Anyone else having trouble getting into the Christmas/Holiday spirit this year? It's been harder for me for the past several years, since my wife passed away right before Christmas (in 2014) and it's hard to separate the two events. I'm overdosing on Christmas music trying to get there, though, while also trying to get a book finished before year's end.

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Our Book Focus this weekend is on Nova Terra, a sci-fi erotica novella which is really two stories in one book: "Nova Terra" and "Nova Terra Gen 2", which is a sequel focused on the second generation of this space colony.

The impetus for the initial "Nova Terra" short story was the question of what the impact would be if only a few rare men were fertile, in a space colony that needed to increase population? Would these men gain influence or lose freedom? How would marriages survive, when husbands had to impregnate multiple women and when, for genetic diversity, the wives had to bear children by multiple men? And what role could the infertile men still play?

My answer -- of course -- was group sex and plenty of it, leading to polyamorous families forming to raise all of the kids and work together on building homes and farms and the other enterprises of a new colony.

I just had to devise a means to produce infertility en-masse, either before the colonization crew arrived on their new planet or after. I chose before, implicating an unexpected interaction between birth control implants (in the men) and the stasis system that enables hibernation and blaming the folks back on Earth who never tested them together to realize that they'd interact to permanently destroy the ability to produce sperm. Before the crew realizes it, 7/8ths of the men, who had been hibernating, are infertile.

I worked out the math that if each of the women needed to become pregnant 4 times (by different men) to double the population and only 1/8th of the men remain fertile, those men needed to impregnate 32 women each to produce the same number of children. A whole new meaning for "getting busy."

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Then, the longer "Nova Terra Gen 2" examines the impact the changes in their parents' lives and marriages have upon the second generation. They don't face the same fertility issues, but now have to deal with dating and marriage in a society that no longer has monogamy and where group marriages have to be approved based on genetic and personality compatibility tests. And in which the "sperm fathers" turned competitive, fathering children well past their 32-child quotas, and are now beginning to pursue the second generation women, too. Some have fathered close to 100 children.

What quickly occurred to me is that having a second generation close to four times the size of the first (double the original plan) would soon have political ramifications, as those youngsters start to reach voting age, and that they'd soon outnumber their parents. So when the two generations disagree, it would only be a matter of time before the kids' views would win out.

And the first things they disagree about are the rules for marriage, not just the ones the second generation has to follow but the ones they think their parents should follow, as well. Particularly ones to get the "sperm fathers" to behave.

That became the backdrop for the story of a foursome who get married and move into a new home, while simultaneously leading a coup of sorts to take seats on the colony council and impose the marriage rules they want -- leading to some strong reactions from their parents' generation. The story continues as they interact with another foursome who can't get married due to some genetic issues between two members, but can join in a larger marriage, so long as the mating pairs are well-managed. So, they regroup as an octet and have a second wedding night.

All as an excuse for -- you guessed it -- more group sex.