EP005: Snow Day

[Russell Nash]

EP005: Snow Day

By Jennifer Pelland.
Read by Deborah Green.

“Innovate, Max. Burrow your way out. I don’t care.”

“A tunnel of snow would be unsafe for you to travel through, as it could collapse at any time.”

“Max–”

“Would you like to have sex?”

Damn him. He vibrates.

Rated R. Contains profanity, robotic sexual content, and offensive weather.



Listen to this week’s Escape Pod!

[Rain]

Pelland+Green = Awesome. Really a fun and cute story

[Russell Nash]

Excellent reading.  This one just had me giggling my head off.  It's one of my keepers.

[JoeFitz]

For humour and naughtiness, this one and Burning Bush take the cake!

[eytanz]

I remember enjoying this story, and finding it funny, but when we reached the explanation for the city-wide robot strike my suspension of disbelief broke. That didn't hurt the story too much, as it never really took itself very seriously, but it sort of switched in my head from being told an amusing story to being told a long joke, and I'm more partial to stories than to jokes.

[DKT]

I remember during the flash fiction contest, this story got referenced a lot because there were a lot of stories there about sex and robots.

I really like this story, although to be honest, I remember less about the plot and more about the narrator's relationship with her robot.

[Thaurismunths]

I really like this story, although to be honest, I remember less about the plot and more about the narrator's relationship with her robot.

Wait... there was a plot?

[Unblinking]

This one was hilarious!  "Would you like to have sex?" made a great repeating punchline, and she is so distracted by the most excellent sex that she doesn't even notice for most of the story that he's clearing just doing it to distract her from the topic at hand.

The resolution was so easy, simply using a different kind of oil, that it might've been a little dissatisfying if the rest of the story wasn't so darned entertaining.

Despite the obvious pleasure provided by the bots, I'm not sure I'd really see them as a positive influence.  It makes perfect sense, of course, instant gratification tends to sell well, but the end result is people sitting at home by themselves and masturbating a dozen times a day and not doing much else--yes, I'd call that masturbation, it is just using a very technologically advanced sex toy.  But it wasn't out of character, and it was very entertaining, so this is just speculation, not gripes.

[Hilary Moon Murphy]

I've been going through the EP backlog, starting with the oldest stories and working my way forward in time.  It's a really cold day here in Minnesota, and this story totally made my day.  Man, I wanted a Max of my own to make me waffles and find innovative uses for spatulas.  I'm willing to do my own shoveling if someone else does the rest.

I am going to disagree here that the resolution involved the oil.  What the resolution involved was getting someone who has programmed not to discuss his own needs actually bringing them forward.  It was an interesting communication problem, and I like how the narrator solved it.

The writing style reminded me very much of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series.  (I consider this a good thing, because I am very much a fan of the early Stephanie Plum books.)  I think that part of why I was reminded of it was that the narrator had Stephanie Plum's qualities.  Like Stephanie, she was intelligent and unfazed, but also a little self-indulgent and easily distracted.  It's an interesting combination in a protagonist.  I've always felt that the Stephanie Plum books worked so well because Stephanie was smart enough to find her way out of trouble, but foolish enough to run headlong into it first. 

Still, I did feel that there was a darker edge to the story that underlay all of its hilarity... Was anyone else mourning the earlier generation of whiny robots that had preceded the 5000 series?  Eh, maybe I'm overthinking this.

Hmm