help me find this story? Round 2!
One of my australian LJ friends is having a terrible time finding a book, and remembering the success we had with finding the title of the Green Book, I thought I'd try again.
Quote:
Originally Posted by nett
I was wondering if anyone on my lovely flist was familiar with a short story compilation (and the author that wrote it) that I believe is categorized as teen fiction/horror. For all I know its REALLY popular but its been around a decade since I read it and none of my search words come up with anything useful in le google. Weak google-fu: I has it.
~~ A widower wakes up one morning on a planet that is not earth, in a house that is an exact replica of his own. On a downstairs coffee table there is a catalogue of women with their names. He is expected to choose one of them and that woman will be 'delivered' to his home. He kicks up a stink and orders two women, and is obliged though not without complaint/protest.
The women are androids, and they have different settings that he can play with at will. He sets one of the androids to have a sex drive of around 3 and he views her as a best friend/daughter/wife replacement. The other one he's totally full on with and does everything from turning her into a total shrinking violet and pretty much raping her, to turning her up to ten so she's insatiable.
He freaks out one day and turns them off and puts them in a junkpile out the back of his house, and orders two more women who he doesn't really regard with any great respect. He largely ends up making them stand around and be coat/hack racks; eventually pulling the first two out of the bin, cleaning them up and pretty much resuming as he had before.
Near the end of the story it is revealed that all the androids have a 'used by date' and they all must be incinerated. The widower is solemn and doesn't want them to go, though as the last one -- the one he had made his best friend/daughter/wife replacement -- goes into the incinerator he's moved to tears and he attempts to follow her in to die with her.
-- I don't THINK that this is one of the stories in Isobelle Carmody's Green Monkey Dreams, I'm pretty sure its by a male author named Richard/Robert or something similar (though I could be WAY off for all I know it could be a guy named Victor xD).
