A friend recently recommended that I read stories from the Human Domestication Guide (HDG). This collection of stories takes place in a universe where Earth has been taken over by technologically advanced invaders. These invaders, however, have an imperative to reduce suffering, even if that means imprisoning a miserable person in order to take care of all their physical and mental needs. The stories are technically smut but 90% of their content examines disability, mental health, and gender expression.
It interests me partly because I like researching topics in mental health and gender expression. Additionally, at least some stories are written from the perspective of characters who desire to give someone else total control of their life. This ideology is the exact opposite of my own: everyone should have as much freedom to act as individuals as possible. A government-less society is the ideal… which is about as realistic as the society of post-scarcity, boundless resources, and total control depicted in the HDG. It interests me because I want to understand a perspective so different from my own.
I’m no stranger to picking through smut for other aspects of a story that interest me, but I’ve gotten rather annoyed with having to do so as evidenced by the following rant I gave my friend:
In regard to the Human Domestication Guide, is my fascination with experimental writing showing when I say I’m more interested in the methods the creators use to attempt to maintain coherence across thousands of stories and dozens of writers than I am in the stories themselves? At first I thought the Wiki (which I found first) was the HDG, but then, I found the collection of stories that actually compose it. If it had been the Wiki, that would have blown my mind. Non-linear writing is neat.
I’ve been slowly writing/adding to this “non-linear saga outline,” “digital garden,” thing: https://the-net-digital-garden.vercel.app/. Eventually, it will basically be a collection of my notes, backstories, character profiles, and other things that are too detailed or too irrelevant to put into any book I plan to write. They’re things I needed to flesh out to make the stories and characters that these notes support appear coherent (hopefully) though. At first I thought HDG was something similar that already existed.
I’ve imagined that some writer out there could find my notes and be inspired to write their own story within my universe. I don’t plan to flesh out six planets worth of things after all, just the parts that I need. There’s plenty of room for someone else to write within it… And then I think, “Someone is just going to use all these ideas as a backdrop for smut, aren’t they? I’ve certainly given them enough fuel to do that. -_-”
Smut has it’s place I suppose if it’s allowed HDG to grow as large as it has. It’s just annoying. HDG’s ideas sound interesting enough on their own without pandering to the reptile brain. It’s a plague within experimental writing, too. Even House of Leaves, a book objectively unique and interesting to look at without even reading it, has straight up porn in the middle of it.
I reread Vurt by Jeff Noon a few years ago and realized that it represents everything I dislike reading and everything I dislike about experimental writing. It’s a book about drugs and incest (and robo-dog-cop-vurt-human-shadow hybrids) and written from the perspective of a guy writing a book (that’s a different rant). Yet, I still loved the basic story, the characters, and the subtle experimentation with perspectives, which is what I remember most and remember liking a lot back in high school. I realized I’ve kind of spent the past twenty years trying to recreate what I liked so much about Jeff Noon’s writing but without all the smut.