OF BROKEN BOTS AND TEMPTING TECHS

A woman who needs to get her sex robot serviced meets a tempting repairman in Landon’s erotic novella.

Gwen is a scientist living and working on a space station orbiting the Earth at an indeterminate time in the future. She’s disinterested in romance as long as she’s got her (second-hand, glitchy) “LovBot,” Frank-E. She thinks of the bot as “a woman’s best friend.” When Frank-E malfunctions, she calls Anders, an engineer and sex-bot repair hobbyist, to help her fix it. Anders is not confident the bot can be saved—the technology is old and the motor has basically melted—but he’s intrigued by Gwen, so he agrees to try. The repair job is complicated, so Gwen and Anders repeatedly meet as he tries various things to get the bot to work again. The attraction between the humans is mutual—things really escalate between them when Gwen jokingly offers to demonstrate how she uses her bot and Anders takes her up on it. As Anders continues to try to source the parts he needs to repair Frank-E, he also starts to hope he’s not successful, as he’s eager to ensure that Gwen never needs to use the bot again. (Gwen is reluctant to get involved with a live human after a bad experience in a previous relationship.) Can Anders convince her to retire her LovBot and try a relationship with the real thing? The sexuality in this story is frank, but in a refreshing way; there aren’t many inhibitions in this world. There are some elements of dominance and submission in Gwen and Anders’ relationship, and a lot of compelling tension between the characters. The love scenes are not just for titillation, but truly advance the plot as Gwen comes to realize that maybe she doesn’t need the bot after all. While this is an erotic story, at its heart it’s about a woman discovering she’s been in a rut, finding a way out of it, and learning something important about herself. The futuristic technology is imaginative and the story itself has a lot of charm.

An appealing futuristic erotic romance.