Title: UngirlsAuthor: Lauren Beukes
Series: Disorder Collection #3
First Published: June 27, 2019
Publisher: Amazon Original Stories
Pages: 63
Genre: Horror, Science Fiction, Short Stories
Format: Ebook
Source: Prime Reading
Rating:
Synopsis:
In the near future, lab-grown sex dolls are the pleasure toy of choice in this disturbing and provocative short story from Lauren Beukes, the bestselling author of The Shining Girls.
Actor and sex worker Nats is experienced at putting on a show. However, her new gig supplying intimate whispers for growgirls takes her to a place darker and lonelier than she could have ever imagined. The lab-grown dolls can respond to pleasure or pain; their synthetic heads contain only the simplest AI to prevent any pesky robo sex doll uprisings. But just because growgirls don’t have a brain, doesn’t mean they don’t have a voice…
Review
I went into Ungirls pretty blind, not bothering to read the description but picking up the story because of the author. I had enjoyed Lauren Beuke’s The Shining Girls and had always wanted to read more of her work. Even though this story is already four years old my goodness Lauren Beukes has her finger on the pulse of contemporary issues! After witnessing the rise of AI art, Andrew Tate, and the uncomfortably misogynistic thirst over the sexy robot twins from Atomic Heart, this story is quite prescient. I distinctly recall reading a lot of posts online about how “women’s days were numbered” once perfect sex dolls are available, which is very much the vibe of this story.
Ungirls is a story that begs to be a full-length novel, it follows the lives of sex workers and their paradoxical existence, highly desirable and woefully despised. I really enjoyed the main characters and it was a shame that their stories were so paper thin due to the low page count, it makes the pacing of the story feel unwieldly as the narrative leaps from one character to the next. The narrative shines a spotlight on the incel problem and the abhorrent online discourse that occurs in online spaces and the terribly lonely young men that inhabit them. Beukes presents us with young men that are both pitiful and terrifying and an ending that made me really fucking sad about the state of the world.
Mild spoiler, but being a Southeast Asian woman with a particular disdain for a certain population of wife-hunters, that last shot at the end was like a sucker punch. Bravo.
Quote
“These lone wolves are lonely, they’re desperate, and society has turned its back on them. It’s made them the problem.”
Content Warnings
View Spoiler »About the Author
About Lauren Beukes
Lauren Beukes is the award-winning and internationally best-selling South African author of The Shining Girls, Zoo City and Afterland, among other works. Her novels have been published in 24 countries and are being adapted for film and TV. She’s also a comics writer, screenwriter, journalist and documentary maker.
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