Electra Shepherd is the pseudonym for an award-winning, bestselling romance/women’s fiction author. She enjoys travelling, reading, and extreme Lego.
I blame it on Star Trek: The Next Generation. No, going further back, I blame it on Marvin the Paranoid Android. The chronically depressed robot was chief of the many reasons that I loved Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. He had a brain the size of a planet, he’d been created by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation to embody a genuine human emotion, and he was the ultimate underdog.
I loved Marvin. I wondered what it would take to make him happy. I wondered if, given the right female companion, he might start to embody other human emotions as well. Curiosity, for example. Attraction. Lust.
Data, the android in The Next Generation, was famously Fully Functional. Legend has it that when Denise Crosby, who played Tasha Yar, was asked at a conference about her character’s sexual encounter with Data, she said that Data had three speed settings, “Slow, Fast, and OMG”.
Who wouldn’t love that? And Data had the added advantages of being hugely curious, immensely capable, staggeringly intelligent, and—crucially—enormously vulnerable.
I
think robots are sexy. Not your bog-standard assembly line robot who builds 6000 Toyotas a day (although I’ll admit to a weakness for Tony Stark’s assembly-arm robots in Iron Man, if they could speak in Jarvis’s voice)…I think sentient robots are sexy. Robots who want, and desire, and try to be human. Robots who need a teacher in the intricacies of human emotions and sexuality.
They might have variable settings for your pleasure, but they’re more than sex toys. They can discuss quantum physics, for example, or make an omelet, or lift a house, or crush the bad guys, or survive naked in space.
Sexy. Right?
My Body Electric series of erotic romances is set in the near future and is about the Morgenstern family, who live with three house robots who tend to their every domestic need. The robots, Blue, Green and Red, are human in appearance (except for their bald heads, glowing eyes, and Crayola-coloured skin). They move and talk like humans, but they have no nipples or genitalia.
The first book, Love Machine, starts one night when the batteries in Cally Morgenstern’s vibrator run out. One of the house robots, Blue, volunteers to help her out by functioning as a vibrator. But it soon becomes clear that Blue has begun to develop a personality, emotions, and an intense curiosity about human sexuality. Together, Cally and Blue decide to build him a few necessary parts he’s been lacking…
The second book, Man or Machine, is about Cally’s sister Ilsa, a lonely, geeky computer genius. Inspired by the success of Blue’s transformation, she builds herself a fully-functional robot lover, and embarks on a series of sexual experiments with him. Though she’s not counting on her ex-boyfriend finding the remote control. The robot, Dallas, has learned his speech patterns from watching porn on the internet and he’s just as interested in Ilsa’s ex Hal, as he is in Ilsa.
I’m writing the third book, Hardware, now, and it’s about two male robots who are extremely sexually compatible…but who are less successful at understanding what love is. There’ll be a fourth, too, called Software, with a rather unusual electrical heroine.
When Love Machine was published, I wanted to buy myself a little present to celebrate and so I searched high and low for the perfect blue vibrator. I still haven’t found it, and I’d appreciate any recommendations!
Contact Electra:
http://www.electrashepherd.com
@ElectraShepherd on Twitter
Electra on Facebook
Where to buy Electra’s ebooks:
From her publisher, Ellora’s Cave
On amazon.com
