I picked this story out because it had an interesting plot: Alex gets some windfall money and buys Shelby, a sexbot. His wife Genia goes along with it at first, thinking it's just a sex toy. Then she decides Alex is falling in love with Shelby (with good reason, if you ask me).
Genia responds as any sane person would, she illegally sells Shelby to some guy in Florida and refuses to tell Alex who she sold Shelby to or where he is.
There's some sharp dialogue when Alex asks Genia if she has seen Shelby and Genia responds that she sold him. Genia mockingly says, "Just think, you'll never have to give me a bl**j** again!" which was apparently one of his selling points for buying Shelby. But that's about all we get about the state of their marriage. I'll come back to that point later.
Alex discovers that even though his wife has changed the password on Shelby, thus locking Alex out of her command set so he can't order her to return or find out where she is or communicate with him.
Alex is furious as he discovers how thoroughly screwed he is. (Plus, Shelby gave great b***j**s.) But a buddy of his tells Alex there is a homing protocol built into Shelby, and it will work even without a password, because all it does is command the sexbot to go the location of its registered owner. Which is Alex, since the new owner has neglected to register Shelby as his. It also allows the owner to track the progress of his bot in returning home. (Minor quibble here -- it would have been SO EASY to explain the owner not registering Shelby because it was an illegal sale, and very consistent with the rest of the story. Don't know why the author didn't do that.)
Alex activates the homing beacon immediately, and shortly thereafter Shelby begins her odyssey to return to Alex. Which is a good thing because her new owner is an abusive jerk who likes to beat women up when he has sex with them.
Not that it matters to Shelby. This is why I rate this story so highly: at no point does Daniels give in to the urge to make Shelby
human. Shelby does not care if she is being abused, because she has no emotions to care with. She's a robot, all her feelings are simulated. It's like he's abusing a toaster.
I love this. The author has a lot of fun showing the innate absurdity of the humans projecting their human emotions on Shelby, who doesn't share them. There's even a g**g b**g scene where Shelby is abused by lowlifes, and it leaves absolutely no psychological effect on her, because there's no "her" to be harmed. All of the emotions are projected on her by the humans around her.
Shelby has other adventures with lowllifes of various stripes on her odyssey to return to her owner. In less talented hands, it would be a predictable story and very maudlin, a takeoff on one of those "lost dog treks to find its owner" stories. But this is not that story. And the ending will likely surprise you. I found it both pleasing and disappointing, but not disappointing in a way that greatly detracted from my enjoyment of the story.
The sex scenes are described in explicit detail but there is never a description of Shelby's emotional responses, because she's not having any. There are descriptions of her behaving has if she is having emotional responses … crying, moaning, gasping, etc., but it's made clear that those are programmed responses. In fact the story describes her various captors and her owner dialing her emotional responses up and down according to what they want from her.
This is being marketed as erotica, but I'm just not buying it. It's got plenty of explicit sex, but it's an absolutely top of the line science fiction story period, very edgy, very subversive. The only thing that makes me give it 4 stars rather than five (I'd go for 4.5 stars if it were possible) is that it doesn't really develop Alex's relationship with his wife Genia as much as I would like. Genia seems more like a plot convenience than an actual person, but I think a little more development of her could have added a little richness and depth to the story, even though that's not central to the plot.
I got it free via Kindle Unlimited, but I would have been perfectly happy to pay $2.99 for it. It's a good science fiction read.
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