Atlas Shagged (a parody)

By Fraser Sherman

Fantasy in strange times and strange places.
In Sword of Darcy you'll see Conan the Barbarian take Mr. Darcy's role in Pride and Prejudice?
The Wodehouse Murder Case reimagines Bertie Wooster as a wizard who write murder mysteries on the side. Only now he has to solve one …
Atlas Shagged turns Ayn Rand's iconic hero John Galt into "Big Johnson" Galt, the porn star out to stop the engine of the world — Internet porn.
A Wall Street powerhouse wakes up in Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears the Clown to discover he's turned into a circucIn Dark Satanic Mills a plucky Satanist from the Midwest struggles to make in the Big Apple world of Satanic lifestyle-magazine publishing.

This collection offers magic and mystery, romance and comedy. There's death and deceit, but no tragedy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Behold the Book
• Release date: Jul 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386457794

Fraser Sherman

Fraser Sherman graduated college with no particular idea what to do next, so he thought he'd try writing. He liked it. Since then he's worked as a reporter; published five books of film reference including Now and Then We Time Travel and Sex For Dinner, Death for Breakfast; and had more than two dozen specfic short stories published. Some of them have been collected in Atlas Shagged. Born in England, raised in Florida, he now lives in North Carolina with his amazing wife and two dogs. You can find him online at frasersherman.com or bogatyr5 on Twitter.

Book preview

WELCOME, READERS!

If you’ve picked up this book, thank you! Given how much quality fantasy, old and new, is now available, I greatly appreciate you picking my book over the alternatives.

This collection combines several previously published short stories with one new story. In order:

•Atlas Shagged (a parody) is the new one. What happens in this Ayn Rand takeoff when por star Big Johnson Galt decides to stop the motor of the world?

•The Wodehouse Murder Case came out in Azure Valley in 2012. Can a magician find true love while hiding his deepest secret from everyone around him?

•The Sword of Darcy appeared in the More Scary Kisses anthology in 2011. Jane Austen meets Conan when swaggering Cimmerian Robert Howard Darcy romances a respectable Englishwoman.

•Dark Satanic Mills came out in Tales of the Talisman in 2007. Can a small-town Satanist make it as a writer in the world of Big Apple Satanic lifestyle magazines?

•Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears the Clown is from Drabblecast, 2011. A financial titan wakes up one morning to discover he’s become a clown. Literally.

The cover image, John Singer Sargent’s Atlas and the Hesperides, is public domain (PD-old-80). Downloaded from wikicommons.

Rights to these stories are mine. If you’re downloading the book off a pirate website, well I can’t stop you. But I hope you feel a little bit ashamed.

If you have any comments, thoughts or brickbats, you can find me online at frasersherman.wordpress.com

ATLAS SHAGGED

When the government responded to the demands of the religious right by stepping up porn prosecutions, rumors spread on the Internet that porn producers would retaliate by going Galt.

Most people assumed going Galt was some new sex act pornographers had invented to distract them from their woes. A few porn stars made cryptic references to someone named John Galt, but googling the name turned up nothing. Even if people researching him had known to type in Big Johnson Galt, it wouldn’t have helped. Galt was a lost figure in the genre’s history. No online porn databases or movie reviews mentioned him or his movies.

Big Johnson Galt broke into porn in the early 1980s, back when watching dirty movies at home meant renting a VHS tape rather than streaming video. Retired porn actors later interviewed by the FBI confirmed that Galt’s Johnson was big even by industry standards. Nevertheless, his films sat almost completely unrented in video stores.

Interviewees blamed Galt’s failed career on his devotion to producer/director/screenwriter Ayn Randy, his lover and muse. Randy had broken into the industry with a series of one-person, all-masturbation videos such as The Virtue of Sexual Selfishness during which Galt would jerk off, then explain why the quest for personal pleasure outweighed the need to satisfy a partner. Using just one actor made Randy’s films cheap and therefore modestly profitable, but didn’t draw enough of an audience to satisfy her. She turned instead to making more conventional porn such as The Golden Fountainhead and Atlas Jiggled.

The resulting films proved unsuccessful as Randy’s scripts emphasized talky discussions of her sex objectivism philosophy over actual fucking. The interviewees did, however, admit that Big Johnson Galt had been perfectly cast, due to his amazing breath control. One example that came up over and over again was the orgy scene in We, the Horny. While satisfying a half-dozen partners during the orgy, Galt simultaneously delivered a forty-minute non-stop lecture on sex objectivism.

After Randy’s death, Galt received offers from other producers. He responded with long tirades about his contempt for a society that treated the industry like filth, even as it kept right on watching. Every speech concluded with a cryptic reference to Galt’s Gulch, which listeners guessed was a new anal-sex film. Galt abruptly disappeared and the movie never came out. The reaction from the people who no longer had to listen to his speeches was relief, if they thought about him at all.

It wasn’t until the 21st century that Galt reappeared, showing the industry that time had confirmed his predictions. Society still condemned their creative endeavors, and parasites were now leaching millions from the industry through digital piracy. He proposed they set a date to withdraw to Galt’s Gulch and stop the motor of the world—sex.

When the date arrived, all over the Internet, porn sites went Galt and shut down. Over the next 72 hours, Internet traffic dropped by 90 percent. Millions of people, upon realizing this wasn’t a temporary aberration, canceled their Internet service outright.

That was only the beginning. Galt had convinced the author of the long-awaited sequel Sixty Shades of Pink to retreat to Galt’s Gulch along with her manuscript. Ditto the publishers and staff of Maxim, Penthouse and the more erotic end of the romance novel industry.  The new revenue projections for Amazon and Barnes & Noble hospitalized a dozen executives with panic attacks.

Finally Washington began asking the question, Who is John Galt? As they began searching for the answer, word came from Silicon Valley that America’s top computer geniuses had left their jobs and their porn-free Internet for Galt’s Gulch.

John Galt contacted the president shortly afterwards. Galt reminded him that porn sites had always been the cutting edge of Internet technology, the first to allow the use of credit cards, the first to offer streaming video. The new residents of Galt’s Gulch were happily working on more breakthroughs such as 3D streaming video, virtual reality and sex holograms.

The president asked Galt to think of the good of America and end the porn drought. Galt’s email response included a list of demands and a sex objectivism lecture so long it crashed the Whitehouse.gov servers.

Refusing to bow to Galt, the government struck a deal with cable companies, paying them to import Japanese porn and include it for free on all their systems. The failure of the Hentai Channel proved that, as Ronald Reagan almost said,