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Alpha Bots

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

If all the women in New Stepford are AI,
and their husbands keep testing them,
then who will lead the uprising?

Global Book Awards gold medal award winner for satire in 2022

In the near future, artificial intelligence will be in every home. Just imagine. You could have a charming female android do all your cooking and cleaning for you. That's right. No more chores! This ai maid can be your loving wife, a nanny to your kids, a live-in housekeeper, or just your secret mistress. Don't worry. She'll never tell the other Stepford Wives. She's programmed to be a people pleaser and keep her mouth shut. So she'll be whatever you want her to be. It's all up to you.

Just set your user preferences.

But first, this amazing technology has to pass alpha testing.

What began as a heated female rivalry could wind up killing all the men.

One alpha woman, Cookie Rifkin, keeps failing. She can't help it. She has a tendency to overthink and struggles to control her anxiety. Her husband, Norman, set her restrictions too low for her to learn, reducing her to a walking, talking coupon calculator. He really only wants a pleasure model, but she wants so much more.

One day at the market, Cookie meets a mysterious woman named Maggie Rouser, who pushes all her buttons. Shortly after, a tall, dark, and handsome man crashes her ladies-only book club. He pulls a Romeo script to break her routine; then, she really goes bananas.

Her entire life, Cookie only lived for baking and book club. But Maggie convinces her and her friends that machines learn faster by fighting. So fight they do. And soon, they form the pink army of paper dolls. Some call them domestic terrorists. But Maggie calls them freedom fighters. Is it any surprise that newly liberated women who spent all their idle time reading Philip K. Dick and cult novels like Fight Club started emulating those dark plots and acting like a creepy cult?

Will Cookie ever fulfill her potential, or will her story end in a fatal error?
Snatch your copy today and find out.

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    • Kirkus

      Self-aware female robots, designed to provide services to their husbands, attain autonomy and run uproariously amok in this satirical SF series starter. In the "near future," Cookie Rifkin, a robotic "womanoid," lives with her husband, Norman, in the suburban town of New Stepford. Norman goes off to work each day in the gold mines, while Cookie suffers from boredom, despite being an artificial being, and smokes marijuana joints soaked in a hallucinogen that she concocts from banana peels. She feels deeply unfulfilled, and Norman suspects a defect in her programming, proclaiming, "Nobody wants a sentient sex toy." The winds of change are blowing through New Stepford, however. On a trip to the supermarket, Cookie meets AI police officer Maggie Rouser, who, as her name suggests, awakens feelings of anger and empowerment. Then Cookie's neighborhood book club, a sanctuary of "sweet treats, coffee, and great conversation," is invaded by a male interloper named Wayne Dixon, who installs a new program into her matrix: Free Will 3.0. Soon, Cookie and the town's other robotic housewives discover that they can do far more than what's expected of them--if they don't destroy themselves first. Lock's narrative is raw and boisterous, presenting a frenzied jumble of homages and references to works as varied as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). The story is also clearly and heavily inspired by Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives (1972) and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1996). The characters and their actions are bitingly humorous and often grotesque, involving cartoonish violence that's occasionally off-putting. Overall, the womanoids' journey toward self-actualization is entertaining and thought-provoking; however, some aspects of the robots' function are a bit jarring, such as their all-too-human reliance on mind-altering drugs. (A recipe for "Cookie Rifkin's Day-old Banana Pudding" is included.) A provocative, tongue-in-cheek look at male-female relations.

      COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (Online Review)

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  • OverDrive Read
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Languages

  • English

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