Wired Hard 5

Wired Hard 5 continues the tradition begun with the 1994 publication of Wired Hard, collecting five stories examining gay male sexuality through the lens of erotic science fiction and fantasy. Blending spacecraft and magecraft, hard edges and sincere sweetness, humanity and something other, the five stories in Wired Hard 5 explore themes of isolation, loneliness, and intimate connection.

In Jonathan Hepburn’s “The Halfway Point,” an astronaut finds himself gravitating toward a crewmate as their ship moves farther from Earth, while in Hero Freyr’s “Human Bonds,” an elf stripped of his magic finds solace in a being as lost as he. “The Amnesiaphiliac,” by Benji Bright, chronicles a doomed romance in a floating city consumed by an epidemic of forgetting, and in Laylah Hunter’s “Direct Connection,” a sentient artificial intelligence and a human man make the most intimate connection of all. Finally, an apprentice sex mage comes into his own in Sasha Payne’s “Season of Fire.”