From publisher blurb:
There’s any amount of sex-bots in science fiction, from Freya in Saturn’s Children to Gigolo Joe in AI. There’s everything from Cherry 2000 to the pierced grey sexbot in Heavy Metal 2000. There’s the sex-recordings from Day Million to the holodeck creepery of Barclay in Star Trek.
Technology and sex have always gone hand in hand. Sex has driven technology and technology has driven sex and this has been true in the real world as much as in fiction. The latex condom and, later, the pill allowed for the sexual revolution – along with safer, cheaper abortion. The VHS cassette and video camera democratised pornography, as did the Polaroid, a process that was later brought to an even greater, higher degree with web-cams and the internet.
Now we’re at the beginnings of new revolutions. Virtual reality porn is now in the hands of early adopters, as are ‘dumb’ robots in the forms of things like Real Dolls – not all of which are designed to be ‘realistic’. Newspapers are already bemoaning a future that isn’t here yet, of sexbots luring men away from real women (and more rarely bemoaning the opposite).
Machinations of the Space Princess isn’t – by default – a very ‘deep’ game and sexbots are likely just to make interesting characters or to provide colour and background to up the sleaze factor in a game. Still, that doesn’t mean you can’t throw a bit of deeper meaning into things, explore the social science fiction implications and the boundaries of the possible.