In the not-so-distant future, one Corporation, combining government and business, will rule America. Food, shelter, and above all, health, will be prioritized as an elite Corporate class rises again, behind a mask of “universal happiness and opportunity.” Much wealth will be invested in the production of vaccos, living human “Corporate cadavers”: raised on isolated ranches as sources for organ and tissue transplants. Drugged on “euphorics,” the vaccos will be “harvested” for organs already scheduled for a waiting list of patients.
One such vacco, the very valuable “property” Hart256043, will escape. At an underground bar specializing in illicit sex and drugs, he meets Edgar Devereaux, a successful designer and adopted son of Joshua Devereaux, a member of the Corporate board. But Edgar has a secret: he was born Chris Turner, a lower-class renegade—and he can never shake his origins or desire to retaste his wild youth. Chris and Hart will bond. They will discover within each other compassion, fulfillment, and a completeness outside the boundaries of Corp life. Edgar will reject Joshua’s lifestyle, and join with him to do anything—including kill—to ensure Hart’s survival. And Hart, one of the most appealing characters to appear in contemporary fiction, will find in Chris Turner the humanity he needs to survive.
Genre: FICTION / Dystopian"The Harvest" was very successful when it appeared in 1997; it got spectacular reviews from the gay press and also the science fiction community and it was nominated for a Lambda LIterary Award in Science Fiction. It sold about 8,000 copies, extemely well for a book from an independent small press. It was adapted as a play, and has been optioned as a movie. It is currently being considered for movie rights in Canada.
Prologue
He is finally mine. I can not tell you the happiness this brings me. The sublimity of it: that every organ in his body that would once belong to someone else now belongs to me. That he is lying next to me breathing and his coarse, hard, bull-haired body, full of prickly flesh and muscle and a kind of dream sweetness and maleness that evades most human appreciation, now waits for me. I want to lick his throat without waking him, then kiss his callused toes and work my way up his hairy thighs until I reach the swelling animal-sex part of him that lies ready this moment as a conch shell pulled from the sea but that trembles I can feel against my fingers, with every hard breath and thunder-beat of his heart. The house around me now feels good. Before it was simply a place where I worked. Nice as these things go, out by itself in the country where I like to be. There is a beautiful fresh-water lake nearby and sheltering trees, and now my small house satisfies me as it did not before: before he reached inside me and pulled something from me that had been shoveled over years before, when I had been taken off to become someone other than who I was. But he reached in and found it, on the gut level, in my loins and heart. The power of it. The power of him. That he could do this, and at the same time stir me with pity—that I would shelter him, save him, hold him from those who’d kill him . . . if he only knew all this, but now he’s asleep.
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Portuguese
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Already translated.
Translated by Allan Felipe Rocha Penoni
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Spanish
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Translation in progress.
Translated by Jaili Ivinai Buelvas Diaz
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