'Cybersex' edited by Richard Glyn Jones Raven Books 1996 410 pages ISBN 1-85487-447-0

Of the anthologies I've read over the past few years, this is my favourite. Most of the stories are reprints and go back as far as 1966. They are listed roughly in reverse chronology. Several of my favourite short stories of all time are contained in this collection.

There are a certain amount of nerd / geek tales, like the one about the mature couple who buy a sex machine to spice up their love life, have a brilliant bonk session, and then discover they forgot to switch it on. But the book is dominated by stories that display some understanding of gender and sexuality issues, including blatantly transgender stories.

There isn't much in the way of literal lesbigay in here, and what there is, is through the trans-door. Like Maureen F McHugh's 'A Coney Island Of The Mind', where innocent nerd-boy Cobalt, who's into computer games holds hands with enigmatic girl Lamia in VR, and finds he's held something other than a hand with something other than a girl. 'Learning About Machine Sex' by Candas Jane Dorsey has a gay man as the het female protagonist's best friend.

I feel so close to Bettina, it's unreal. And I have a strong need to point out, that a large proportion of people who mess with gender, do it because bodies do matter, not because they don't.When it comes to sex Bettina craves genital intimacy. And she's got the most gorgeous boyfriend, but the only embraces he wants are the virtual kind. In his games, he chases her through endless dark corridors, and, how shall we say, *mails* her a disembodied orgasm, unrelated to any sex action in the game narrative. In other words, he mails her when he should be nailing her.

Is this really what men want? 'Bodies don't matter', he says. She bets him that they do. He wants to disappear into the world of VR forever and entirely. I won't tell you what Bettina does to the raven-haired beauty in order to win the bet, only that we never find out who won, and my greatest fear is that she may, ultimately, have lost. Who will join me in my great cause to ensure victory for Bettina?

Because body modification is such a popular SF trope, trans always seems round the corner, and even if it isn't literal, it still feels close to the bone to one who's messed with his biology.

James Tiptree Jr's 'The Girl Who Was Plugged In', again isn't literal trans, but still dysphoric, being about the mind of ugly girl P Burke operating (via remote control) the body of beautiful girl Philadelphia / Delphi, but without being able to experience sensual pleasure. She can feel touching and being touched, but merely functionally.

Like a very long distance strap-on, Barbie-doll-like Delphi, (can't remember whether she's made of latex or not) becomes a celebrity dating another, performs all the usual beautiful girl things, performs the sex, and it's not that she objects to the stereotypical nature of the performance she has to do or the appearance of the body, it's the fact that she can't feel a thing with it that ultimately leads to despair. Bodies do matter. *Sensation*. Not performance. I would very much have liked to have met Tiptree.

Joe Haldeman's 'More Than The Sum Of His Parts' works like a counterpart to the Tiptree story. Protagonist Dr Wilson Cheetham looses his dick and about half of the rest of his body in an accident and is outfitted with high-tech prosthetics. His new parts mimic what his natural ones could do, but are much more powerful. Sensation is not an issue here, but rather the dangers of dating 'Superman', unless you're superhuman yourself, I suppose.

So while the girls want, forever, to *feel more*, the boys are forever afraid of feeling anything, and the loss of control that might result. In this I'm with the girls.

Storm Constantine ['Kiss Booties Night-Night'] and Harlan Ellison ['Catman'] do sex between humans and machines, here quite literally machines, as in the hardware not the software. The hardware goes into the software, or, the hardware goes into the hardware, outsch! Outsch in both cases really, but a very orgasmic outsch.

Both stories present their characters sexual preferences / machine-curiosity as deviant. Constantine's female masochism doesn't quite work out, but Ellison goes all the way with 'Catman', the sex scene itself being only the proverbial climax of a story that is great in all other ways too. If only all short stories were that good. When I read this for the first time, it made me believe that reading SF short fiction was definitely a good idea. A blue-print for how it should be done.

Fed up with seeing what his mother is doing to his father, one time het protagonist, Neil Leipzig, turns away from women and towards machines, no matter the consequences, and as always, there are those who share his passion. He discovers a community, a culture growing from the sexuality.

Fursday, this Fursday, I me I get turn." Neil felt a terrible kinship and pity and recycling of terror. This little thing, here beside him on this ledge, this remnant of what had once been a man, before it had begun dreaming of metal surfaces, of electric currents, of shining thighs, this thing had been no better than Neil Leipzig. Was this the future?'* (Ellison, Harlan: 'Catman' 1974)

There's also a reversal of what I said earlier about girls + boys - Ellison's boy has no fear, maybe because he's a deviant, maybe because in his world the women are more powerful. Whereas Constantine's girl chickens out when the moment comes, opting instead for the stale dominant woman routine.

Connie Willis: 'All My Darling Daughters'. Simply the best story. This truly shocked and moved me. Maybe my favourite short story of all time.

Sex-crazed Octavia attends an orbiting boarding school, where some of the boys and girls are owned 'corporately' so to speak, the property of the super-rich. There's a terrified new girl in her dorm, and there's a craze involving genetically engineered pets, and worst of all, the boys have lost all interest in fucking the girls. What's the connection?

Connie Willis accomplishes that rare feat of tackling child abuse while staying sex-positive at the same time, when so many other writers can only do a simple 'sex is good' or 'sex is bad', and as far as story endings go, they don't come any better than this.

In Will Self's 'Profit And Lust', future mothers-to-be have their fetuses clothed gender-appropriately in the womb, so that they don't have to be born naked, and grow up into inadequate misfits. There's no lesbigaytrans or alt-sex-gen in Jeff Noon's 'Artificially Induced Dub Syndrome', but I still adore it for the way it does music + sex.

The last and oldest piece, 'Day Million' by Frederik Pohl, again does trans, but more in the spirit of an Egan than a Tiptree. Since the lovers in this story never literally / physically / genitally touch, it's 'okay' that the girl has a boy history, and the boy is a cyborg anyway. So Pohl means well, and that's nice, but ultimately simply evades the heart of the matter.

In hard science fiction circles Greg Egan is regarded as somewhat of a philosopher. If the age of science fiction is 12, then Egan is 13. He mixes hard science with questions of identity. Perhaps so. But - why does he never get anywhere remotely interesting? I make more profound discoveries peeping down my kitchen sink plug hole, than accompanying his heroes into a black hole. (The Planck Dive). Once I read a glowing review of one of his novels. It was about two pages long and never once mentioned any of the characters. Therein lies the problem, I think. An Egan character isn't so much cardboard, cardboard being too hard and dry,

but glib, slippery and virtually frictionless. He slides and slithers through the universe like a wet turd.

I'm sure Egan can do the physics, and there are those to who this matters, and I am not one of them, so maybe I should just ignore him, but since 'Closer' is one of the most trans stories in the book, I'm allowing myself to go on a bit longer. [If any of you readers have a more positive vision of Egan's alt-sex-gen, please do send it in.]

Michael wants to get closer to his girlfriend. There are some things about her he just doesn't understand. As this is a far future world, he proposes an experiment involving the couple switching bodies for a while, him in hers, she in his. Then a period where they both have his body and do a gay male thing, then the lesbian version, etc. And the only thing Michael ever has to say about his female experience, is that 'orgasms are more intense'. At the end of 'Closer' our Beta couple split up, and Egan informs us that it is because they now know everything about each other, a cliché also known as 'The mystery's gone.' I think they split up because, having found out everything about each other, they found that there was nothing there.

Perhaps I'm unfair. Maybe Egan's more clever than I think. This might be his version of Angela Carter's 'tabula erasa'. There are indeed drone-people. They might be nuns today and nazis tomorrow, with no understanding of the difference between the two, and only concerned with performing their given roles as efficiently as possible.

My, it's such fun being a freak. I lay waste to the world around me, and it cuts me to pieces, and then I mess all over the debris, and the landscape is forever changed, as is my most immediate environment: my body. That's Science Fiction. Recommended especially to you symbolically-minded folk out there. Get in touch. I wanna meet you

Other stories are by Michael Hemmingson, Martin Amis, Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Kathe Koja, Gene Wolfe, Pat Murphy, Lisa Tuttle, Rudy Rucker, Manuel Van Loggan, Ian Watson, George Zebrowski, Nancy Kress, Jeff Dantemann, David Gerrold