Male birth control in the 31st century

I've been back to work a bit on my long-unfinished military sf novel Shame, which is set roughly a thousand years in the future. Yesterday I was adding some details to a sex scene involving a heterosexual couple, and I started to wonder whether or not I should bother mentioning if they have made provisions for birth control or disease prevention. They are both on-duty soldiers and aren't doing it for procreation (also, the kind of people who believe that the only proper role for sex is procreation have gone totally extinct by the time period of my story. Ironic, huh?). Then it occurred to me that I could make passing "futuristic" references to how STDs pretty much don't exist in their world and that birth control is pretty much foolproof by then...and perhaps even it's the case that the male partner is on some kind of hormonal birth control or has some kind of easy and reversible vasectomy technology (using, perhaps, nanotech?). 

In fact, real-world news was made recently about the imminent roll-out of a male birth control pill, which made me think that, sure, of course, a thousand years from now that will probably be standard and I was about to stick that detail into the story. But then I thought about it some more. And I concluded that I don't think that a male birth control pill is really going to fly either in the 21st century or the 31st. I think the only venue where people might opt for it and trust is within a committed relationship such as marriage where perhaps the partners don't want kids or are done having kids. If a woman were contemplating having sex with a dude with whom she were not in a very committed relationship and did not know very well, would she really be smart to trust him when he says, "Yeah, I'm on the pill. It's cool." I hate to think that a guy would lie about such a thing. But if I were a female, that possibility would certainly be in the back of my mind. Of course I am sure it has happened in history that a female has lied about being on the pill, but the stakes are a lot higher for the female since she is the one who might end up pregnant. 

Since I don't buy the premise of the male pill, I decided to drop that detail from my story and decided that talking about birth control and disease prevention probably didn't need to happen in this fictional world anyway, especially not just for the sake of making it seem "futuristic." But then I backtracked again and added in a new detail: I have the dude put on a condom. I don't know if I will leave that in there, but something amuses me about the irony of the situation that I have created in this story, a sort of good news/bad news situation.  The good news: in the 31st century, sex is positive and good, and partners enjoy it as equals...the bad news: in the 31st century, dudes will still be expected to wear rubbers! Damn!

A story for Haiti

Our friends at Crossed Genres suggested that we post some free fiction today and encourage our readers to enjoy it and then donate some money to the Haiti earthquake relief effort.  On the M-Brane blog, I am offering a free download of Ergosphere/M-Brane #12 and suggesting that people donate to Doctors Without Borders. The Crossed Genres team has set up a site where links to other people who are posting stories will be aggregated. Since I have this Live Journal, I will offer some free fiction here as well.  The first piece is a chapter from my National Novel Writing Month novel Days of the Dust and the Diane Rehm Show. The second is an unrevised draft of a recent-written short story called "Mirror." Neither are very good, but they are both rather raw and reflective of how I feel a lot of the time as the world seems to whither away.

"We Spend the Night in a Hotel" from Days of the Dust

When we entered the hotel room, A-R said, “Damn, I am so sick of sweating today.” Now that he mentioned it, it had been a hot evening, car travel was sticky and fatiguing anyway, and the blowing cold A/C in our hotel room really did feel wonderfully luxurious all of a sudden. A-R threw his bag down on one of the beds, kicked off his shoes, peeled off his socks, kept on stripping until he was down to his briefs, and then flopped on his back, face up on the floral-printed bed spread. “It feels so good to be cool again.”

I opened a beer and looked around for the TV remote control.

A-R turned his head leftward and looked at me. “Can I have one of those?” I didn’t answer immediately, so he added, “I mean, you bought like a lot of it. Any chance you were thinking about sharing? I’ve had a hard day, too, you know.”

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"Mirror"

By the end of the third year, Reese had begun to despise his son. He’d started to wish that he had never adopted the boy. He’d done it at Linda’s insistence, when sweet Kirin, the natural son that he’d shared and raised with her for fourteen years, had died of the Waste. But it—the boy’s demise—did not play out as expected. Kirin had lingered past his death-by-Waste far longer than anyone could have imagined, far longer than any parents trying to move past their grief could possibly be expected to endure. 

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