Some genre writers tend to avoid work by their peers out of an understandable desire to avoid unconsciously swiping from 'em. This is probably a commendable practice, but as an FA fantasist, I've never followed it. It's hard to get too excited from a fantasy that you've labored over yourself, after all: spend more time noticing grammatical flubs than I do re-experiencing the fantasy. (It's much easier to ignore someone else's grammar errors.) So there are some FA writers whose work I've followed over the years, and I'd be lying by omission if I didn't give credit to 'em.

First on my list would have to be R.B. Lawrence. Though he hasn't graced us with any FA fantasies in several years, at one time he was a welcome and prolific figure on the scene. Bob (his first name appeared on a Juggs story, so I'm not giving away any secrets here) started selling stories to the men's mags around the same time as me. It was his early writing, in fact, that encouraged me to take some of my broader fantasies out and put them down on paper.

The one that did it for me was a BUF piece entitled, "The Fat Pump." It appeared with an early Delacroix illo (back when Paul was still willing to align himself with such subject matter). While Bob later would do stories that were a little less obvious (the plot mechanics leap out at you here - as they do in another early tale, "The Blimping of Earth"), there's a joy to the presentation that's undeniable. Here's a guy putting his boyhood fantasies down on paper for all to see, and it feels good!

Lawrence's tale concerns a patent attorney who swipes a pair of inventions from an amiable mad scientist. His wife has been dieting her figure away, so to counteract this, he connects her to a pump that will add poundage to her while she's sleeping. (Interesting editing fact here: in the original version, R.B. had the wife connected by tubes to more than one orifice. In publishing the tale, BUF's editor had second thoughts about one of these as revealed by two noticeable gaps in the text.) What the husband doesn't know is the pump is filled with more fattening fluid than he realizes (umm, wouldn't the extra material weigh a whole lot more?) or the tank of odorless sleeping gas he's brought to drug his wife has a leaky valve.

He fattens his wife to super-size and waits for her to wake. When she does, she's shocked and frightened but ultimately realizes that her husband does indeed love her at her new size. (One of those moments of character reversal so common to stories like this.) The couple decides to take the pumping a little further, thinking that there's only a small amount of weight gain fluid left, so the husband restarts the machine. At which point, the sleeping gas valve finally gives and knocks him unconscious. The results: a ton-plus spouse.

At the time "Fat Pump" appeared, I'd only made a couple of tentative stabs at weight gain fantasy ("Balloon Lady" and "Fat Magic"); "Pump" encouraged me to dream bigger on paper. Perhaps this would happened on its own eventually - like most fantasists, I don't have a great sense of boundaries - but Bob sped up the process. His loving descriptions of his heroine's panicked expansion (though her hubby has been knocked out, she's apparently far enough away from the gas to remain awake through the process) retain their power in the face of other writers' attempts at replicating the same scene. It's a great moment in FA fantasy.

R.B. would give us other mega-women. In the Dimensions tale, "The Bottle" (originally capped with a marvelous Ned Sonntag pic, incidentally), it's a magic potion found in one of those Gremlins-style curio shops that does the deed. In "Feed Me" (originally published in Juggs, until recently on view in the now defunct www.feeder.com's story section), two bisexual babes work to build themselves through old-fashioned gluttony, though a sudden shift near story end has one of the women pumping herself into balloon size through the nonstop ingestion of high-calorie food paste. In "Eating Beauty," Lawrence's fairy tale parody (it's an unwritten law that every writer of erotica has to do at least one), the character grows large enough to fill a room, thanks to a witch's curse. Though the curse is overturned and the character ultimately deflates to mere super-size, at her peak she remains unmatched. Only R.B.L. would give us a woman large enough to fill a room and still make her sexy.

For a while, Bob Lawrence was as ubiquitous a presence in the FA-friendly media as yours truly. Nice thing about name writers is the way you can depend on 'em for a certain consistent level of craft. R.B. Lawrence's name on a story was a guarantee that you'd be getting imaginative and sexy FA fiction. There are days when I wish that he was still producing FA fantasies, but it's clear he's moved onto other things. Still, at his peak, Lawrence was a major force in the tiny world of FA erotica; those of us who write today can't help but be influenced by him.

Copyright 1997 - Oakhaus Designs

---Wilson Barbers