"A Diagram of Rapture" is the first story I ever sold professionally. It appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in April of 2000, and began my regular run in that magazine. If you haven't read it, here's a brief summary:

Claudia Pickens is snooping in her son Tommy's room when she finds some triangular green pills. She's shocked because she knows what they are: Efracol, an aphrodisiac for women. She invented it.

But it turns out their concerns are misguided. Tom's girlfriend has been using the pills herself. The kids don't even see what the fuss is about; to them using Efracol to get aroused is no different from drinking caffeine to stay awake. Claudia isn't very pleased to hear this, but she does realize that whatever happens, she isn't responsible. People will find their own uses for Efracol and it's up to them. The End.

The story began as a fairly simple idea: every teenage boy fantasizes about some magic potion to make girls want to sleep with him. What if such a thing really existed? After all, sexual arousal is quite likely a chemical phenomenon in the brain, so it's pretty plausible that the right molecule might get someone turned on. It also reflects what I think is a pretty fundamental assymetry in relations between men and women (not same-sex relationships, however): the fact that women seem to have an easier time inspiring sexual attraction in men than vice-versa. For younger couples, it's almost like flipping a switch to get him fired up.

When I was younger, I thought this was tremendously unfair. Now I see that it's at the root of a great deal of friction between the sexes (get your mind out of the gutter, reader!). If a woman can generate sexual interest more or less at will, she runs the risk of being valued only for that ability — and of losing all value when it goes away with age. I can't track down the author, but I remember a very telling quote to the effect that women sometimes feel jealous of their own bodies, because the body has that power. 

I brainstormed all the social changes likely to result from widespread availability of aphrodisiacs — including increased paranoia about slipping something into your drink, recreational use as an excuse for wild behavior, urban legends about overdoses, cheap foreign knockoffs, et cetera. One thing I wanted to avoid was a dystopian view. It would be easy to posit the existence of a working aphrodisiac being used to make women subservient — but my name isn't Joanna Russ or Suzy Charnas, and I can't make myself believe that. In fact, it might ultimately reduce resentment and tension by leveling the playing field, so to speak.

To make the science sound plausible I did some research at the Cornell University library about neurotransmitters. My goal was to get some likely-sounding technobabble. In the story I called my aphrodisiac "Dibutyl Catecholandrogen" or DBCA for short. (I have no idea if there really is a chemical called that, or what it might do.) For background on how drug testing works, I checked with Monica Eiland, who was doing pharmaceutical research at the time.

Then I faced my first problem: a scientific discovery and social consequences, however well-researched and logically thought out, are not a story. A story needs characters and conflict. I decided to focus on the discoverer of DBCA, and modeled her closely on my wife Diane — biologist, has kids, married to a writer. The only difference is that Claudia's research has made her very well-off, capable of funding her own laboratory. Instead of scrambling to get tenure and funding, she has universities quietly wooing her. What good is fiction if you can't indulge in a little wish-fulfillment?

The central conflict grew out of the extrapolative brainstorming, and more or less embodies the theme of the story:  people adapt. What seems like a big change gets smaller over time, and what seems like a problem becomes part of the landscape.

Interestingly, this story of mine may wind up being prophetic. As we learn more about the brain and how it works, I expect it's only a matter of time before someone discovers a way to directly induce arousal the way DBCA does in my story. It may be a chemical, it may require electrical stimulation — but it's going to happen. Even now we know of many species of parasites which affect the behavior of their hosts in quite complex and specific ways, all by just emitting the right chemicals. Unless you believe you have an immaterial, immortal soul distinct from your physical body, you have to face the fact that what you think and how you feel can be manipulated if someone tinkers with your brain.

The reflex is to think this is a Bad Thing. Sinister mind control. Big Brother. But talk to someone with schizophrenia or clinical depression and ask them what they think of messing with people's brain chemistry. For some, it has been salvation. And if we try to ban or limit brain research to protect our free society . . . that just guarantees that work will be done on behalf of tyrants instead. I'm not sure I want that to happen.

Society and law still have not really grappled with the implications of a mechanistic universe. Concepts of guilt, innocence, intent, and deterrence are based on the idea of autonomous, free-willed individuals capable of moral choice — not a collection of brains subject to chemical reprogramming. Are you responsible for a crime if you've been dosed with something that makes you violent? What if you t
ook the dose voluntarily?

Right now law and custom are all over the map on this. If you get into a car wreck because you're drunk, it's worse than if you're sober, because you knowingly drank alcohol even though it impairs your ability to drive. But if you get into a fight while drunk, you could argue the booze impaired your ability to make moral choices, and thus reduces your guilt. Right now the trend seems to be toward punishing people for reducing their own capacity to be rational — in other words, preserving the illusion of free will through force of law.

The title of "A Diagram of Rapture" is from Emily Dickinson. Diane was reading a volume of her poems at the time I was working on this story, and the line jumped out at me as a good title for something. It doesn't fit this story perfectly, but it's close and I couldn't think of anything better. Plus it lets me borrow a little of Miss Emily's literary street cred, which is always a good thing.

I did make one big error in this story. When I talked with Monica about drug development, I misunderstood her answer about the stages a new product must go through before it reaches the market. I mistook her timetable for one step as the length of the whole thing, so in the story Efracol has an amazingly fast time from discovery to hitting the drugstore shelves. One F&SF reader wrote in to point this out, and all I could tell Gordon Van Gelder was, "Oops."

Anyway, "Diagram" was my debut, and for that reason I'll always be absurdly proud of it. If I were to write it now I'd probably dig deeper into Claudia's own sex life and sexual identity, and almost certainly include a scene in which she takes some of the pills. I can't believe I didn't think of that. Of course, that would have left me with a story suitable only for the letters column of Penthouse, so it's probably best as is.