I recall that back when I was in college a lot of my fellow students were spending time I would have spent deep in the library instead working with various complex and expensive exercise machines with the aim of making their toned and fit selves even more toned and fit.  So it’s with no small pleasure that I can now pay tribute to their efforts by writing a scene in which Jill Keeney, already an athlete at Gnosis College,gets in training for her espionage mission with appropriate machines.

The sex machine is of course its own kind of thaumatophile vision, and it has inspired an entire site and at least one entire book, as well as coverage in Agnès Giard‘s Le sexe bizarre:

There’s even some fantastic video art on sex machines, such as “Noosphere,” by the sci-fi eroticist Yann Minh.

This topos too has a long and distinguished pedigree.  Dare we ever forget Duran Duran’s famous Excessive Machine, which was so singularly unable to overcome Barbarella?

Sort of the high point of Jane Fonda‘s career, if you ask me, so I am happy to be able to pay tribute to it.