Month: October 2021

Image: John T

In our last essay about life in the City, we talked about how having an extended lifespan and almost total physical safety all the time might change ideas about risk, making physical risk seem much less important than emotional risk. (In fact, this is an important theme in the fourth novel, tentatively titled Unyielding Devotions, due out in 2023).

Partly because of this, as well as some of their norms around consent, the people in the City have a very different idea about what relationships look like. There’s no Standard Model, no template of what a relationship “should” be…in short, no “relationship escalator,” with its expectations about the steps a relationship progresses through meeting, dating, living together, marriage, kids, and death. In our real world, to step off that path, that escalator, is to be forced to return to the start and to have ‘wasted’ all that time — a concept that probably keeps more people in their relationships than you would expect. Sunk cost fallacy shows up everywhere, it seems…

Relationships in the City are all bespoke. They may involve two people or more than two people. They may be explicitly intended to be an indefinite commitment, renewed each time the designated duration draws near to an end, or more free-form. They may or may not be solemnized or publically acknowledged by a commitment ceremony, and those that are, may have any kind of ceremony that suits the people involved (though there are some common templates, as we explore in the third novel, The Hallowed Covenant). They may or may not be intended to include rearing a child or children.

Part of this flexibility is the post-scarcity setting; there is no need for a socially recognized way to handle joint finances or other resources if there’s no such thing as money! Instead, such ceremonies are purely social and emotional.

“Today we celebrate a cleansing,” Sayi said. “Tashaka and Sendi call upon the Keeper to wipe away all past transgressions so they may join together with a clean slate.” The air around her vibrated with her words, carrying them to every corner of the enormous hall. The flowing motes of light swirled in a vast whirlpool above the stage. “I call upon Tashaka and Sendi to write down all their past transgressions against one another, so they may be washed clean by the Keeper. Let each transgression be erased as if it never happened.”

Tashaka and Sendi dipped pens into the ink pots and wrote on long strips of pale pink silk. As they finished each strip, they handed it to a veiled Confessor, who rolled it up and placed it in the censer. Dense blue smoke rose from within. Sayi could not help noticing Sendi prepared several more ribbons than Tashaka.

When they finished, Sayi said, “Let those closest to Tashaka and Sendi now do the same, so that they move forward in friendship unsullied by transgressions of the past. Allow me to accept the weight of all your sins.”

The people seated behind the balustrade came forward. Tashaka and Sendi stood beside Sayi while their friends wrote on narrow strips of silk. A Confessor took each strip reverentially and placed it in the censer to be burned. Thick smoke twisted in the air.

—from Book Three, The Hallowed Covenant

This flexibility, too, means that ‘comet’ relationships are likely quite common in the City: relationships where people come together for a brief period, celebrate one another, then part ways for a time, each treasuring the memories of the other until life and circumstances draw them together once again. When you live for centuries, a break of a few years or even a decade is less significant. Of course, in such a society there would be no label to indicate that this type of relationship is special or unusual or different from the expected norm — it’s merely a description of one more type of relationship out of many.

This absence of a Standard Model of relationships plays out in nearly every aspect of City life. In the City, most (though not all!) citizens live in great massive towers, each one a cluster of community spaces, recreational spaces, and living areas, where they can be as close to others or as independent of others as they choose. They can have as much community as suits them, with no pressure or obligation to engage in any way they don’t choose to—in that way, the City, despite its high density living, is actually more friendly to introverts than the real world! (Plus the lack of requirement to be around people at work, of course — if you don’t have an obligation to work in order to survive, that is one fewer environment where you might expect to be in enforced ongoing contact with people you didn’t choose to be close to. In fact, that sounds like a great idea for another blog post!)

There’s no expectation that people in a relationship—even a stable, committed, long-standing union—must live together. In fact, in a post-scarcity world where your living circumstances can be literally anything you imagine and moving is a simple as saying “I want to be over here now, please have the drones make it happen,” the idea of ‘living together’ in the sense we in the real world think of it doesn’t quite fit. Characters might think of themselves as ‘living together’ if they share adjoining apartments, and can make or remove the wall between as suits their mood at the moment. Equally, they might think of themselves as ‘living together’ if they both live in a family group, sharing a common space which is set up around their child, in addition to their own private apartments. (This is something we will be exploring further in the fifth novel, as a matter of fact.) Or they might live together in a way that would be very familiar to us, sharing every intimate space down to their bed.

And should you want something else, anything else, that too is available.

Terlyn made her home in a tiny crystal box near an outcropping of rock. A small waterfall flowed over the rock into a little pond. The house was a simple rectangle whose transparent sides and roof were made of glass, nestled beneath a large pergola of wood. In the summer, lush vines covered in tiny purple flowers grew over the pergola. Today, the wood slats were bare. Small tufts of snow lay scattered across the roof.

The door opened at Terlyn’s approach. Inside, the house was just a single room, as spare as it was outside. Terlyn’s home contained nothing other than a large round bed surrounded by a low wood wall open on one side; a wood desk and chair; a low stone wall that partly concealed the necessary facilities; and of course, the opaque black rectangle of the Provider. Beneath her feet, wide planks of hardwood formed a floor that didn’t reach all the way to the glass walls. A garden lined three of the four walls, lush with clusters of small flowering bushes growing from a flat expanse of short grass. Tiny creeping vines decorated with fingernail-sized flowers in gold, red, blue, and violet snaked along the grass, sending hesitant tendrils toward the wood floor.

Terlyn flopped onto the bed. “Walls opaque,” she said. The glass walls turned frosted white. She left the ceiling transparent, so she could gaze at the clear blue sky.

—From Book One, The Brazen Altar

In the real world, the ideas about what a relationship ought to look like, including the notion that people in a ‘serious’ relationship must live together, have the weight of tremendous social expectation behind them. So much so that we often forget these ideals—Mom and Dad sharing a home with Rover and 2.4 children—are in truth quite new, relics of American post-WWII social transformation, not the deep historical traditions many folks believe. (For most of recorded Western civilization, extended multi-generational families, not nuclear families, were the norm.) Even the normalisation of marrying for romantic love, rather than merely as a joining of two family fortunes, is significantly more recent than you might expect!

So what does it mean to live in a society where emotional risk is (relatively more) difficult, there isn’t a commonly accepted model of what a relationship is supposed to look like, and even your living arrangements are as flexible and bespoke as you want them to be?

A person from the real world transported to the City might struggle to interpret relationships there. Without the typical markers we understand to say ‘yes, this is a real relationship,’ things might seem chaotic, anarchistic, confusing. Unsettling, even. How do you know if you’re in a real relationship? How do you know what’s expected of you? How do you know who else might be in relationships? Is a particular individual exclusively committed, or are you allowed to approach them? How do you know what the limits are?

The answer is, you talk about it. The society of the City, even in the dark even-numbered books of erotic horror, prizes consent and autonomy in ways the real world doesn’t, and that means you talk about everything: your needs, your expectations, what you want your romantic life to look like, the expected duration of your relationship.

This is a double-edged sword. (Or rather, triple-edged.) On the one hand, you’re not stamped into assembly-line, cookie-cutter relationships regardless of whether they (or you!) fit or not. On the other hand, you’re living in a society where vulnerability feels more scary than spending three days running through a forest terrified out of your mind, your body available to anyone able to catch you and overpower you, and the only way to be in relationships is to be vulnerable. And on the third hand (hey, you can have as many hands as you like in the City, subject only to the laws of physics and biology!), you are responsible for deciding what you want. Relationships aren’t pre-configured; you have to figure out what you need, then advocate for that, without society doing the heavy lifting for you.

Your life, your choice. You figure it out.

Thankfully, of course, you have a lot of time to do that. You probably haven’t taken your first adult name and moved into your adult life until your 30s or 40s, and from there you have a life that’s basically as long as you want it to be—centuries, typically; many centuries, if you like. You have plenty of time to practice using your words.

And you have a lot to choose from. There is no expectation of monogamy in the City; in fact, social expectations of monogamy may be an artifact of scarcity (yes, we have plans to write about that at some point!). Want a monogamous relationship? Totally cool, as long as your partner is on board. A plural relationship? If that’s your jam, fill your boots! Light, shallow relationships that only touch at the periphery of your life, or deeply entwined relationships that allow you to share everything with a lover for centuries? You can have that. No relationship at all? Nobody in the City will ever, ever ask you when you’re going to settle down, get married, and have kids.

At the end of the day, you’re the one who chooses (in collaboration with your partner(s) of choice, naturally). Nobody will try to make those choices for you.

For many of us in the real world (including both of us!), that sounds fantastically liberating. For others, that probably sounds terrifying. There’s safety in knowing what’s expected of you, what commitment looks like to you and the people around you. Sometimes it can even be a timesaver, assuming you’re lucky enough to have found a partner who exactly matches your relationship style in all the important ways. Of course, you might well think you’ve found such a partner, and then discover many years into the relationship that actually, their attitude toward children is rather different from yours. That’s the danger of not discussing your needs and wants, alas.

And in the real world, many people value themselves with respect to their lovers by how effectively they provide for those they love—which is all but meaningless in a post-scarcity society where nobody has to rely on anyone else for the resources they need to survive. Without that, how might such people know they’re good partners?

Point is, in the City, you can’t go into a relationship holding expectations about what it will look like—or what other people expect, either from you or to offer you. You’re given a toolkit (and arguably one much better than people in the real world receive; the fifth novel will go into child-rearing, childhood drones, and how children are equipped to navigate the City. Every child is uniquely prepared, over many, many years, to be able to function in civic life in a way that most suits their needs and desires, and even children have far more autonomy in the City than a lot of people in the real world), but you’re expected to use it to first figure out what you need, and then negotiate with those you love to build a relationship exactly suited to you.

Perhaps that’s fitting. In a place where everything can be manufactured at will by nanotech assemblers, everything is bespoke. Perhaps it’s somewhat contradictory, given the effortlessness of design and manufacturing, that craftsmanship is built into the City on a very deep level. (Or maybe it’s just very human.) When your very environment and every item you touch is not mass produced, why allow your relationships to be mass produced? Why not apply that same idea of uniqueness to arguably the most important aspect of your life—your relationships?

+3

Divine Burdens is out! You can now find it on Amazon (five days after publication, Divine Burdens is still on the site, touch wood, even though they banned the much less edgy utopian scifi that was The Brazen Altar—giant corporations gonna corp, amirite? Welcome to capitalism, I guess).

As we were discussing Divine Burdens, an interesting conversation on the topic of risk developed and we couldn’t help but share with you!

One of the main characters in Divine Burdens is a woman named Lija, a worshipper of the god called the Hunt. She’s a top athlete, one of the five best athletes in the City, and spends nine months competing with other top athletes for the coveted role of Sacrifice to the Hunt. As Sacrifice, she will spend three days without sleep or rest being chased down by Hunters through a constantly-shifting forest, her body available as a prize to anyone who manages to catch her and physically overpower her. She is both religious object and most honored worshipper in one. 

Divine Burdens is, as we’ve mentioned a time or three before, erotic horror. Lija’s experiences during the Hunt are…well, let’s be politic and call them ‘intense.’ The Sacrifice is given a Blessing that makes her terrified out of her mind and unable to rest, then set loose for wave after wave of Hunters to pursue her.

In the City, this is a high honor, and every single one of the athletes competing for the position is incredibly skilled, competitive, and strong. They all go through extensive, enormously intense training, some of which might quickly break the spirit of a person without access to the speedy healing offered by a medical pod.

Given that, you might be forgiven for assuming that the people who compete for Sacrifice to the Hunt would be utterly fearless. And in a sense, they are.

Lija lay on her back, holding Tatian tightly. She wrapped her legs around Tatian’s hips. They stared at each other for a moment, face to face.

“I almost wish you would win the competition,” Tatian said. “I might enjoy that a lot.”

“Are you conceding?”

Tatian laughed. “Oh, no. There’s no way you’re beating me.” She planted a knee on the platform and wrenched herself violently, twisting herself around in Lija’s grasp. Then she placed both feet on the ground and pushed, sliding them both backward along the platform. It tilted. Tatian twisted sideways. They both rolled toward the edge of the platform, which tilted more and more rapidly until it dumped them off the edge. They fell, still locked in a tight embrace.

Lija cursed. They hit the ground. The world filled with stars. Lija’s grip slackened for a second. That was all Tatian needed. She wrenched herself free and was on her feet again, racing for the stairs.

Lija dragged herself upright. She set out after Tatian, who was already nearly to the top. Tatian trotted out to the center of the platform. The line resumed its sweep.

Lija climbed the stairs, her breath coming in ragged gasps. She stepped out onto the platform. Tatian stepped to the side. It tilted. Lija wavered.

“You’re stronger than me,” Tatian said. “You might even be faster than me. I can still beat you. The winner isn’t always the fastest or the strongest. The winner is the person who’s willing to do what the other one isn’t.”

From Book Two, Divine Burdens

Lija and her fellow athletes are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to win. They’re the best, most competitive, most aggressive elite candidates the City has to offer. Broken bones during the competition? Eh, it happens, hop in a medpod. Just part of the price of being the best. Pain, discomfort, stretching past the normal limits of endurance? It’s how you show you’re the best. They casually accept a degree of physical pain that even the most hardcore extreme sports enthusiasts in our world would not voluntarily agree to (and we plan to discuss that more in a future blog post).

After breakfast, High Priest Henlith and Amakoli rose. “Today,” Henlith said, “we learn who will become this year’s Sacrifice to the Hunt.” A cheer ran through the Hall. 

Brin leaned forward to whisper in Lija’s ear, “I know who I think it should be!” Tatian glowered.

“The Sacrifice represents the strongest of us, the fiercest, the most capable,” Amakoli said. “Many people compete, but only one can be the best. Today, we find out who that is.”

Savine, standing behind Tatian, fixed her gaze on Lija. Two eyes floated in black emptiness. Lija shivered.

“Tonight, this hall will be filled with celebration,” Henlith said. “Let’s go find out who it will be for.”

From Book Two, Divine Burdens

Those who don’t succeed in becoming the Sacrifice in any particular year often become Hunters instead, chasing the Sacrifice through the forest, ravishing her once they catch her. These elite Hunters are also top athletes, people who have trained alongside the Sacrifice—possibly for years—who know how the Sacrifice thinks, who know how to track, who know intimately the layout of the forest that serves as the arena for the Hunt and the playground for the god they all worship.

The Sacrifice, in other words, is in for an…interesting time.

In the real world, signing up for something like this might seem so risky as to be quite bonkers. No, not quite bonkers, very bonkers. In the world of the Passionate Pantheon, the citizens of the City have a very different approach to risk than people in the real world—an approach that comes from living their entire lives knowing that the gods and the AIs always, always have their backs, that nothing can hurt them past the ability of a couple of hours in a medical pod to fix, that their limits and boundaries will never be violated, that nothing bad will happen to them.

Nothing physically bad, that is.

In the Passionate Pantheon, physical risk is treated very differently indeed than it is in the real world, thanks to their culture, their technology, and the omnipresent AI gods and drones.

Emotional risk, on the other hand…

Emotional risk in the City is a whole ‘nother beast. Partly because of the difference in contrast, of course; when you have almost nothing to fear from physical risk, emotional risk feels scarier, perhaps. And practice with assessing risk makes it easier over time to accurately judge, after all, and they get much less practice.

More than that, though, when you spend your life in the same city, a place of only a few million people, and you routinely live for centuries, the fact is, people who you hurt or who hurt you might continue to be part of your community for hundreds of years. This changes the society, and the social contract around vulnerability…something we explore in-depth in the third book, The Hallowed Covenant, and the fourth book, tentatively titled Unyielding Devotions.

What does this mean for Lija and other characters we meet in the first two books?  That stark contrast between physical and emotional risk means characters will routinely, even eagerly, agree to do physically intense—even overwhelming—things (like compete to be Sacrifice to the Hunt) that would be unthinkable in the real world…but emotional risk and vulnerability that are part of our ordinary daily lives become incredibly difficult for them.

 “This might be the biggest bedroom I’ve ever seen,” Brin said. She snuggled up to Lija’s side. “You could host a party in here.”

“The thought’s occurred to me,” Lija said. “It used to be even bigger. I did make one change.”

“What’s that?”

“I had the room divided in half.” She took Brin’s hand again and led her into a second bedroom, appointed much the same as the first but without the tapestry on the ceiling. This room had a couch at the foot of the bed. Beside the couch sat a claw-footed nightstand of tiger-striped wood with a Provider set in its center.

“What’s this room for?” Brin said.

“Well, I was kind of hoping, that is, if you didn’t have any other…I mean, if you don’t mind, I thought that maybe, I don’t know, you and Savine could, well, I mean, once Savine’s finished her term as my bondslave, because, you know, she doesn’t have a choice right now, but you do, if you wanted to—oh, I’m making a hash of this.” Lija rolled her eyes and ran an impatient hand through her hair. “How would you feel about moving in here with me? You and Savine. If you want to, I mean.”

Brin hugged Lija fiercely. 

“Oof! Is that a yes or a no?”

Brin laughed. “I will consider your proposal.” She grinned at Lija’s expression. “That’s a yes.”

“Whew!” Lija said. “That was awkward. This doesn’t mean I’m going to sleep with you every night! I still like sleeping on my own. And—”

“Hush.” Brin kissed her to silence her.

From Book Two, Divine Burdens

In the real world, we have a common expectation of the way relationships are “supposed” to progress. You meet, you date, things get serious, you move in together, you get married (in some societies it’s the other way around—you get married, then you move in together), you have kids, you die. A lot of folks refer to this as the “relationship escalator.” It’s a sort of path society slots you into, which you can’t step off without tumbling all the way to the beginning again (hence ‘escalator’), and it guides your expectations about what a relationship looks like and what trajectory it takes.

In the City, there isn’t a relationship template. Relationships come in a whole colorful tapestry of different forms, with no two relationships looking alike. There are lots of reasons for that—in fact, watch this space, we’re planning a whole essay on this topic!—but the lack of a relationship template means you need to be more emotionally vulnerable, to be willing to ask for what you want without leaning on the Standard Model of what a relationship looks like…but that emotional vulnerability is harder for them than it is for us. And without a relationship template to draw upon, emotional vulnerability itself becomes attached to a lot more risk, and navigating that risk is something citizens of the City do quite differently. (You’ll see some ways that manifests, and what happens during a breakup, in the third novel.) 

(As an aside, for many people in the real world—especially those socialised as women who mostly seek heterosexual relationships—physical and emotional risk are intrinsically bound together. There is very rarely an occasion for emotional risk without the physical, and many experiences of physical harm come with emotional betrayal. So the separation isn’t always as neat and tidy as we’re laying it out here, but the point is, in general, people in the City approach these kinds of risks in ways that aren’t like what happens in the real world.)

The people in the City are, in many ways, extremely emotionally healthy—much healthier on average than we in the real world are, with our weird associations and assumptions around intrinsic value and resources and human rights—though they do have some weaknesses. One of these is grief. Grief and bereavement, especially when it’s unexpected, is something the citizens of the City have a lot of trouble with (and that’s one of the themes in the fourth novel!). People of the City are generally secure-attached, they communicate directly (the way consent is structured in the City encourages direct, usually verbal, communication and clear boundaries), and they have that bedrock sense of safety and security that comes from knowing that your childhood drone, and later the whole of the City itself, is always watching over you protectively…plus of course they live in a post-scarcity society, so they’ll never want for anything like food or shelter.

But they aren’t superhuman. They do feel rejection painfully, even excruciatingly, (though the things they interpret as rejection are different…perhaps that will be a blog post of its own!). They do get their hearts broken, and when you live for as long as they do, heartbreak is on a completely different scale. So they are, perhaps reasonably, more hesitant, more guarded maybe, around emotional intimacy.

When they offer it, they offer it all the way—the fourth novel has some lovely examples!—but it’s not as easy as it is for us, with our shorter lives and our acute awareness of physical risk on top of the emotional risk of relating to others.

At the end of the day, the reasons they do the things they do—the reason Lija and her fellow competitors are willing to fight so hard for the honor of experiencing a ritual that to us would be both intensely painful and extremely horrific, yet become incredibly flustered at the thought of inviting a lover to move in—is the way the society of the City views risk. It’s so radically different from how we in the real world look at it that we, as the authors and creators of this world, aren’t even sure we’ve fully explored the implications! Maybe in the future, we should revisit this topic?

+2

We’ve already talked quite a lot about consent in the Passionate Pantheon universe (check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the series), but there’s always so much more to talk about! It’s a topic that is both expansive and nuanced, and we use the Passionate Pantheon novels to examine consent from a lot of different angles.

One of the differences between consent in the Passionate Pantheon (especially in the darker even-numbered novels) and consent in the real world is that consent in the real world is often assumed to be open-ended, unless it is explicitly revoked—this is the way most romantic relationships, including marriage, work—whereas in the City, consent once given often cannot be revoked, but it is never open-ended in duration. So in the Passionate Pantheon, if you consent to an activity, you’re in it for the ride. You generally can’t change your mind halfway through. However, consent is always given on a case by case basis; consent to an activity today is never assumed to mean you’re willing to do it again tomorrow! Nor that you might be willing to do other similar activities that you hadn’t given consent for. Nor that you might be willing to do that activity with anyone else.

We got to talking about this a couple of weeks ago, and Eunice observed that consent in the Passionate Pantheon works the way some non-kinky people in the real world assume that BDSM works. Sometimes, when people who are unfamiliar with kink watch a BDSM scene (or a Hollywood mock-up of one — and yes, mockery is a deliberately chosen description!) from the outside, they can come away with some strange ideas about how it works. For example, many get the idea that if you consent to be submissive once, that’s it. You’re now A Submissive, the end, and you’ve given up the right to revoke consent from that point on. You’ve signed the contract, as they might say in a certain extremely unrealistic book and movie franchise based on Twilight fanfiction.

In the BDSM community, we know this isn’t how it works (or at least, it shouldn’t be—humans being what they are, we wouldn’t want to be that definitive!). One of the hallmarks of BDSM is that consent is always ongoing. Even in so-called Master/slave relationships, which are built on the idea that the master “owns” the slave, the slave is, in reality, free to leave at any time. Master/slave relationships are a kind of fantasy about total control—yes, even for those who insist it’s not a fantasy! Maybe particularly a fantasy for them, in fact—and the people in such relationships can (and do) choose to end them. There is no way to enforce such a relationship if one party wants to end it without some almost-verging-on-highly illegal actions.

And those are rather less common than religious fundamentalist evangelicals would have you believe, especially in comparison to some of their own activities.

The society of the City is built on a strong foundation of consent. With very few exceptions, consent is baked into the social fabric to a degree that would seem quite strange to us in the real world. Even a person who consistently commits offenses against others is not involuntarily incarcerated against their will. There is no such thing as a prison in the Passionate Pantheon. Rehabilitation is short and intense, invariably taking less than a day, then reparation is done in the community. A person who absolutely cannot exist without harming others may be given a choice to have their brain changed so that their need to harm others is removed (though again, this is never done unless the person agrees to it), or simply excluded from the City. Even this choice would be at the end of a long series of attempts to prevent any damage to others without infringing on the individual’s own freedom of choice. Each person’s right to choose ends when it negatively impacts others, of course, but that doesn’t mean that their ability to choose isn’t important. This is a foundational tenet, maybe only behind the importance of keeping your promises (we’ll come back to that in a bit).

But… (and of course there is a but…)

In the City, it is typically the case that once you’ve agreed to do something, your ability to revoke consent is taken away from you…and this is considered normal and acceptable. Your consent is always, always limited in duration—one activity, one party, one day, whatever—but once you’ve agreed, you may not be able to change your mind. In fact, your subjective experience might deliberately be distorted so that you’re not capable of changing your mind.

Enrilik gestured to one of the nude figures, a tall, curvy woman with long yellow hair. The woman stood spreadeagle at one of the frames, legs apart, arms above her head. Enrilik fastened the straps around her body, then closed the manacles around her wrists. “Kaytin, this is Nayar. Nayar, meet Kaytin.”

“Pleased to meet you!” the woman said. “I’ve heard so much about you. When I found out Jakalva was hosting a party in your honor, I had to be here.” She tugged at the manacles that bound her wrists. “Can you make those a little tighter? Jakalva says I’m in for a terrifying night. It wouldn’t do for me to get loose in my panic.”

Enrilik adjusted the manacles. “Is that better?”

Nayar tugged at them again. “Much better, thank you.” Kaytin knelt to bind her ankles to the lower corners of the frame. “Will you be accepting my hospitality later, when I am confused and frightened?” Nayar said.

Kaytin straightened with a grin. “Maybe. That sounds fun.”

From Book 4, tentatively titled Unwavering Devotions

Citizens of the City are okay with that, in part because of the absolute bedrock sense of safety that comes with growing up in their society. They know, as surely as you know that if you drop something it will fall, that the AI gods and the drones are watching. They know that the gods and drones will intervene if something goes wrong. They know they will not be damaged, physically or mentally, at least not in any way that can’t easily be fixed just by hopping into a medical pod for a short time. They know the boundaries around the thing they’ve consented to will be enforced with absolute, unyielding precision. (We talk about this cast-iron sense of safety in more depth in Part 1 of this series.)

Consent works this way in the City because, while consent is one of the foundational principles of the society of the City, so is the idea that a promise once made can never, ever be broken (I said we’d get back to this point!). As we’ve mentioned previously, in this sense, the people of the City are kind of like science-fiction Fey.

Promises are the deepest, most foundational magic that exists. It’s the bond that makes living in a society bearable, for you and those around you. The idea that you are beholden to others is what drove the ability to create a social contract when we developed as a species, and what greater magic could possibly exist?

They were joined a few moments later by a tall, slim woman with light brown skin and short black hair that looked decidedly tousled. She wore a simple yellow wrap tied loosely around her waist. She walked quietly, as though trying to evade notice, her gray eyes downcast.

“Cleric Penril,” she said, in a voice so soft Avia had to strain to hear it. “I…I need to talk to you.”

The woman—Tessia, Avia guessed, from the sound of her voice—sat, eyes still downcast. Silence descended on the room, broken only by the soft sigh of a light breeze through the open windows. Penril seemed content to wait for her to speak first. She seemed in no hurry to do so. The moment stretched. Avia fought down the urge to break the silence.

Eventually, Tessia spoke. “Last night, I made a promise.”

“You did,” Penril said, his voice even.

“I…I don’t think…it wasn’t what I…I don’t know if…” A tear ran down her cheek. “It wasn’t what I thought it would be.”

Penril nodded. “New experiences often aren’t.”

“What I mean is…” Her voice trailed off. She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. “The thing is…”

“Yes?”

Tessia twisted her fingers together. “I don’t think I can keep my promise.” Her voice was nearly inaudible.

“I see.” Penril sat back with his arms folded in front of him, lips pressed in a tight line of disapproval. “You made a promise not only to me, but to the gods themselves. This is a serious matter.”

“I know!” Tessia wailed. “I can’t do service, I just can’t!”

Penril sighed. “When we created the first gods,” he said, “we struck a pact. The gods would provide for us, and in exchange, we would worship them. Central to this covenant is the idea that a promise is a sacred thing. Nobody, human or god, may break a promise once given. To do so is to tear at the foundation of our society.”

“But I—”

“I’m not finished!” Penril thundered. “If we cannot count on one another to keep our promises, the bonds that tie us to each other in mutual cooperation fail. All of society crumbles. A promise, whether to a person or to a god, is a bond. If you break that bond, what place do you have among civilized people?”

Tessia wept, wracking sobs that shook her slender frame. “I know!” she said. “I can’t—I just—I didn’t know! I thought I could do it! I’m sorry!”

Penril’s gaze held steady. “You have made a promise to the Blesser and to me. You made your promise in the presence of Avia in her role as Vessel of the Blesser. Keeping your promise is not optional. I will expect you to be here half an hour before sundown in four days’ time, prepared to serve the Blesser.”

From Book 3, The Hallowed Covenant

So the idea that consent once given can’t be withdrawn is perhaps much less frightening to them than it is to us, because consent is a promise, not to be broken, and they know that whatever it is they’ve agreed to has a fixed, usually short, duration. The end is always visible from the beginning. Tessia weeps because she is so disappointed in herself, so full of shame that she has broken a promise, but she is not terrified. She doesn’t fear being harmed or forever  judged, or a pariah for not being able to fulfil a promise.

Even in the case where you accept a punishment (and in all but one City you must both consent to, and actively ask for, punishment, and accept that the punishment is fair and just, for it to be given), the punishment too is limited in duration and impacts on your future. If you fail to accept punishment for hurting others, it won’t be forced on you, though the drones and the AIs will seek to protect others from you in the future. Only if that is impossible will you face exile.

And in the society of the City, once the thing you’ve consented to is over, it’s over. Including punishments. There’s no assumptions about who you are or what you are afterward; if you agree to be someone’s bondslave, when the term has ended, you are absolute equals again. There’s no lingering sense that that person has any further claim to power over you whatsoever due to that previous bondslavery. If you are punished, once that punishment is complete the stain of that guilt is entirely wiped clean, with no lingering stigma.

The ways we explore consent in the Passionate Pantheon universe might be uncomfortable to some people. They’re supposed to be. Hot, yes; sexy, we hope—but also uncomfortable, because we use these novels to ask “what if?” questions that hold a mirror up to some of the more uncomfortable parts of the real world.

We have a little suspicion, though, that the way we play with irrevocable consent, especially in the second and fourth books, may, perhaps non-intuitively, make kinky people more uncomfortable than people who aren’t into BDSM.

People (especially female-identified people in heterosexual relationships) in ordinary non-kinky relationships might already be accustomed to the notion that a lot of people believe that once you’ve said yes to something, you can’t stop. Many women have had the experience of feeling they can’t say ‘no’ once they’ve said ‘yes.’ They are often considered, sometimes even told explicitly, that they are selfish if they withdraw consent. That they are possibly even damaging their partner if they stop in the middle of sexual activity. That’s both horrifying and untrue, but it’s also an inevitable consequence of the way our society looks at sex and sexual agency. (We’re not saying only women have this experience, of course, though it’s probably more familiar to female-identified people than male-identified people. The real world doesn’t do a good job of promoting sexual agency for women.) 

And whilst this approach to irrevocable consent might be perfectly reasonable and acceptable in a fictional society where every single individual is both a lot more free of coercion (there’s no such thing as survival sex in the post-scarcity culture of the Passionate Pantheon) and significantly more confident of their physical safety, those two elements aren’t, and can’t be, true in our real world. And yet this belief that consent is a promise that is unforgivable to break somehow still exists in reality, and probably is far more wide-spread than most people would like to acknowledge.

Kinksters, on the other hand, are—at least in theory; the reality is outside the scope of this essay, but let’s just say that theory and practice should be the same, but humans aren’t known for being able to always perfectly practice what they preach, and kinksters are no different—inculcated in a culture that teaches consent must always be explicit, exists only in the moment, and can always be withdrawn. Withdrawing consent is the whole function of safewords!

So perhaps unexpectedly, it’s the people most accustomed to playing with consent who might find the even-numbered novels the most uncomfortable, especially if it makes them horny too. It goes utterly against what they’ve been taught is the ‘better’ style of consent, better than the way mainstream society does it, a more conscientious style that they aim for and idealise. And in our real world, we approve of that. We encourage that, in fact. But the real world is not the world of the Passionate Pantheon, and the circumstances that exist in the real world would be considered intrinsically antithetical to true consent from the point of view of the residents of the City anyway.

We hope the readers will find the scenes we paint arousing, hopefully a little thought-provoking, but we also hope they’ll be at least a little disturbing. The even-numbered novels are erotic horror, after all. And what’s the point of horror if it doesn’t make you look at the world around you and feel just a bit unsettled at the similarities?

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