The Difference (in) Engine - Retooling a Victorian Christmas Classic for the Femdom Cyber Future

It's Advent, I haven't bought things for any of the people I like to buy things for (still less, the people I'm expected to buy things for), and I am already quietly resentful of hearing slow, dated Christmas songs coming out of every single shop I pass...

But I'm taking the "if you can't beat them, join them" path, and releasing a seasonal Christmas novella! 

It's called Anna Voss's Christmas Carol, and, er, yes. It's that Christmas Carol, except my villain is called Eleanora Cruse, not Ebeneezer Scrooge. And it's set on an off-Earth colony planet in the future. 

Oh. And she's not a moneylender, she's a findomme. 

 

 

The trouble with A Christmas Carol is that almost everyone thinks they know it. Ask them to summarise it, and most folk will give you the same outline: Grumpy rich man doesn't like Christmas, sees ghosts, buys turkey, small boy doesn't die. Some people will probably remember to quote “God bless us, Every One,” without ever hearing what a mercilessly universal order Dickens meant that line to be.

But the thing almost everyone misses is the driving, social, coal-powered engine of the story. 

Because Dickens didn’t write A Christmas Carol to be a cosy Christmas story.

He wrote a moral machine, a perfectly-tuned polemic raging against the engineered injustices of early Victorian capitalism. His ghosts aren’t festive mascots; they’re auditors. Proof not that Scrooge is grumpy, but that he's monstrous.  

It might sound twee to us in 2025, but his dismissing Christmas as “humbug” was written to feel brutally transgressive. His declaration that the poor had better die and decrease the surplus population, and his refusal to know their plight is a calculated, inhuman obscenity. 

Everything about Scrooge as we first meet him is perfectly crafted to make the reader loathe him not as the pantomime villain he often becomes in film, but as a man with such a cold, twisted sense of moral superiority that any human would instinctively recoil from him. That's why he's alone. That's why the only warmth he can offer the world is what bleeds into the sheets of his deathbed. That's why even the businessmen whose approval he fought for scorn his memory when he's gone. That's why he can't even bring himself to attend the party given by his own beloved sister's son.

But while Dickens built that engine with incredible precision, he did it for people who literally lived the context he wrote in. 

That context isn't just Victorian, it is seriously early Victorian. At first glance, people don't always spot the difference.

Because when we hear "Victorian" we think trams and steam trains and policemen with capes. But the pace of change across the 19th Century was enormous, and Dickens' original setting of 1843 is a million miles from the gaslit, gramophone, Gilbert and Sullivan world the word "Victorian" now conjures up.

Note that Scrooge is probably about 60 in the book. He was maybe born around 1783. So, when he goes back to see himself at school, he's watching himself being lonely somewhere in the 1790s. He was a schoolboy before the Napoleonic Wars. 

A Christmas Carol is an incredible tale, but it's bound so tightly into its own era that today, we can struggle to relate. Even when we imagine "it's Victorian," odds are good we're remembering the wrong end of that sixty-four year period.

I think this is why most people focus on the snow, and the massive turkey, and Tiny Tim's last line: the core story is pretty much timeless - but the narrative engine of the book is built to take coal, and we come at it from a world of central heating and we struggle to see just how inhumanly cold Scrooge is. 

So I've taken Dickens' engine and stripped it back and rebuilt it to run on crypto. 

(Dickens did me a huge favour here, incidentally, by having Marley's ghost bound round with chains; it made converting him into Martine, Cruse's former co-domme now bound into the Blockchain of her own findomme transactions an amazingly satisfying bit of narrative architecture.)

So yes: Anna Voss’s Christmas Carol changes a great many things. Victorian currency becomes crypto credits. Scrooge & Marley’s firm becomes a Findomme Temple. Scrooge’s penny-pinching cruelty becomes Cruse’s automated indifference to her subs. Bob Cratchit becomes Bec Padget, Cruse’s overstretched, astonishingly loyal assistant, and, gosh, more on her in another post... 

Essentially, it offers the same formula I used when I created Anna Voss Writes The Classics: I'm taking the core conceit and style of a major part of the literary canon, and firing it with so much femdom heat the boiler almost bursts.

That said, I left out the lighthouse keepers: pretty much every single adaptation does.

 

 

But even with all those changes, the book's underlying question remained exactly the same:

What happens to you when your cruelty becomes habitual? And how on earth can you break that habit?

Eleanora Cruse, the central figure of my novella, isn't an analogue for Scrooge so much as a descendant. She lives in a world where power can be automated, where intimacy can be replaced by efficiency, where even dominance can be outsourced to code. Her cruelty is not theatrical; it is systemic. It is the logical outcome of a world in which bodies are remote and money is instant. Dickens would recognise the shape of her (and my, it's a good shape; she uses it very well, when she wants to properly dominate...)

Similarly, the Ghosts in my version aren’t ethereal Victorian archetypes; they're echoes of Cruse's past self, mirrors of her present choices, and frightening projections of what her empire will become if she cannot relearn vulnerability. Each spirit is a psychological pressure point.

Each one forces her to confront a different failure: intimacy abandoned, kindness forgotten, loyalty betrayed, love postponed too long by a woman who believed desire could be mined and denial industrialised. 

A domme who believes that her relationship with submissives is purely one-way: effortless, pointless, laborious tribute on their part; and unfeeling, indifferent cruelty on hers.

She learns to do better, of course. The Ghosts ensure it. Bec ensures it. 

And most of all, as in the original, Cruse herself ensures it, because she sees what she has done to the world, and sees the ways her attempt to push out effortless algorithmic content instead of engaging with her own community are destroying the very things she sought to build.

Of course, I've kept all my usual fixations: edging and denial, structured power, emotional consequence, the ethics of domination; even the fascinating nature of devotion among submissives needing to be wanted, whatever the cost.

But beneath the heat, the prose, the teasing, the denial... and beneath a frankly devastatingly good scene between Cruse and Bec as the former learns exactly what it means to be vulnerable in the hands of an ethical, expert Domme - the backbone of this little Christmas offering remains pure, unsentimental Dickens.

I just had to retool the engine so that we aren't talking about coal and gold and cruelty:

We're talking about edges and cybercages and cruelty. And that is far more fun. 

And I'm very pleased to say that Anna Voss's Christmas Carol is available now.