The 11 tales in Tan's (Black Feathers: Erotic Dreams) new anthology deal with the eroticism of power exchange--S/M--in futuristic and alternative-reality settings. The best of them fully integrate sex with SF/fantasy and provide erotic heat in satisfactory genre motifs. A futuristic Japanese-flavored culture of rigid societal roles provides the backdrop for Reina Delacroix's submissive/dominant action in "All Things Ripen in Their Own Time." Andrea Horlick's "Training A Priestess" sleeps in the same bed, but its setting is a fantasy temple where acolytes gain spiritual power in exchange for perfect obedience. "Cyber Knight," by Gary Bower, plays in a programmed universe of steamy sexual encounters. M. Christian's stylish "Guernica" is set in a future when kinky sex is a heinous crime and its practitioners risk prison and death to partake in it. Sexuality has been homogenized, licensed and regulated into blandness in "Form," by Pagan O'Leary, wherein it takes an outlaw Master to warm things up. This explicit collection isn't quite the cutting-edge erotics or literature it purports to be, but it's imaginative and a cut above most such offerings. (July)
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