"Trances" by Michael K. Smith (mksmith@metronet.com). When he was a freshman in college, the narrator learned from his friend Edward how to hypnotize people. As his first conquest, he hypnotized Edward's kid sister Sharon - making her believe that the licorice her gave her was chocolate candy. When he eventually turned to more prurient possibilities, he hypnotized a schoolmate named Kathy not to give him a blowjob, but rather to fall in love with him and to do everything possible to make him reciprocate. After many good times together, he realized he had laid the foundation poorly and he released Kathy to have a happy life of her own.

And so it goes with other "experiments." The narrator is a sort of benign dictator with Power to control other people, but he generally uses this in only the most constructive ways. With girls and women this usually means freeing them from their inhibitions and enabling them to do (with him) those things that they would secretly like to do anyway. The story has two major components: (1) the flashbacks induced by hypnosis, during which his clients describe in very sexy terms their own previous sexual experiences, and (2) the narrator's current sexual activities with these partners. The author skillfully joins these complementary components into an interesting plot.

I found this story to be an excellent blend of mind control and romance. Mind control stories in which the main characters simply make other people do dirty things for them have always seemed a bit uncreative to me. In this story, however, the mind control, though still an essential part of the story, is more subtle. The narrator's sexual partners act freely, even though they are under his control.

Of course, as I have said before, I personally consider mind control stories to be essentially balderdash. {That's strange; I've never used that word before.} The notion that people can go into a college library and learn how to control the minds of other people is bunk. If mind control really worked, surely someone would figure out a way to do it through cyberspace. If this were possible, then an incredibly sexy man could have his way with, say, an equally sexy English teacher and then top it off by having her spend a major part of her life writing extensive reviews of stories for a Usenet newsgroup and get consistently high reviews for his own stories. Such an idea is clearly impossible.