This morning, I answered a question over on Quora, the social media site where I spend most of my time these days.

The question asked, What do partners say to each other in sex, like when you are thrusting and such?

As it turns out, I had an example from some rather spectacular sex last night, the kind of sex that makes you see the face of God, that may have led to my lover and I creating a new literary genre…one that we’re tentatively calling “hyperurbanized noir retrofuturism.” It’s kind of a spinoff of the cyberpunk retrofuturism of entertainment like Bladerunner or Akira or Cyberpunk 2077.

Okay, so.

I call my Talespinner my Talespinner because she has a gift for weaving worlds from words, something she does pretty much all the time, including during sex.

When we have sex, we build shared worlds—we talk about fictional characters and settings in which characters are having sex. We explore fantasies together by inventing these characters and setting them loose in a shared universe very different from ours.

Like the dystopian, oligarchical world we’ve created where the State is controlled by a kleptocratic class and the apparatus of the State, modeled loosely on Stalinist Russia, arrests political dissidents who are conditioned and brainwashed to serve as pleasure objects, leased to the oligarchs for staggering sums of money to fulfill the oligarchs’ most perverse desires. (We’ve opened this shared world to my crush and her other boyfriend, and written over 170,000 words of fiction with a cast of dozens of characters.)

So before I go further, a bit of backstory is necessary.

Some time ago, I shared this H. R. Giger image with my crush:

I said it looks like a machine for forced sexual stimulation, she pointed out that all sexual stimulation can be forced sexual stimulation if it goes on for long enough, and at that point it was off to the races.

Before long we’d invented a world in which an all-female Yakuza-style street gang had arisen with a unique punishment for members who erred: rather than cutting off a finger to atone, they were strapped into this device, then raised into a soundproofed plexiglas cube in the middle of a posh restaurant owned by the gang, where the machine forced orgasm after agonizing, unendurable orgasm from their helpless bodies for eight or nine hours while they screamed and sobbed in uncanny silence for the amusement of the restaurant’s patrons.

I shared this scenario with my Talespinner. One of the things I love about my polycule is that it’s fertile ground for creativity: my Talespinner’s other boyfriend is contributing to an erotic anthology my Talespinner and I will be publishing next year, my wife has created the entire history of fashion for my Black Iron universe; my wife designed the Victorian house that serves as the setting for a novel my crush and I were writing, that my Talespinner may help finish…you get the idea.

It’s magnificent.

Anyway. I shared this scenario with my Talespinner, and together we fleshed out the world a retrofuturist, quasi-cyberpunk world that abandons the signature chrome-steel, neon, weirdly Orientalist fetishistic background of traditional cyberpunk:

for a more grounded environment that’s less chrome and neon and more Cubist hyperurbanization:

Imagine an endless, densely packed urban environment, but not the Sprawl from Neuromancer; rather, this is an immense vista of great towering Cubist architecture, spanned by a complex web of covered pedestrian bridges far above street level—a huge multilevel Cubist metropolis in which you can walk for a dozen blocks or more without ever descending to street level.

Subways accessed through stations beneath the buildings allow travel to the far corners of the immense city without ever setting foot on the street (which is dominated almost exclusively by robotic taxis and self-driving supply vehicles).

Our main character is a member of this all-female gang, young but ambitious and on an upward trajectory through the ranks.

You will notice that the Giger painting features space for two people. What, then, happens when only one person transgresses against the gang’s rules?

In such a case, another gang member may volunteer to serve alongside her or, if no volunteers are forthcoming, one is chosen at random. Serving in this capacity awards a certain measure of honor and respect, more if it’s voluntary than if it’s assigned randomly.

The tale my Talespinner and I wove over many hot kinky sex sessions during the past week or so, involves our unnamed gang-member heroine and an unnamed gentleman who happened to be dining in this restaurant (owned and operated by an ostensibly retired former gang member, of course) on a day when our heroine is randomly chosen to endure hours of unimaginable sexual torment alongside another member caught transgressing the gang’s rules.

He becomes so enamored of this mysterious tattooed woman locked in this cube, suffering so magnificently, that he waits until the restaurant closes and follows her, still shaking and weeping, home.

A dangerous game to be sure, but he is a civilian and has no idea what he’s up against.

He spies on her for weeks, but somehow whenever he tries to follow her to figure out what she does for a living, poof! She vanishes like a ghost.

Eventually, he works up the courage to ask her out for coffee, and is quite surprised when she accepts. They have a few dates, and soon become lovers…

…but…

…but…

…she knows, of course. She knows how she first came to his attention. She knows he has stalked her. And she resolves to teach him a lesson.

Which brings me, in roundabout fashion, to my answer to the question, what do lovers say to each other during sex, like when thrusting and such?

You need to understand that at this point, my Talespinner and I had had sex…um, four times, I think? Not including the threesomes with her other boyfriend the night before.

The last time we had sex, I’d already had…oh, man, I don’t know how many orgasms. Enough I was convinced I couldn’t have another.

That’s when it started.

My Talespinner murmured in my ear an entire scenario in which our heroine took this fellow out on a leisurely day-long date, one where she gave him every possible opportunity to come clean. She even took him to the indoor garden cafe in the building across the street from her apartment, and had lunch with him at the one table overlooking her apartment from which he spied on her.

She was disappointed, of course, that he failed to be forthcoming about his behavior prior to asking her out. Disappointed, but prepared.

So when she invited him back to her apartment, she’d already set up the chair with the straps and the projecting rod and all the implements she needed to impress upon him the value of open, honest communication in a relationship.

Including a rather lovely item of jewelry something like this, but with the blades blades on the fingertips wickedly sharp:

She has, while she binds him, a calm, reasoned conversation with him, about honesty and openness, and how she’d really hoped he’d be more forthcoming, but regardless, the time for that conversation had come, and now there was nothing for it but to talk.

It was around the point where she described the narrow, almost thread-thin, but very strong cords she wrapped around his body to encourage him to remain very still without struggling lest the cords cut painfully into his skin, and the way she ran those thin sharp blades down his skin, that I had the last, strongest, and definitely most painful orgasm of the evening, and indeed of the past several months.

We will likely end up writing a novel set in this world, but there are so many projects in the pipe ahead of it I don’t see us starting on it until 2027 at the earliest.

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Now, of course, I’m not suggesting this is what you, dear reader, should necessarily talk about during sex. It may be that hyperurbanized noir retrofuturism isn’t your particular taste.

Perhaps you’d rather talk about the interpersonal social dynamics of My Little Pony, or the alternative economics of non-monetary tips for the pizza delivery dude.

The point is, talk about your interests. Listen to your partner talk about their interests. Find the overlap. Explore the area between.

This might mean that you talk about what you’re doing, or what you’d like to. It might mean you invent characters in fictitious worlds and talk about them. It might mean you talk about Vulcan philosophy, or pon farr rituals, or how the latter doesn’t really mesh with the former but is really more about Gene Roddenberry’s own particular and peculiar sexual tastes.

Whatever.

You don’t need someone else to tell you what’s okay to talk about. Explore! It’s your life and your relationship.