Stella Goes Abroad
I’m still new enough to this business of writing and selling stories that I still get a real thrill at the news that one of my publishers, Circlet Press, has sold foreign rights to one of my stories. My novel Man’s World has been picked up for a German edition, and I cannot begin to tell you how excited I am about that. I’ve had one previous story, “Understudy”, sold to a foreign publisher as part of the anthology Lust at First Bite, so this isn’t entirely unprecedented, but this time it’s all my words that are wanted across the Atlantic!I read and speak a little German, so I am very excited to see how this turns out. Man’s World is one of the few science fiction stories I’ve written and it seems to me that translating SF must take special skills. In a genre that is already full of made-up words, what must a translator do to re-imagine a word, retain the meaning, then very likely make up yet another new word?
Man’s World is the story of Stella Blue Darter, an interstellar working girl who decides to ditch the game and seek her fortunes anywhere she can land. Fate sends her to Moulton, a planet founded along the tenets of a very strange philosophy. Her adventures in the world of the Fumblars, the Debs, and the Scions create a fun, and I hope, a hot interstellar romp!
Here’s an excerpt from the American edition:
Then light battered her eyelids, brighter than sunlight, and a harsh voice racked her nerves.
“Police. Stand up and put your hands where we can see them.”
Harker’s wonderful heat went away and Stella forced her eyes to open. She would have known the men were cops even if they hadn’t identified themselves or hadn’t been wearing slate gray, military styled uniforms.
Harker obeyed them and Stella figured she should too. She slid off the hood, careful to keep her hands in sight, though the cops couldn’t possibly have worried about concealed weapons on either of them. At first she couldn’t imagine where the officers had come from and then she realized their vehicle hovered only a short distance away, just at the edge of the cliff that overlooked the roaring river below. The craft seemed to be spun of glass or gossamer, completely transparent and powered by a small, whisper-quiet whirling blade. They had come either from above or below and probably had a good view of the action before they debarked and announced themselves. She hoped they had at least been entertained.
One of the men was older and he shined his light on Stella like a spotlight lingering on a stripper. His younger partner seemed more interested in Harker.
“Run ‘em, Dextro,” the older guy said and the younger cop stuck Harker’s hip with a tiny needle attached by a wire to a pod on his belt. Then he stuck Stella, though she hardly felt it.
“Got him, Sarge,” Dextro said, reading his pod. “Harker Merman of the National Petroleum Mermans. Second son. Offworld until about three months ago. Clean.”
“Who’s the slit?”
“No record. Offworlder not in the database.”
The older officer examined the reading on his own pod and Bo seized the moment to flow up Stella’s ankles and cover her in a modest jumper.
Sarge wasn’t happy when his attention returned to her. “The fuck? I told you not to move.”
“I saw it,” Dextro said. “It’s one of them smart dresses.”
The old cop huffed. He looked at Harker and growled, “Get your pants on.” This time Dextro’s disappointment flowered as Harker found his pants and pulled them on.
“You’re in big trouble, Merman,” the sergeant said. “Apart from public indecency, you got a woman here, and an unregistered one at that.”
“We’re from the cotillion,” he said.
“She’s too pretty for a cotillion girl.”
Harker shrugged. “You want to mess with cotillion business, that’s your affair. Arrest us if that’s what you want to do.”
Sarge considered. “I can’t just let you go.”
“How about we give each of ‘em a chance to pay their fine, Sarge. You know what I mean.”
“No fucking way,” Stella said, pinning Sarge with an icy stare. “I’d rather eat roc-lite.”
“How about you tell me how many credits the fine is, officer,” Harker offered. “and I’ll pay you. Save us all some time.”
“Four thousand ought to cover it,” the sergeant said. “If you don’t have it all, you can work something out with Dextro here.”
Harker fished in his pocket and produced a sheaf of bills. He started to count them and Sarge snatched them out of his hand. “I trust you,” he said.
Harker bristled but the younger cop had drawn a weapon.
“Be glad I’m feeling generous tonight, Merman. I could keep your money, claim you stumbled into the falls trying to run away, and keep the girl for myself. For awhile, at least. Now you better get your asses back to the cotillion before I change my mind.”
They mounted the crystalline flyer without looking and it rose rapidly and silently into the air. Looking up, Stella realized the cops’ gray uniforms blended perfectly with the night sky and that their presence overhead was only revealed by an absence of stars.
Harker picked up his shirt but didn’t wear it. They drove back down the mountain toward the city, silent at first, tense from a narrow escape. “Tell me about that dress of yours,” he said, when they had both calmed a little.
“Bo?”
“It has a name?”
“She’s a Beau Brummel plesomesh. Nanotech. Basically a swarm of tiny harvesters and synthesizers with a distributed brain.”
“Can it .. she … make anything you think of?”
“No, she’s programmed for designs and accessories. Her memory is crammed full with designs and soft sense. Without an uplink, she can learn behavior but not new fashions.”
He laughed. “Sounds like half the wives in Scion City. How does she make the fabric?”
“The harvesters are constantly picking up substances from the environment, atoms of this and that, dead skin cells from me.” She laughed. “She’s probably got something of yours now too. All the stuff she collects can be resynthed and she tries to re-use whatever she can.”
“Yeah, I noticed back there that the clothes I took off you vanished when she dressed you again.”
“Bo is a little miracle of efficiency. Wish she could give me lessons.”
“What did she cost you?”
Stella told him and he whistled. “You could buy half of Fumblar for that.”
“Best fortune I ever spent,” she said and laughed, but the laughter faded fast. Harker pulled back into the packed parking lot by the dancehall, returning to the very space they had left. They walked quietly toward the door and Stella cast one last look up at the night sky, but the view up there had been ruined with clouds.
**
Also, I’m very excited to announce that my lesbian shape shifter story “Sweetwater Pass” will be in the upcoming Cleis anthology She-Shifters. “Sweetwater Pass” is the story of a young woman traveling across the American frontier and her encounter with a Native American spirit. Look for She-Shifters in 2012!
Posted by Angela Caperton at 11/20/2011 5:03 PM 
Categories: Man's World, Science Fiction, Angela Caperton, Erotica, Circlet Press
Tags: Angela Caperton Erotica Circlet Man's World
Categories: Man's World, Science Fiction, Angela Caperton, Erotica, Circlet Press
Tags: Angela Caperton Erotica Circlet Man's World
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