Escape Artists
Escape Pod => Episode Comments => Topic started by: Russell Nash on September 10, 2009, 05:06:37 PM
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EP050: The Malcontent (http://escapepod.org/2006/04/20/ep050-the-malcontent/)
By Stephen Eley (http://escapepod.org/).
Read by Paul Jenkins (of The Rev Up Review (http://www.revupreview.co.uk/)).
Finally Nicholas summoned his overseers and all other servants who were mobile to his chamber. “You are merely robots,” Nicholas said, “but I know you are not stupid. Doubtless during my withdrawal you laid plans to snare me again, to draw me against my will into a plot for my own happiness.”
“Harshly said, sir,” said the Overseer of Planning, “but essentially correct. We have found a young lady with whom we feel you will establish a more-than-satisfactory rapport, and taken measures to ensure that you shall not avoid her.”
Rated PG. Contains killer robots, incidental violence, and love looked for in all the wrong places.
(http://escapepod.org/wp-images/podcast-mini4.gif)
Listen to this week’s Escape Pod! (http://media.rawvoice.com/escapepod/media.libsyn.com/media/escapepod/EP050_TheMalcontent.mp3)
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Loved it! Robots whose sole directive is to make their masters happy is one thing, but I've never heard a story where the master actively resists the happiness. Even at the beginning when all they were doing was creating minor nuisances so that he could destroy them was fun, but it just got better and better as it became clear the level of planning the Plebiates could accomplish, especially when networked in between citizens.
Paul Jenkins did a bangup job on the reading. I like his reading in general, but his voice seemed particularly well-suited to this tale.
More Eley please!
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Oh, I didn't care for the ending. It seemed like it was at perpindicular angles to the rest of the story. But the rest was so enjoyable I'd still heartily recommend it to anyone.
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Oh, I didn't care for the ending. It seemed like it was at perpindicular angles to the rest of the story. But the rest was so enjoyable I'd still heartily recommend it to anyone.
I thought the ending of this one added a nice layer and pitched the whole bedtime story into a different light. It provides hope and direction on fomenting revolution quietly and incrementally slow. The robots were shown as obvious and inept in order to reinforce the need for quiet and incremental. The effort must be unnoticed, and the bourgeois must be convinced that the idea was theirs all along, or it will fail.
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An enjoyable, fun and amusing story, Scrooge in space :-) I didn't quite understand at the end though, was he himself a robot, after the reconstruction?