Annalee Newitz

'Autonomous is to biotech and AI what Neuromancer was to the internet' NEAL STEPHENSON 'Something genuinely and thrillingly new' WILLIAM GIBSON 'Holy hell. Autonomous is remarkable' LAUREN BEUKES WINNER OF THE 2018 LAMBDA AWARD FOR SFF SHORTLISTED FOR THE NEBULA AWARD 2018 SHORTLISTED FOR THE LOCUS AWARD FOR BEST DEBUT 2018 Earth, 2144. Jack is an anti-patent scientist turned drug pirate, traversing the world in a submarine as a pharmaceutical Robin Hood, fabricating cheap medicines for those who can't otherwise afford them. But her latest drug hack has left a trail of lethal overdoses as people become addicted to their work, doing repetitive tasks until they become unsafe or insane. Hot on her trail is an unlikely pair: Eliasz, a brooding military agent, and his indentured robotic partner, Paladin. As they race to stop information about the sinister origins of Jack's drug from getting out, they begin to form an uncommonly close bond that neither of them fully understands. And underlying it all is one fundamental question: is freedom possible in a culture where everything, even people, can be owned?

Autonomous

The highly anticipated science fiction debut from the founder of io9! Earth, 2144. Jack is an anti-patent scientist turned drug pirate, traversing the world in a submarine as a pharmaceutical Robin Hood, fabricating cheap scrips for poor people who can’t otherwise afford them. But her latest drug hack has left a trail of lethal overdoses as people become addicted to their work, doing repetitive tasks until they become unsafe or insane. Hot on her trail, an unlikely pair: Eliasz, a brooding military agent, and his robotic partner, Paladin. As they race to stop information about the sinister origins of Jack’s drug from getting out, they begin to form an uncommonly close bond that neither of them fully understand. And underlying it all is one fundamental question: Is freedom possible in a culture where everything, even people, can be owned?

A Novel

Lindy

1) I was so close to quitting this book when I read the line, "She could taste a nuanced ethical understanding of the patent system all over his body" around page fifty. Fortunately, none of the rest of the writing in the book comes close to the level of bad encapsulated in that paragraph. Except maybe that the in-universe equivalent to LiveJournal is called Memeland. 

2) Regarding robot gender: While I do agree that it's a little difficult to suss out the author's intentions with this plotline, I don't necessarily think it's problematic. (view spoiler)[In this story, robots do not have a self-concept that includes gender, but humans impose gender on them anyway. When Eliasz solely views Paladin as a military buddy in a highly masculinized environment, he understands Paladin to be a man. However, as "sex object" and "female" are virtually synonyms in our society, when Eliasz begins to perceive Paladin as the former the latter must follow, and Eliasz rationalizes the paradigm shift when he learns that Paladin's main biological component was harvested from a woman. Paladin cannot feel sexual gratification, but claims to enjoy sexual activity because she likes that Eliasz gets off, which is like, the epitome of a female gender role. Later, when Paladin is granted temporary autonomy, she learns that she's been programmed to feel loyalty and affection for whomever she's serving. She feels an intense disappointment and asks if it's ever possible to feel love under such conditions. She realizes it's impossible to disentangle "herself" from her programming and decides to roll with it, basically. Even at the end of the book, Eliasz, like many people, is still only able to conceptualize gender as an intrinsic quality (of a brain and/or soul) as opposed to a hierarchical system of power. (hide spoiler)] In any case, it's not as punchy as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and lacks the depth of He, She and It but I think it gets the point across about the coercive nature of gender.

Aamna

Starts off slow but picks up. A bit much action for me though. For that, there's the movies.

Joy Bush

This book is wonderful!!!!!!! 

Its set in the future, (2144), its kind of dystopian, it has 2 major themes, and has good queer rep by a queer author. 

The first major theme is with our MC, Jack. She wants to fight against patent laws and big pharma so that everybody has access to medication. A corporation sells a work enhancement drug, that gets people so addicted to work that they die. Jack had reverse engineered the drug and released it herself and she feels awful about it, so she sets about trying to make it right while also staying hidden from the patent law police. 

The second major theme, has to do with bots and some humans that serve as indentured servants for so many years before they can apply to become Autonomous. Our 2nd main character is a bot named Paladin working with a human partner for the patent law police to hunt down Jack. 
Bots have no gender but Paladin is referred to as He and later decides to change their pronouns to She. 

The story kept me very interested throughout, the pacing and world building is great, the narrator wasnt the best Ive heard but shes not bad either. Definitely pick this one up!

Bouke van der Bijl

A compelling world at first that is ruined by totally unnecessary distractions. Why the details about the sex life of the main character? Why the concern about the gender of a robot? Robots are objects. I am not concerned about the gender of a car either. Missed opportunity

Matthew Royal

I like the concept, but execution was too sloppy. Characters were flat, too many flashbacks, predictable plot and dialogue, and development of key ideas was superficial. Not good as sci-fi, and not good as a story, so why bother?

Shona Tiger

Didi Chanoch

Autonomous is rich in ideas and characters. Flawed, sometimes despicable characters and smart, sometimes depressing ideas about the future. The plot is a bit thin, and I think I may have hated one of the characters more than the author intended. Hard to be sure. 

It's really hard to say anything more about this novel without spoilers, beyond the synopsis. I will recommend Amal El-Mohtar's review in NPR Books. 

This is a good book, maybe very good. It is also, I should warn, at points a very violent book. If you can stomach that, I recommend it.

Laura

The ending felt kind of abrupt to me. I still wanted more story!

Fraser Simons

“He was a user of his own consciousness, but he did not have owner privileges. As a result, Paladin felt many things without knowing why.”

In 2144 there are canola fields that transmit data. There are drugs to extend your life. There are drugs for just about everything. 

In the Arctic Sea, Jack Chen is a pirate in a submarine with her own lab used to fabricate reverse-engineered drugs on the cheap, making them available to everyone... and antagonizing Big Pharma in the processes. When people start taking her newest drug, a perfectly replicated version of "Zacuity", a performance-enhancing drug that makes people feel immense pleasure from doing a specific activity. The company primarily uses it to get its own labor force hooked on something very particular: work. And the side effects suck.

“It didn’t just boost your concentration. It made you enjoy work. You couldn’t wait to get back to the keyboard, the breadboard, the gesture table, the lab, the fabber.” 

Intense reactions to the drug, altering the human mind and in some cases actually killing them, triggers the main thrust of the story. Jack sets out to research and fabricate a cure and disseminate it before more people die, and before Elias and Paladin, two military agents dispatched to eliminate Jack and facilitate a cover-up find her and take her out. You do not want to mess with patent law in this future. 

“When it came to intellectual property, justice was simple and clear.”

Paladin, an indentured robot serving the military, is governed in much the same way A.I generally is in cyberpunk and sci-fi. Freedom in a box; confined to a very particular place in society. Governed because they are a commodity. Labour and manpower and expensive technologies created bots, and so, because of their programming, even to bots this seems fair and right. Indentured humans though, slaves, are not as polarizing. There are rules and laws that must be followed if you have indentured. 

“Bots, who cost money, required a period of indenture to make their manufacture worthwhile. No such incentive was required for humans to make other humans.” 

Throughout the assignment, Elias and Paladin forge an unconventional relationship. One billed as a love story on the back of the book. Admittedly, my initial, gut reaction to this assertion was that it was the weakest part of the story. It didn't feel earned. And upon further reflection, I think that's in part what the author was going for.

“How many times had Paladin looked into this human face, its features animated by neurological impulse alone? He did not know. Even if he were to sort through his video memories and count them up one by one, he still didn't think he would have the right answer. But after today's mission, human faces would always look different to him. They would remind him of what it felt like to suffer, and to be relieved of suffering.”

Autonomous broaches many preconceptions; some of which lead to the exploration of our incessant need to anthropomorphize everything we interact with. In this particular case, technology and the other things we construct are similar in themes touched on in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, and were handled well throughout the fiction. 

“Everybody is an outsider, if you go deep enough. The trick is reassuring people that you’re their kind of outsider.”

Elias is overly concerned with making sure Paladin uses pronouns and that those pronouns come from Paladin's brain, not programming—which is not considered important to the makeup of what Paladin considers their identity. Pronouns are useful in so far as they are needed to converse with humans. But bots don't communicate that way and bots often refer to humans as mysterious, trying to figure out why humans do what they do at all; especially regarding identity.

“She was part of a social network that included artists and activists who were always hatching what they called “disruptive strategies” aimed at undermining all forms of authority: cultural, economic, scientific. Mostly their disruptions involved artistic fashion shows full of uselessly beautiful GMOs and tissue mods that said something about global recolonization.” 

While Elias and Paladin attempt to find Jack, exerting the will of the system of which Jack fights against with the help of Threezed, an indentured slave freed by Jack, incidentally; they invariably end up finding themselves in an unconventional way. And while Jack and Threezed enlist the help of another, completely autonomous bot named "Med", they too discover components of themselves missing; in some cases merely forgotten. 

“The key to autonomy, she realized, was more than root access on the programs that shaped her desires. It was a sense of privacy.”

Flashbacks to Elias and Jack's pasts work well to help the pacing of the story as well as do what this novel does best: world building. The technology, especially biotech is perhaps the greatest strength of the book. It feels well thought out and incremental in such a way that it makes it feel like this is not the 100ish years in the future, but something even closer, just on the peripheral. 

“People assigned genders based on behaviors and work roles, often ignoring anatomy. Gender was a form of social recognition.” 

It's a quick read with an interesting way to broach anthropomorphization in general, but also what our relationships might look like when such technology does enter our lives. The need to place things in human boxes and terms is an injustice and disservice and is at the root of a lot of social issues. Coupled with where Big Pharma is going, again, this all feels like a good extrapolation of where we could be headed. A pill for everything. The resistance and the "punks" confined to fabricating small victories in the form of a cheaper product, rather than the ability to destabilize the system so much for actual, meaningful change; reflective of the socio-political climate right now. 

“But now we know there has been no one great disaster—only the slow-motion disaster of capitalism converting every living thing and idea into property.”

Wrapped up in a fairly quick cat-and-mouse game between the respective characters is an impressive amount of world-building, characterization, and social issues that might result from future developmental progress with where technology may be heading. All of the characters served a purpose and were quite well fleshed out, especially for a 300-page book. I generally don't like narratives that often switch between characters but this didn't bother me in Autonomous. 4/5

“For all the robots who question their programming.”

Moray Lyle McIntosh

In Newitz's future the world has become ultra-corporatized with big pharmaceutical companies owning the parents for the best new medicine. Only money can buy you a long, healthy life unless you manage to score some pirated drugs from anti-patent activists like our protagonist, Jack.

Alongside this commodification of medicine there's a similar development on life itself. In a world where the rich can buy the drugs and health to keep them ahead of the competition the poor, sick and ill-educated can "indenture" themselves (and others, including their children), crafting a nightmarish modern slavery market. And it's not just humans. Most bots (many with a biological element that may or may not play a part in their personalities) begin their existence in a similar indenture, locked out of their own memories and functions until they manage to earn their autonomy.

In this world we have pharm-pirate Jack who, in a rush to finance free anti-vitals for the poor releases a pirated productivity drug. Unfortunately, it is so powerful that it's users work themselves to death, becoming totally addicted to homework, house-painting and other menial tasks. Jack knows she had to fix her mess and hopefully bring to light the criminal properties of the stolen drug. On her tail are Eliasz and Paladin, a human-robot law enforcement partnership in more ways than one.

It's a world that definitely plays on the fears of today (and all days) with activists for freedom and equality of access are tagged against soulless corporations. It focuses on the nature of free-will and autonomy and raises interesting questions about politics and gender. These are the elements most reviews focus on and I don't deny the ideas are intriguing if not entirely original. What seems to get glossed over is the quality of the writing. And it is not good. The prose is bloated with long passages of unnecessary technological detail:
 
"An input mechanism in Yellowknife triggered a query to a molecule database in Bern, seeking several specific strings in one data field. One hundred sixty milliseconds later, the query returned a set of pointers."

I know that this is Newitz's own area of expertise but the narrative is saturated with passages like this that totally paralyse the narrative. Neither the plot not the characters receive anything like this level of attention or description making them flat and lifeless. The irony being that Paladin, the AI character, is (marginally) more flagged or than the rest.

There is also a frankly patronising series of flashbacks designed to make sure that readers do understand that making healthcare available only to the wealthy is a BAD THING. Of course, not everyone is lucky enough to live in a country with universal healthcare (also a BAD THING) but I have serious doubts that the readership of this novel wouldn't be able to reach this conclusion without being walked through the reasoning. 

The plot resolves itself so easily and quickly in many cases that it becomes difficult to follow. When finding a solution to the various conflicts that arise is so consistently Smith it's hard to be invested and the complete lack of tension just keeps everything skimming along until it hits another wall of technobabble or an unnecessarily long, or plain unnecessary, dialogue.

The prose is consistently stuff and stilted, the dialogue painfully poor and if human/AI relationships are permitted by the judges there is more than one scene that could definitely be a strong contender for the Bad Sex Award this year. They're really toe-curling, and not in a good way.

In the end the writing kills the potential laid by the imagination. Or was a significant struggle to finish and I doubt it will leave many impressions unless I revisit that bot sex in my nightmares...

Faith

Ben Nathan

It's a solid 3.5, but I'm rounding up because it's full of great ideas. Very interesting. Had times that I got upset with the story, but others I was enthralled. Three story lines, each interesting in its own way.

Jeremy Cote

I thought the book was a pleasant read. I found the world to be the most interesting part of the story. It was cool to see how society worked with bots. The plot itself was fine, but there wasn’t anything amazing that jumped out at me. Still, I think if you’re a fan of science fiction you will probably enjoy this book.

Tyler Jefford

I didnt really get into this book as much as I wish I did. The concept is fantastic, but for me the character development left me bored and not caring about what was happening.

Daniel Kirwan

Joe Woods

ephe

Pedro Figueiredo

Michael Cowell

Barry A. Martin

kate

'Autonomous is to biotech and AI what Neuromancer was to the internet' NEAL STEPHENSON 'Something genuinely and thrillingly new' WILLIAM GIBSON 'Holy hell. Autonomous is remarkable' LAUREN BEUKES SHORTLISTED FOR THE NEBULA AWARD Earth, 2144. Jack is an anti-patent scientist turned drug pirate, traversing the world in a submarine as a pharmaceutical Robin Hood, fabricating cheap medicines for those who can't otherwise afford them. But her latest drug hack has left a trail of lethal overdoses as people become addicted to their work, doing repetitive tasks until they become unsafe or insane. Hot on her trail is an unlikely pair: Eliasz, a brooding military agent, and his indentured robotic partner, Paladin. As they race to stop information about the sinister origins of Jack's drug from getting out, they begin to form an uncommonly close bond that neither of them fully understands. And underlying it all is one fundamental question: is freedom possible in a culture where everything, even people, can be owned?

Autonomous

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