the blackout curtains and slept stacked like cordwood in the king-size bed.
     Like some sort of Mendelian geneticist, I keep trying to encourage both of Circlet's parent genres to break out of their formulas by cross-pollinating. Both pornography and science fiction can all too easily fall into same-old mode, although mixing the two is certainly no guarantee that predictability or cliché will be avoided. (Please, no more stories about aliens in search of semen, travelers stumbling into faerie ring orgies in the woods or vampires picking up their victims in singles bars.)
     Which brings us to the obvious question: Why are so many sf geeks pervs, and vice-versa? Why the overlap between these two communities? Maybe it's something as simple as the dramatic quality of both worlds (so many personas, so little time). Maybe it's the way both science fiction and SM can press the limits of their genres, pushing literature into speculative poetry, pleasure into pain — making everything just a little bit more heightened. Or maybe it's just the fact that so many sex radicals and sf fans perceive themselves as outsiders, and thus find a bond — erotically and intellectually — with others who feel shoved outside the circle of the "normal." Most likely, it's all of these things, and I feel lucky to have hit upon this nexus in my own psyche and to have built that connection into something concrete through publishing. After all, without science fiction, I could never delve so deeply into the questions that intrigue me most: What do people desire and why? How does our biology interact with our fantasies? Because such writing roams outside the "real," the dully possible, into abstract worlds of philosophy and metaphor, it's perfectly suited for that task. As both writer and editor, my ambition is to provoke people to think about gender, attractiveness, human communication, relationships, queerness and desire — and if I'm lucky, I'll arouse them at the same time.

* * * *

She paints her fingernails with metallic gray nail enamel, each one a blank TV screen: tiny TVs on the ends of her fingers. If she were a futuristic-minded chick like me, she'd call their color cyborg-eye gray. But she isn't, so I'm the one who imagines her nails powering up, flickering to life as she fans her fingers in front of me. Tiny images flash in unison like some appliance department hallucination, and she runs the tips of her nails down the fabric of my shirt.
     She sucks on her finger and I imagine sound, too, the tinny voices of a laundry soap commercial drown out as she wraps her tongue around her finger.
     She's slipping her wet finger between my legs, now two fingers, and three. Her pinky and thumb come together, and five sitcoms at once jabber on, laugh tracks out of sync; smiling well-scrubbed faces reciting one-liners are buried in the folds of my cunt.
     Maybe in the future, I think, we'll experience TV with something other than our eyes and ears . . . but then she interrupts my thought, demanding to know, "What is so funny?"
     Lucille Ball is taking a pratfall, Jerry Seinfeld is talking about nothing, Alan Hale is taking off his hat to hit his little buddy with, Robin Williams is drinking through his finger, and Henry Winkler — the Fonz — is giving me a big thumbs up.