(This review is adapted from thoughts I gave in the RPC Reading Club on November 11th.)
This article has a classic surrealism that's sometimes undercut by a lack of both detail and subtlety. As goes the old tradition, the photos do a lot of the heavy lifting. They are good images, though the middle two are a bit too absurd for me to believe.
A lot of the interior description is left to the imagination. It's never supplemented by an exploration log, which is a bit disappointing because the details that do exist are executed well. I have a vague understanding of the setting, but RPC-015-4 takes over as the subject for the rest of the article. After the rover scene, I can't say I'm complaining.
I was going to gripe that the matriarchal stuff was clichéd, but RPC-015-4 totally justifies it. His adorable "manchild" characteristics, isolation, and shaky grip on reality combined with his bizarre genius create possibly one of the most compelling characters in the entire canon. I love the line where he briefly laments his "condition", while still hardly seeming to grasp what it actually means.
His logs have the perfect runtime, with a balance of a few events and a quick length that I usually wouldn't expect to be so effective. This has proven to me that it can be done. The ending also excels in that tricky compromise of resolving the story while keeping the anomaly around and functioning.
This doesn't start off on the strongest foot, but it really picks up by the end. It raises questions and possibilities that I'd love to see followed up on, though it appears we will not be hearing them from the original author. 5/5