Long Enough and Just So Long

Short Story by Cat Rambo

Published free online at Lightspeed (text & audio)

Two women fight over a man. Except they live on the moon, in a domed colony, and the man in question is a sex-bot. There is some barely-explained background about a gate which new technology seems to fall out of and spaceships and acid rain, but really the entire story is about these girls stalking, befriending, and being rejected by a sex bot.

I don't really like the title, it would be entirely irrelevant except for a phrase added on to the end seemingly to justify the title. Honestly, I spent the whole story waiting for the inevitable penis joke that never came. I'm not sure if I'm relieved or disappointed, but I don't think the title fits at all.

Really, not much happened, and there aren't really deeper themes beyond friendship. Rambo has a world that seems interesting enough, but this story could happen without it. The SF trappings are only that, but the story isn't poorly written.

3 emancipated sex-bots out of 5.

Angry Rose's Lament

Short Story by Cat Rambo
Originally published free online in Abyss & Apex
Read for Escape Pod by Mur Lafferty

Paul Rutter is a negotiator for a third-string interstellar corporation, who has to seal a major deal with an alien species. The Solin are a race of brain-eating space-wasps who have chosen to deal with Rutter's RecoveryCo instead of any of the major corporations, and it could be their big break.

RecoveryCo is a company founded by a group of recovering drug addicts, and failure by Paul could cause his friends to slip back into their old ways. Apparently the drug has a 90% relapse rate. There is some very interesting world building here, a lot of density in very few pages. The world is almost like an aggressively capitalist version of Brin's Uplift Universe. Not with uplifting local species, but with new races ending up indebted to the older ones. But humans are the dominant species in this civilization.

Anyway, Paul finds himself facing an impossible choice. More than just large benefits and losses, it is a choice where Paul has almost none of the relevant information. Angry Rose, a pilot who initially explored the planet tells him the Solin are dangerous, they seem to have plausible explanations and Paul has no way to confirm either party's statements. More importantly Paul doesn't know what will really be better for his friends and the company. He eventually makes a choice, but we are left unsure of whether it was the right one, for him or for anyone else.

That is the real strength of the story, Paul doesn't know anything for certain, and neither do we. The central situation is well set-up, and Paul is clearly the ideal person to tell the story. I'm inclined to agree with his choice, but I can see the other side as well. Mur's outro is fairly insightful on this story, and her reading is good. I definitely recommend the podcast version given the choice. This is a story worth thinking about the implications of.
4 space-wasp brains out of 5.

Narrative of a Beast's Life

Novelette by Cat Rambo

Originally published in Realms of Fantasy
Anthologized in Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight
Podcastle recording by Paul Jenkins

The reader is a bit dry, but in a way I think appropriate to the framing of this story as 1800s equivalent newspaper account. The one problem with the audio version is that the chapter subtitles can get long and distracting, where one could skim past them in text. They don't add anything other than the style of the period.

Some people seem to really like this story, and I cannot figure out why. The writing is good, but the story is far from it. The narrator is captured in Africa, put on a ship where he is mistreated, sold as a slave to work on a plantation, fails to escape, and reminisces on how slavery is bad. Oh, but he's a centaur, not a black guy, so this isn't a long-winded, unsubtle retelling of a generic slave narrative, really.

Once again, the writing was good, and at the end I did feel sorry for Philip, and I of course agree that slavery is horrific, but this adds nothing to the conversation and really doesn't have much story to tell, which is even more annoying for how long it is. Especially because the centaur being sold into slavery really drew me into the tale, wondering where it was going. "Nowhere" wasn't the answer I was looking for. 1.5 out of 5.