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Machines of Consent
WINNER for Outstanding Science Fiction - TFR 2025
Dr. Jess Stockton is a scientist with high goals and even higher ambitions. Through her efforts, she has created a device based around consent which has revolutionised society and drawn no small amount of attention both good and bad.
Roh is a freerunning messenger for the underground with the solitary goal of survival. When tested in the lab for the consent device, she displays a very odd set of biometrics which should be impossible in humans.
Machines of Consent follows two trans lesbians in a sci-fi adventure as they find each other and try to escape an oppressive force bent to use them for nefarious ends. Both cyberpunk and spicy blockbuster, it's a thrill ride from start to finish.
Do you consent to the heat?
Dr. Jess Stockton is a scientist with high goals and even higher ambitions. Through her efforts, she has created a device based around consent which has revolutionised society and drawn no small amount of attention both good and bad.
Roh is a freerunning messenger for the underground with the solitary goal of survival. When tested in the lab for the consent device, she displays a very odd set of biometrics which should be impossible in humans.
Machines of Consent follows two trans lesbians in a sci-fi adventure as they find each other and try to escape an oppressive force bent to use them for nefarious ends. Both cyberpunk and spicy blockbuster, it's a thrill ride from start to finish.
Do you consent to the heat?
226 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 7, 2025
5 people are currently reading
45 people want to read
About the author
Sophia Turner
2 books13 followersSophia Turner is a trans woman based in Australia. She’s a programming language designer turned author with a love of all things trans and lesbian. Her first novel, Machines of Consent, was released in 2025.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 13, 2025
This review features mild spoilers, more serious spoilers have been blurred.
Machine of Consent, in its effort to bring viewers the heat and espousing the virtues and sexiness of consent right from the first page, forgot one crucial thing to sci-fi erotica that’s really sexy: giving context to its world.
To quickly summarize this book:
That is basically the plot of this book, a fairly cliché sci-fi thriller story. This isn’t an inherently bad thing, and Machines of Consent makes unique modifications: both of our leads are transfem lesbians and they have a shit load of sex. The problem? The story begins to fall apart in the early pages and continues to crumble from there. It would truly take an excruciating amount of time to describe every single problem I have with the book’s worldbuilding, and thus I’ll settle on discussing one thing in detail: the Bonobo device.
The book’s “Bonobo” devices are an interesting addition. It’s a necklace-looking device that displays the wearer’s mood, making it very clear if your date is actually into you. You can actually see Jess, the blonde scientist, wearing it in the book cover. It is credited for bringing down assaults and redefining consent laws, punishing those going further than the allowance displayed on the device. The device also rakes in a shit load of cash for Jess, the inventor of the device. Like, “having multiple apartments with expensive modifications” type of cash.
The book doesn’t discuss the multiple pitfalls this device might have on society. First problem concerns the material conditions of dating app users. The book describes that dating apps require users to wear their Bonobos when on dates. However, in modern society, and certainly in the future as well, poor people are gonna use dating apps as well. Let me tell you folks, depending on how expensive those devices are (and it’s reasonable to conclude they’re expensive, since Jess has “fuck you, I own multiple apartments” money), poor people are essentially locked out of the primary way to find a partner.
This is a problem, because, well… capitalism still exists in Machines of Consent. And the bourgeoisie needs the labor of workers to maintain their wealth. Locking people out of dating would mean less working-class people would reproduce, thus less people would be available work in factories in the future, thus bosses would need to offer higher wages in the job market, which would cut into their profit. And it doesn’t seem like there’s any governmental scheme to offer Bonobos to the working class for free. Why would the rich allow dating apps to mandate Bonobos to its users?
The second problem with the Bonobo devices is the claim that “assaults” went down thanks to their introduction. The book is extremely vague about how the devices actually achieved that reduction, or even what type of assault it lowered (although you can conclude Jess is talking about sexual assault here). Just because a sign exists saying “I don’t want to fuck” doesn’t mean assholes aren’t gonna try anyway. The Bonobo is also never explicitly shown to have a log of mood shifts available to the wearer, so if an assault does occur, most likely it’s going to be a word-against-word, just like it is in our Bonobo-less world.
The Bonobo is a solution to the problem of patriarchy that doesn’t really work. The reason the patriarchy exists is actually because men always had access to the surplus of production according to Frederick Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, thus giving (wealthy) men an amount of control over women, relegating them to perform unpaid child labor. The actual solution would be abolishing private property and have workers, all workers, control the means and surplus of production.
The third problem is that the book doesn’t really do that much with Bonobo devices. They just kind of exist as a fun fact, as that thing Jess invented and the reason why Jess has a fuck ton of money. They’re used shockingly little considering the fact they’re literally on the book cover.
As I said, this is just one aspect of MoC’s worldbuilding and the rest of it is as vague and basically non-existent, which is a shocking thing to say about a sci-fi story.
Now, I like Roh as a character. Y’know, a butch lesbian from the streets that had some genetic modifications done to her by the baddies; fairly simple and pretty good. I despised Jess. Until the last roughly 50 pages of the book, she seemed to me like a privileged, constantly horny, bourgeois asshole that is way too full of herself in her head. You may wonder why I call her “bourgeois”? I mean, she owns multiple apartments and drives what I think is a sports car. She’s a landlord. She definitely isn’t a part of the proletariat, that’s for damn sure. I only mellowed out a little bit when the book shared her fairly tragic backstory that also partly explains why she created the Bonobo device.
Their romance also makes no sense. Imagine this: a bourgeois scientist and a proletarian working sketchy jobs love each other in a way that blurs the class divide. A love driven by their sexual desires and biological spontaneity. What a load of rubbish. It's exactly the same kind of romance that got heavily criticized in Arcane's second season, except this time the (capitalist) oppressor is Jess and the (proletarian) oppressed is Roh. The reason why it's criticized is the same: the power dynamics are all sorts of wacky in this instance.
Many don't realize this, but love has a social component to it as well. We choose our partners with our preferred social qualities and under capitalism, people sell themselves on the dating market as a commodity, a product with a selection of popular social qualities; and people can reduce their love feelings for their partner by thinking negatively about them. Love isn't strictly a biological process.
Jess and Roh's love is a capitalist love, one that alienates both of them from wider society and that alienates Roh from her fellow proletarians. It's a form of love where the two lovers only relate to one another and not to the entire society. I don't exactly blame them for being in a bourgeois form of love—almost everyone is under capitalism. However, believing that a bourgeois and a proletarian can be in real love, one not influenced by money or the worker's self-interest to escape poverty, is liberal nonsense.
The last fifty or so pages (the last quarter) also include the book's anti-fascist sentiments, which are pretty much just surface-level critiques that basically everyone can agree with. Y'know, brainwashing bad. Mass surveillance bad. It's not making a detailed rebuttal of fascism (or capitalism, which only receives a jokey jab by Jess), but at least its not explicitly making some kind of social democratic "We only need to reform capitalism to make it work!" sort of thing. Again, it's vague, but doesn't offend.
At the end of this review, I have to acknowledge that I have been massively critical of someone's debut novel, someone's first crack at releasing a piece of art, something they definitely worked on for over a year. Before I started writing this review, I remembered a Discord call with a friend of mine where he gave me a lot of constructive negative criticism to my first semi-finished piece of writing. By the end of the five-hour session, I was emotionally devastated. And he was comparatively WAY nicer than I have been here.
So, I appreciate the author putting this book out in the world. Reading the other reviews of this book, it certainly has an audience that appreciates it for what it can offer to other transfem readers. And even if only one person enjoyed this book or found inspiration in this book? It was worth it.
And I'm not going to lie; I enjoyed the action scenes. I'm a sucker for cliché action and there's a lot of it.
I'm going to be interested in seeing what the author's next book will be and will probably consider buying it. Lots of cool ideas in this book, just not my thing.
Machine of Consent, in its effort to bring viewers the heat and espousing the virtues and sexiness of consent right from the first page, forgot one crucial thing to sci-fi erotica that’s really sexy: giving context to its world.
To quickly summarize this book:
That is basically the plot of this book, a fairly cliché sci-fi thriller story. This isn’t an inherently bad thing, and Machines of Consent makes unique modifications: both of our leads are transfem lesbians and they have a shit load of sex. The problem? The story begins to fall apart in the early pages and continues to crumble from there. It would truly take an excruciating amount of time to describe every single problem I have with the book’s worldbuilding, and thus I’ll settle on discussing one thing in detail: the Bonobo device.
The book’s “Bonobo” devices are an interesting addition. It’s a necklace-looking device that displays the wearer’s mood, making it very clear if your date is actually into you. You can actually see Jess, the blonde scientist, wearing it in the book cover. It is credited for bringing down assaults and redefining consent laws, punishing those going further than the allowance displayed on the device. The device also rakes in a shit load of cash for Jess, the inventor of the device. Like, “having multiple apartments with expensive modifications” type of cash.
The book doesn’t discuss the multiple pitfalls this device might have on society. First problem concerns the material conditions of dating app users. The book describes that dating apps require users to wear their Bonobos when on dates. However, in modern society, and certainly in the future as well, poor people are gonna use dating apps as well. Let me tell you folks, depending on how expensive those devices are (and it’s reasonable to conclude they’re expensive, since Jess has “fuck you, I own multiple apartments” money), poor people are essentially locked out of the primary way to find a partner.
This is a problem, because, well… capitalism still exists in Machines of Consent. And the bourgeoisie needs the labor of workers to maintain their wealth. Locking people out of dating would mean less working-class people would reproduce, thus less people would be available work in factories in the future, thus bosses would need to offer higher wages in the job market, which would cut into their profit. And it doesn’t seem like there’s any governmental scheme to offer Bonobos to the working class for free. Why would the rich allow dating apps to mandate Bonobos to its users?
The second problem with the Bonobo devices is the claim that “assaults” went down thanks to their introduction. The book is extremely vague about how the devices actually achieved that reduction, or even what type of assault it lowered (although you can conclude Jess is talking about sexual assault here). Just because a sign exists saying “I don’t want to fuck” doesn’t mean assholes aren’t gonna try anyway. The Bonobo is also never explicitly shown to have a log of mood shifts available to the wearer, so if an assault does occur, most likely it’s going to be a word-against-word, just like it is in our Bonobo-less world.
The Bonobo is a solution to the problem of patriarchy that doesn’t really work. The reason the patriarchy exists is actually because men always had access to the surplus of production according to Frederick Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, thus giving (wealthy) men an amount of control over women, relegating them to perform unpaid child labor. The actual solution would be abolishing private property and have workers, all workers, control the means and surplus of production.
The third problem is that the book doesn’t really do that much with Bonobo devices. They just kind of exist as a fun fact, as that thing Jess invented and the reason why Jess has a fuck ton of money. They’re used shockingly little considering the fact they’re literally on the book cover.
As I said, this is just one aspect of MoC’s worldbuilding and the rest of it is as vague and basically non-existent, which is a shocking thing to say about a sci-fi story.
Now, I like Roh as a character. Y’know, a butch lesbian from the streets that had some genetic modifications done to her by the baddies; fairly simple and pretty good. I despised Jess. Until the last roughly 50 pages of the book, she seemed to me like a privileged, constantly horny, bourgeois asshole that is way too full of herself in her head. You may wonder why I call her “bourgeois”? I mean, she owns multiple apartments and drives what I think is a sports car. She’s a landlord. She definitely isn’t a part of the proletariat, that’s for damn sure. I only mellowed out a little bit when the book shared her fairly tragic backstory that also partly explains why she created the Bonobo device.
Their romance also makes no sense. Imagine this: a bourgeois scientist and a proletarian working sketchy jobs love each other in a way that blurs the class divide. A love driven by their sexual desires and biological spontaneity. What a load of rubbish. It's exactly the same kind of romance that got heavily criticized in Arcane's second season, except this time the (capitalist) oppressor is Jess and the (proletarian) oppressed is Roh. The reason why it's criticized is the same: the power dynamics are all sorts of wacky in this instance.
Many don't realize this, but love has a social component to it as well. We choose our partners with our preferred social qualities and under capitalism, people sell themselves on the dating market as a commodity, a product with a selection of popular social qualities; and people can reduce their love feelings for their partner by thinking negatively about them. Love isn't strictly a biological process.
Jess and Roh's love is a capitalist love, one that alienates both of them from wider society and that alienates Roh from her fellow proletarians. It's a form of love where the two lovers only relate to one another and not to the entire society. I don't exactly blame them for being in a bourgeois form of love—almost everyone is under capitalism. However, believing that a bourgeois and a proletarian can be in real love, one not influenced by money or the worker's self-interest to escape poverty, is liberal nonsense.
The last fifty or so pages (the last quarter) also include the book's anti-fascist sentiments, which are pretty much just surface-level critiques that basically everyone can agree with. Y'know, brainwashing bad. Mass surveillance bad. It's not making a detailed rebuttal of fascism (or capitalism, which only receives a jokey jab by Jess), but at least its not explicitly making some kind of social democratic "We only need to reform capitalism to make it work!" sort of thing. Again, it's vague, but doesn't offend.
At the end of this review, I have to acknowledge that I have been massively critical of someone's debut novel, someone's first crack at releasing a piece of art, something they definitely worked on for over a year. Before I started writing this review, I remembered a Discord call with a friend of mine where he gave me a lot of constructive negative criticism to my first semi-finished piece of writing. By the end of the five-hour session, I was emotionally devastated. And he was comparatively WAY nicer than I have been here.
So, I appreciate the author putting this book out in the world. Reading the other reviews of this book, it certainly has an audience that appreciates it for what it can offer to other transfem readers. And even if only one person enjoyed this book or found inspiration in this book? It was worth it.
And I'm not going to lie; I enjoyed the action scenes. I'm a sucker for cliché action and there's a lot of it.
I'm going to be interested in seeing what the author's next book will be and will probably consider buying it. Lots of cool ideas in this book, just not my thing.
September 19, 2025
ARC review--I received a free review copy, which did not influence my review.
T4T lesbian romance and cyberpunk noir walk into a bar.
T4T says "I'll have vulnerable emotional intimacy with a chaser of hot lesbian sex."
Noir goes "Got any cool, problematic tech? Oh! And some parkour would be good."
Tattooed lesbian barkeep: "Coming right up."
This is a gem of a book with a killer hook and just enough line to set it and reel in its prey (you, the reader).
The hook: Two women invent a device that improves the sharing of sexual consent between potential partners. One test subject seems immune. Cyberpunk shenanigans ensue.
But instead of the expected non-stop adrenaline-pounding we often get from such stories, we get something better: a beautiful tale of trauma-healing love & sex alongside a cracking-good anti-fascist cyberpunk story. There is action and mystery-solving, yes, but the mysteries of the human heart and the action of mouth on skin are just as important as the sci-fi tech and the parkour (which are both excellent, tbc).
Do I have a few niggles about strings that could have been pulled a little tighter or pacing that was a bit uneven in spots? Barely, because the author told a beautiful story powerfully, and a powerful story beautifully.
I predict this is going to be in contention for a lot of folks' end-of-year lists. I know it'll be on mine.
T4T lesbian romance and cyberpunk noir walk into a bar.
T4T says "I'll have vulnerable emotional intimacy with a chaser of hot lesbian sex."
Noir goes "Got any cool, problematic tech? Oh! And some parkour would be good."
Tattooed lesbian barkeep: "Coming right up."
This is a gem of a book with a killer hook and just enough line to set it and reel in its prey (you, the reader).
The hook: Two women invent a device that improves the sharing of sexual consent between potential partners. One test subject seems immune. Cyberpunk shenanigans ensue.
But instead of the expected non-stop adrenaline-pounding we often get from such stories, we get something better: a beautiful tale of trauma-healing love & sex alongside a cracking-good anti-fascist cyberpunk story. There is action and mystery-solving, yes, but the mysteries of the human heart and the action of mouth on skin are just as important as the sci-fi tech and the parkour (which are both excellent, tbc).
Do I have a few niggles about strings that could have been pulled a little tighter or pacing that was a bit uneven in spots? Barely, because the author told a beautiful story powerfully, and a powerful story beautifully.
I predict this is going to be in contention for a lot of folks' end-of-year lists. I know it'll be on mine.
January 16, 2026
Machines of Consent is the debut novel of Kiwi author Sophia Turner, and brings us an excellent combination of cyberpunk and sexytimes. Starring two transfem leads, with all the attendant joy, trauma, hope, despair, and love that goes along with that, Turner’s debut shows a lot of quality, a lot of promise, and hopefully presages a long and productive writing career.
Read the rest of the review at Strange Currencies at
https://strangecurrencies.org/2026/01...
Read the rest of the review at Strange Currencies at
https://strangecurrencies.org/2026/01...
October 6, 2025
This book was delightful, sexy and intensely exciting. Elements of noir and cyberpunk mixed into an unapologetically sapphic t4t romance. Sophia Turner makes a philosophical exploration of human nature into an action-packed thriller. You *have* to read this book.
February 8, 2026
Eight hells can Sophia write a sex scene. So hot. Mind the CWs – the end reveal of why one of the characters seems so ultra-competent and is so materially rich is emotionally difficult to read. However, it's a great romp and I want more.
October 14, 2025
Part hot trans lesbian romance, sci-fi thriller, and all fun! Machines of Consent imagines a world in which scientist Jess has created a device that conveys the level of consent the wearer is giving in interactions with others. Her world of facts and lab work is crashed into by Roh, a tough woman who uses her parkour skills to run questionably "legal" jobs. But there's something different about Roh. That difference will lead the two women into hiding and on-the-run as they try to outmaneuver a shadowy organization. Full of lesbian spice, kick-ass action, and tender reflection, this is a fantastic read from start to finish.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews