Couldn't get into it. Interesting premises, but felt it tried to take on too much at once. DNF for me.

An undeniably nteresting premise (though one that has been seen before) and a strong beginning but loses steam and entertainment value as it progresses. For me, I think it was sadly somewhat overhyped.

2144. World is ruled by the quality of life (read: medication) and the robots are of so high intellectual and "bio" quality that they can reach authonomy a.k.a liberation of sorts. Also this is a world full of the pharma business as providers of the medicine controlling the world - and some partisan scientists fighting this medical capitalism. Enter our heroes: on the side of supposed baddies we have special agent Eliasz accompanied by the advanced military robot Paladin, on the side of the supposed good guys are pirate/scientist Jack, young former "slave" Threezed and a couple of freedom-fighting scientists.

And I have mixed feelings and dilemmas here.

The novels cover many of the modern issues/questions, some of them worked out better than the others - but as the whole, while this is no way a shallow works, I feel that the novel actually could go much deeper. *The authoress clearly fights some issues on her agenda - yet I think the storytelling talent in her could produce even more compelling works and worlds. Take the issue of slavery (including sexual) - it is covered only on a few pages/passages, but it is covered so well! On the other side - the whole capitalism issue is somehow black-and-white, formulaic here - and also the power balance topic is present in the pages within the all history of literature, we always have bad Goliaths and seemingly weaker Davids in any era. Also, coming from the post-communist country I often feel that people do not know what it is to truly live in the regime. The world built here is interesting, yet - somehow it is similar to the Star Wars of sorts for me (without the personalized evil in the form of Darth Vader).
Also, this book is LGBT+ and covers some (some of them controversial) sexual issue (sex relationship of human and robot, gender fluidity, sexual exploitation and slavery, sexual relationship with much younger partner etc.). To be honest, being a conservative reader, I probably would not read the book knowing that these topics will be covered, not my cup of tea. Yet, here I am - and also honestly again, I understand that the literature is shadowing the real world. And also where else one should discuss even the uncomfortable topics? So while I am uncomfortable with some of the plots (namely gender fluidity, bisexuality and sexual relationship of robots and humans), I have also enjoyed some of the portrayed stories from the literary point, namely: Threezed´s story.

End is somehow abrupt - maybe the second installment is in the works? Fingers covered for the Threezed´s next adventures and for him maturing into a man!

Would I recommend this book? Well, maybe - there are people amongst my acquaintances who might like this genre (but I would add frank explanation of all my uncomfortabilities and some clear trigger warnings for persons who do not like to read the books about the sexual violence/power balance).

Clever, smart and witty - this book was a page turner to the end. With love, drugs and robots, Newitz gave a fresh take on the future.

Review of Autonomous: A Novel by Annalee Newitz
Reviewed by Sam Lubell

Autonomous: A Novel by Annalee Newitz is a novel about freedom and autonomy in both obvious and non-obvious ways. Certainly both robots and human slaves have issues with being autonomous. But so do other humans in a future where drugs can cause people to become addicted to their work. And people’s autonomy is affected by their own prejudice and assumptions.

Autonomous is structured as an extended chase. Jack Chen is a drug pirate, “the Robin Hood of the anti-patent movement” who recently cloned Zacuity, a productivity drug. When people start dying from being unable to quit working, she fears she made an error in her copying, but instead discovers the problem is built into the drug. She is being chased by Eliasz, a military agent, and his robot Paladin. The robot is confused by Eliasz’s emotional response to it; at times attracted to it and at other times refusing to acknowledge it. Ultimately, it deduces that Eliasz sees it as male but has been socialized to resist male-male sexual relations. The solution is to convince Eliasz that it is female. Since Paladin’s type of robots have a human brain, only used for facial recognition, Eliasz becomes obsessed with finding out information about the brain’s former human.

Meanwhile Jack has resolved to bring down the drug company that invented Zacuity by proving that it
broke the law. When Threezed, a slave Jack rescued, discovers an autonomous medical robot working
with a Zacuity patient, he convinces her to join Jack who gets her a job in Jack’s former lab, ironically
the type of work Jack had wanted to do at that same lab.

So, while Jack, Med, and Threezed develop a cure, Eliasz and Paladin follow clues to track them down,
while working on their own relationship.

Autonomous has the action of a police chase thriller but the speculation and ideas of a hard science
fiction novel. This book deserves the attention it has been receiving. Recommended.

Liked this one. Took me some time to get into it, but enjoyed it in the end. Looking forward to more from Annalee Newitz.

Despite trying to read this book multiple times and with different format (audiobook and ebook), I can't seem to go through it. The writing style and the overall book doesn't seem to click with me.

Instead of forcing myself to continue and leave a negative review, I would rather pass and focus on other books.

You can contact me if you would like me to continue despite the negative review, but otherwise I will move on.

As someone who's read hundreds of sci-fi, I can tell there are elements in Autonomous that I've never or rarely seen in the genre. It took me a while to get caught up with the plot (maybe it was just my reading speed and mood at the time), but once I did I was hooked.

I really enjoyed the cyberpunk vibe to it and how homophobia was explored with Paladin (who is non binary) and Eliasz relationship. Topics such LGBTQ-phobia and gender (identification and gender roles) should be way more explored in sci-fi and it is really refreshing to see it finally happening.

All in all, it was a great read and I'll be recommending it no doubt :)

(This book has been submitted to the Over the Rainbow Committee, a project of the Stonewall Awards from the American Library Association. I am a member of that committee. While your book is under consideration I cannot post any reviews of the work. Monthly lists of reviewed books and, in early 2019, the full annotated recommendations list, will be posted at http://www.glbtrt.ala.org/overtherainbow/. (My original request pre-dated my committee appointment.) Thanks for your patience and understanding!)

The writing style was crisp. The plot elements worked. A lot of thought-provoking stuff here.

A few of the details felt a little off, and it was a bit slow to start. Otherwise, a good consideration of consent and autonomy in ways both explicit and implicit.

I'd like to mention that some of the descriptions I've seen of this book seem a little misleading. It's pitched as a story about a pharmaceutical pirate with a submarine, and while that's *technically* true, we don't follow any of Jack Chen's pirating operations themselves over the course of the book, nor do we spend a significant amount of time in her submarine. It's split between two main narratives, one in which Jack is trying to mitigate the aftermath of a serious error, and one in which a pair of military agents are pursuing her, one of whom is an introspective bot named Paladin. I didn't necessarily find this to be a fast-paced or "fun" book, but I did find it to be a meaty and complex one, well worth my time.

Autonomous is set on a future Earth that feels unsettlingly familiar, even though the scenarios posed seem pretty extreme and the technological worldbuilding pretty dense. In some ways it's a dystopia, though Annalee Newitz doesn't necessarily follow the literary traditions of that subgenre. I've seen this book described as "cyberpunk," which may be more accurate, but I haven't read other cyberpunk books with which to compare it. As with a lot of the best science fiction I've read, the world of this book is more than just a backdrop... it's really the whole point, and Newitz reveals more and more facets of her world deliberately, all the way up until the end.

One of the most appealing aspects of Autonomous is its focus on the lives and careers of scientists and their struggle to determine what "Good Science" really means and how to pursue it in a world dominated by corporate interest. Jack pirates drugs by means of reverse-engineering with the goal of providing medical treatment to those who can't afford patented medications, but she funds her operation by selling recreational and productivity drugs as well. We begin with Jack's discovery that a batch of a drug called Zaucity that she has pirated is having dangerous side effects, causing workers to become fatally addicted to their jobs. The pharmaceutical company that developed Zaucity is clearly breaking the law with this drug, but Jack understands that her role in distributing it more broadly constitutes a betrayal of the ideals she stands for. She knows that the authorities will be on her tail, so it's a race against the clock to dig up old professional contacts to help her prove the dangers of the original drug and develop a publicly available cure. Along the way, we get flashbacks to Jack's past, and we see how her involvement with various types of anti-patent activism brought her where she is today.

With Jack as a sympathetic protagonist, one would think it would be hard to care about the characters in the second plotline, who are, after all, hunting her down. And I'll admit that the human agent, Eliasz, comes across as a jerk. He's homophobic, callous when it comes to the use of torture, and insensitive to the ways Paladin's experience of the world is different from a human's. But Paladin is a fascinating POV character, laboring under a type of bot indenture that ensures the loyalty of even their thought processes. Paladin is incapable of questioning the mission, but still finds plenty else to ponder, including the value for bots of human gender and sexuality (Paladin uses both he and she pronouns at points in the book) and the significance of the human brain that helps them to recognize facial expressions. I thought that Paladin's storyline did some wonderful things, but the attempt to show Eliasz in a more positive light late in the book felt insufficient.

The theme of "autonomy," from whence the book gets its title, comes more into the spotlight in the second half, and eventually intersects with the book's other themes in interesting ways. This world has a human indenture system that ostensibly grew out of bot indenture, but is justified with social ideology that's really nothing new. Jack is accompanied throughout by a boy named Threezed, whom she frees from an abusive indenture situation at the beginning of the book, and they are eventually joined by a bot named Med who was raised autonomous and is an accomplished scientist in her own right. It's easy to see Jack as a savior in her relationship with Threezed, but when we finally see his side of the story, nothing is that simple.

While the resolution of the story is satisfying on a character level, there are no easy triumphs and no clear heroes. Ultimately, Autonomous is a compelling portrait of a world with a heck of a lot wrong with it that asks more questions than it answers.

3.5ish stars.

An interesting, well-written, near-ish-future SF novel with some compelling ideas. It reminds me a little bit of Malka Older's idea heavy Infomocracy, although I liked Older's book a little bit more.

I didn't find this extremely engaging and never felt strongly pressed to continue reading, but I did enjoy it consistently. The ideas outshine the characters, and I didn't connect with any of them except for Paladin, an indentured robot working toward "autonomy," and, to a lesser extent, Threezed, an indentured human experiencing autonomy for the first time.

Newitz also explores sexuality/gender identity in some different ways, while not making them a direct focus of the narrative - for example, Paladin is a genderless robot whose human partner, Eliasz, projects his own expectations, desires, and ultimately his suppressed homophobia, onto Paladin. Paladin takes it, and even allows Eliasz to change the pronoun he uses for Paladin from “he” to “she” just to appease him (Paladin, being genderless, doesn’t care, but wants Eliasz, who is sexually attracted to Paladin but doesn’t want to be a “faggot,” to be comfortable). Obviously an icky situation, and Newitz obviously does not try to present it as a healthy representation of gender identity because that's obviously not the point she's making, and not all characters in literature are saints. Newitz shows that Paladin has the right to choose how to handle, and ultimately learn from, the relationships presented, which I appreciate, even if it's not resolved like a Becky Chambers novel. Others have expressed discomfort with the inclusion of this particular aspect of the novel, and though I can't speak to it from the perspective of an LGBT+ individual, Newitz herself is a member of the community (her partner is Charlie Jane Anders, a trans individual, and talented author of All the Birds in the Sky), meaning, if nothing else, that she has a distinct frame of reference that I respect. Just a note that having a homophobic character in a book does not mean the book or its author is homophobic anymore than a book involving a murderer means the book or its author is condoning of murder (this book has its fair share of that as well).

Some of the focal subject matters of the book are property rights, economics, and Big Pharma, which are not really of huge interest to me, but I respect it as well-written and worthy of the praise it's received.

I finally penetrated through the surplus of computer jargon that permeates the prose of this book. And although I've not finished it yet, I'm now confident that I will. Worth the effort! Love the premise! Looking forward to finishing, at which point I will update/revise this "pre-review".

My quick take on this book is “feminist anarchist new-wave cyberpunk,” but that doesn’t do it justice by a long shot. In a world dominated by pharmaceutical companies, illegally reverse-engineered drugs offer the only hope to the poor. But when her attention-focusing drug creates lethal obsession, rogue scientist Jack desperately tries to get her pirated version off the streets. That’s half the story and I was already hooked (scientist heroes, check; women scientist heroes, double-check). The second half of the story centers around the private military team (human Eliaz and robot-with-human-brain Paladin) dispatched to apprehend Jack. That’s where things get really interesting, because in this dystopic world, robots are chattel and sometimes so are people. Both can earn their freedom, but what does that really mean?

Quotes from the book: Once bots gained human rights, a wave of legislation swept through many governments … became known as the Human Rights Indenture Laws. They established the rights of indentured robots, and, after a decade of court battles established the rights of humans to become indentured, too. After all, if human-equivalent beings could be indentured, why not humans themselves?
“For bots, industry always precedes autonomy,” explained a final string of text.

Legal autonomy, emotional independence, freedom from obsession and pharmaceutical control of mood, thought, and desire? Newitz deftly blends the themes and resonances into a dramatic story that feels refreshingly current and yet fits easily within the genre. I look forward to her next work.

I really enjoy a good robot/AI adventure and was not disappointed in this story. A thrilling tale set in a future world that was just the great adventure I was looking for.

Annalee Newitz - Autonomous

What do you get when someone deeply embedded in the Now, the discussions around our online culture, about our electronic rights, about where we are and where we are heading, and who has published copiously on these topics previously writes a work of fiction? The answer, for very good (and maybe even obvious?) reasons is with a cracker of a novel playing on exactly these topics - here is someone who knows what they are talking about, and who is telling us about what she feels we need to think of for the future.

Annalee Newitz is a journalist who writes about the cultural impact of science and technology, the former editor at iO9 and Gizmodo, a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and currently the Tech Culture Editor for Ars Technica. Besides all her online and magazine work she has 6 non-fiction books to her name, now followed by her first novel, Autonomous.

Autonomous is a story about bots, about ownership, and about self-image and self-determination. Or, alternatively, about business, intellectual property, and the protection of investment; including the question of what is socially, ethically, and morally acceptable (or can be got away with, at least).
The story, set in a 2144 which is surprisingly recognisable, follows two main protagonists - firstly Jack, a designer drug pirate who travels in a stealth submarine, and distributes free drugs to the needy who cannot afford them; and secondly Paladin, a bird-like bot, freshly become incorporated and thus indentured to the African Federation, who now is set to work for the IPC to track down patent violations. You see, this world is nominally run by a small number of power blocks, but all the more so by ever-mightier corporations, who more or less can flaunt the law as they wish in the protection of their interests; we witness some events involving violence I found rather unpalatable, but apparently quite accepted as fait accompli by society.
Jack has a problem though - one of the drugs she reverse-engineered, has had produced, and sold to pay for her charitable work belonged to a mighty corporation called Zacity, and has a flaw - it does not just make work much more enjoyable and desirable to do (as it is designed to), it makes the user dependent on continuing to do it to the exclusion of everything else - to their death. And Zacity will do anything to keep this from becoming common knowledge.


I guess you can see how Jack’s path intersects with Paladin’s... the surface story of Paladin's (and his human handler Eliaz') tracking down of Jack via her contacts runs against a heavy undertow of patent law, corporate malfeasance, and IP conflicts, including Corporate interests vs Public Good (as always it goes the way of the money, you will not be surprised to hear).

The world this is set in was surprisingly similar to ours, given the 100+ years that have elapsed, but it has a number of interesting features. Society now allows indenture - for bots, as there is a cost involved in creating them, and combining their AI with a human brain (for the bits AI is still no good at like facial recognition - ?); but also for humans who have fallen on hard times (there is opposition to that part, still). The world is entirely connected via atmospheric ‘motes’ providing near-universal network access, even if you still get localised bandwidth constraints (!), but this also leads to a near-panopticon society, with some interesting gaps in application.
We also see how this world now feeds itself, and the changes to the environment (they arrive in Iqualut on the Baffin Islands where the temperature is 20 degrees! As I write this they are at -28...).

The story is told in short bursts, following a specific protagonist/thread each, including a number of flashbacks to Jack’s history, explaining how she ended up where/as she is. I found that I was not totally keen on some of the blow-by-blow verbal exchanges, which came across stilted at times; they were a bit better if filtered through Paladin’s more alien perception and frames of reference. Via Paladin we also get to see bot/bot communication, which again felt simplistic, and old-fashioned even for today, never mind the far future…
Other bits a I found jarring and uneven in development/extrapolation was the comparison of the ease of identification and background checks which Paladin performs vs the ease of using pseudonyms and invented backstories for humint - neither the pirates nor other areas, even official ones, really seem to be able to identify known, active IPC agents and bots, for example. The use of text repositories as the main exchange medium also struck me as odd and atavistic.

Overall, despite these weaknesses and quibbles, I found this to be a fascinating book talking about a possible path in terms of copyright and profiteering over common good, and the rights of robots to their own autonomy (something which is explored in variants across the book), never mind their gender (we still struggle with humans as it is!). And about what should be legal, who should define this, and how it can and cannot be enforced.

The book is dedicated to “the robots who question their programming”, which is interesting in itself, and has cover endorsements from both William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, which slightly over-hype the book I felt.
Nevertheless, this is a driving, energetic piece of social SF, and in most parts very well thought out and thought-provoking. Recommended, needless to say.



Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.

Title: Autonomous
Author: Annalee Newitz
Reviewer: Markus
Reviewer URL: http://thierstein.net
Publisher: TOR
Publisher URL: http://www.us.macmillan.com
Publication Date: Dec 2017
Review Date: 171229
ISBN:9780765392091
Pages: 261
Format: ePub
Topic: AI
Topic: Societal Norms

A review in spanish: https://dreamsofelvex.blogspot.com/2018/01/autonomous-analee-newitz.html

Autonomous (Tor, September 2017), the debut novel from io9 founder and tech editor Annalee Newitz, falls somewhere on the spectrum between the work of Madeline Ashby and the work of Cory Doctorow. It deals with drug patents, autonomy and free will and ownership of human beings and artificial intelligences alike. All at the same time, but there’s a common thread: they’re all about several kinds of property, specifically the intellectual and human kind, and the ways in which possession and ownership interact with freedom and selfhood.

Also, a good chunk of it is set in Canada, about which I have thoughts.

Autonomous is set in the mid-22nd century, but the world is, for all its additional technological enhancements, a familiar territory. A dystopia with recognizable characteristics. Big Pharma is still with us, and has metastasized into Big Brother, a drug-patent oligarchy enforced with brutality that sells productivity-enhancing drugs with some frightening side effects. The narrative alternates between Jack, a drug pirate who has reverse-engineered a productivity drug that is starting to kill people, and Paladin, a robot with a human brain (installed to facilitate facial recognition processing) that has been partnered with Eliasz, an agent assigned to deal with the threat Jack presents. Eliasz also has a thing for Paladin, which Paladin does their best to process. Jack also has a sidekick: Threezed, an indentured slave she inadvertently liberates during a botched assassination attempt against her.

The plot advances briskly, as Eliasz and Paladin move ruthlessly against Jack, wreaking carnage in the process; Jack, for her part, must simultaneously evade capture and find a cure for the drug that she helped disseminate. All the while, it’s via the plot arcs of both Threezed and Paladin that Autonomous explores and develops its eponymous theme, as each learns, via their respective partnerships, to gain (or regain) and assert a certain sense of self. That theme elevates Autonomous beyond mere technothriller; this is a book that is about something, and it’s thought about it. As first novels go, this is exceptionally good.

Most of the action takes place in Canada: in the far north, in Vancouver, and in Saskatoon. It was oddly dissonant to see a future Canada rendered through a funhouse mirror: much was familiar (I’ve actually been to some of the locations mentioned), much unrecognizable. Partly that’s because it’s set in the future, but in a couple of cases I found myself bouncing off geographical errors, if you could call them that, that tried my ability to suspend disbelief. Little details of location or scale that suggested that the author didn’t get things quite right. Not significant, but the kind of thing that can throw a Canadian reader out of the book. (If anything it’s a reminder to my own self to be careful when writing about other people’s geographies.)

Noteworthy experiences while reading this book: Writing style was great but the story just didn't work for me.

Check out author's other books? Maybe
Recommend this book? No

Notes and Opinions: I really wanted to like this one but it just didn't work out. I thought the story was interesting and the writing style was fine but the characters were really lacking for me. I didn't connect with any of them and I was slightly bored. The next issue was the world building we don't really get a lot. I wish that we would have been able to really get some much needed history about this world before the story started. As when the story did start it felt like I had been dropped into an already started world. I was so lost and stayed that way for the duration. For me this one just didnt work out at all. The story, chracters, and plot just felt very out of order and I just couldn't get into it.

Go Into This One Knowing: really confusing

I first became aware of Annalee Newitz through the science-fiction blog she co-founded, io9.com. I've been reading that blog for years and have always held it as my go-to site for all things sci-fi, fantasy, and everything in-between. So when this novel hit my radar I got pretty pumped to finally explore some of her prose.
Autonomous is a really fun ride. Set in the future, this story takes place in a world run in large part by pharmaceutical companies. This has given rise to an underground culture of bio-hackers; pirates who reverse engineer the drug companies' patents in order to affordably provide them to the masses. The story centers on one such pirate, a woman named Jack, as well as her pursuers, a government agent and his robot partner.
I couldn't help but imagine this world looking similar to a Neil Blomcamp film: a quasi-futuristic techno-poverty. This is a world, not too dissimilar to our own, in which everyone has access to some sort of technology as its simply a part of life. But, much like our reality, not everyone is treated equally. Robots are a significant presence now, to varying degrees. Most are indentured or employed to preform a specified job. But with time and effort it can be possible to achieve "autonomy"; robotic freedom.
Newitz uses these details as metaphors to explore a variety of sociopolitical issues: big-pharma, piracy, poverty, addiction, sexuality, and identity being the most prominent. The majority of these ideas are explored successfully. The only issue I had was getting my head around the idea of pharmaceutical patents being issued in such a way. But I'd rather have no explanation than a bad one so once I excepted that I probably wasn't going to get that information it became a non-issue. I found this to be a wise decision, as Newitz is a smart writer. She uses her words in a very accessable, but never dry, way. Her characters are well constructed and engaging. There were even a few moments when a metaphor brought on an actual "ah ha!" moment. And her descriptions of the victims of some of these drugs are downright terrifying. It's always welcome when an author can provide some new perspective on something in the real world, even if the perspective isn't aways pleasant. 
Autonomous is a fresh, edgy sci-fi novel that's probably worth your time. Its got a bit of a punk-rock dirty techno vibe. But I like that. I really like that.