An up-and-coming rock band, Forbidden Fruitcake, has hit a roadblock on the uneven road to fame. But this time it's a real roadblock, on a desert highway. The band bus has blundered into at a hijacking in progress. However, the event is interrupted by a curiously competent hiker. The only way to block the crime is by hiding the parts of a top secret shipment inside each of the band members. This gives them unexpected superpowers. Now they are endangered by forces who want to recover that shipment and the superpowers that go with it. The band takes refuge in Hareem House, a Las Vegas brothel run by a wise madam and a female artificial intelligence. These partners oversee a diverse collection of attractive female robots. The Forbidden Fruitcakes are besieged inside - but they're not unhappy about it.

Meanwhile there's a mad scientist who wants to extract what's inside each of the band members -- by any means possible. Then Dan, in town for an unrelated conference, lands in the middle of protest movement against the brothel. This culminates in a battle, of women against womandroids. Then comes the inconvenient moment when the superpower matures -- and shows what else it can do.

In "House of Clockwork Women," science fiction humor has met the seductive female descendants of Viktor Frankenstein's creature. Now there are robots in the service of man. Or - more accurately - men.

Writers who think they control their characters have lost their grip on reality.

I inadvertently created two other science fiction authors... both unlike myself. One of them is Adam Abels, who is human, but dark and disturbing. The other is John Stuart Millipede, who is not human, but wickedly whimsical. (On John's home world, evolution went a different way leading to his kind of giant, intelligent thousand-legged arthropod.) His real name is something we can neither say nor spell. He makes movies; science fiction, documentaries, etc. He sometimes uses Earth as an exotic location for his films.