Ahoy there me mateys! I received this sci-fi eARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. So here be me honest musings . . .

autonomous (Annalee Newitz)

Title: autonomous

Author: Annalee Newitz

Publisher: Macmillian-Tor/Forge

Publication Date: Available Now!! (hardback/ebook)

ISBN: 978-0765392077

Source: NetGalley

Well me mateys, while this be an interesting read, it certainly wasn't what I was expectin'. I somehow expected it to be much better. It started out with a brilliant quoting of "the last Saskatchewan pirate" which be a shanty that all me crew should know and love.

Side note: if ye haven't heard it then take a break and click on the link in the title above and give it a gander. Then come back and finish reading this log post. That be an order!

The first main character we meet is the awesome pirate, Jack. Ye see Jack is a reverse pharmacological engineer who takes lifesaving drugs from the major tech companies and recreates them in order to give them to the poor. A pharma pirate Robin Hood. Yup I was on-board immediately. Jack sells other black-market "non-necessary" drugs as her side gig to make the money fer her larger calling. Only she just released a reversed batch of drug called Zacuity to get said funds and unfortunately it be havin' unintended consequences. Like death. Which goes against Jack's ideals and desires. Can she make it right or will the pharma companies catch up with her and run her through first?

So yes great beginning. The central theme of the book seems to be that money in this version of the world does not make ye free and that everyone is either a literal slave to society or intellectually so. The world building was well done and realistic. The patent law in this book was a lovely concept. Everything belongs to someone else (usually a corporation) and so how money and information flows can be a mess. It isn't overbearingly done. I'm just a nerd.

In addition to Jack there be robots and indentured humans and scientists etc. This is where I found most of me enjoyment of the book. I loved Paladin who is one of the military bots sent by the pharma to get Jack and to help quell any information about their drug having adverse consequences. Frankly Paladin was the reason this book was worth reading. Paladin is a recently made bot whose has the most growth in the novel. I very much enjoyed the perspective of this bot in terms of inter-robot interaction, trying to figure out how humans work, and personal exploration of how programming affected thought. Me other favourite character happened to also be a bot raised by human scientists.

Unfortunately I found most of the humans to less multi-dimensional. Jack has so much promise and then makes extremely odd unintelligent choices while on the run. The human side-kick to Paladin has a sexual urge for the robot and the subplot got tiring. Also the pacing was uneven and several times made me want to stop reading. And the ending was abrupt and extremely unsatisfying. I am not unhappy that I read this but it ended up being just okay. Awesome ideas but not enough payout. I am not saying don't read this book. I just think there are better robot related books out there. Check out a recent read, sea of rust, for example.

So lastly . . .

Thank you Macmillian-Tor/Forge!

Netgalley's website has this to say about the novel:

When anything can be owned, how can we be free

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?

To visit the author’s website go to:

Annalee Newitz - Author

To buy the novel go to:

autonomous - Book

To add to Goodreads go to:

Yer Ports for Plunder List

I have to say that ultimately I was disappointed with this one. I'd heard a lot of good things about it, but it didn't quite pan out that way for me. It started promisingly, with an intriguing world set up, but for me at least, it just ran out of steam in the second half. The background to the novel is right up my street, all plucky anarchists versus big corporate power, and I found the pharma stuff and background about biodegrable organic tech really cool. In the end though, the characters are nothing like as interesting as the set up warrants - I enjoyed the first half of the book a lot more than I did the second. I honestly did not care about the fledgling relationship between Eliasz and Paladin, and their propensity for brutal murder didn't exactly help to make them sympathetic either. There's potential here, some good stuff, and I'll look out for Annalee Newitz' next book, but this one just doesn't ignite.

I love sci-fi and the techier the better so there were some parts of this story I really liked. I felt rather shocked by the amoral stance on pharma-trafficking but was intrigued by the ideas it threw up, particularly as I learnt only recently that many medicines in poorer countries are fake.

But when the interest in eroticism and gender politics came to the fore I lost sympathy with the characters and then the plot and, I'm afraid, didn't finish the book.

When I finished this book, I didn't know how I felt about it, and I thought maybe if I left it a while I'd eventually figure out how to write a review. But in truth, it's been a couple of weeks now, and I'm still not really sure what my feelings are, because it's a strange one.

There were parts I really liked: it's got a very enjoyable writing style that made me laugh out loud in places, and at other times snigger under my breath enough to annoy my flatmate (in whose room I was reading it, because she wanted me to keep her company). I sent a few quotes to my friends, who also found them entertaining despite the lack of context. That was definitely a highlight.

There were some parts I didn't understand, such as most of the science, and as a result I'm unable to say how believable or realistic any of it was. I do not science. This is a well-known fact about me. It inevitably limits my ability to respond intelligently to sci-fi (and yet I still attempt to write it, because apparently I'm a masochist).

Aaaand there were some parts I was less keen on. Like the rather strange human/robot romantic entanglement that developed (as soon as I caught a whiff of it developing, I was distinctly apprehensive), as well as the human character's fixation on gender. I sort of enjoyed that the book explored gender identities and so on, but it didn't do so in a way that made me feel comfortable, which was a shame. One character's (internalised?) homophobia was offset by several other queer relationships, at least, but it still made me uncomfortable. And to be honest, just generally speaking most of the romantic and sexual relationships in the book bothered me for one reason or another.

So it was a bit of a mixed bag, and I'd prefer not to have to give it a star rating because nothing feels accurate, but for some reason NetGalley has made this compulsory (seriously please can you change this back). Giving it 2 just because in the weeks since I read it, I've forgotten more of the things I enjoyed while the parts I didn't have stuck with me, and that's not a great sign, in my opinion.

This review appears on Goodreads (linked).

Before the release of her debut novel, Annalee Newitz was better known as one of the founders of io9 and wrote about new technologies. So she is well placed to craft a futuristic scifi novel that even set one hundred and twenty odd years from now, still feels like a natural extrapolation of where we are today.
Judith “Jack” Chen is a biological pirate. She takes drugs manufactured by the big pharma companies, reverse engineers them and produces cheaper copies for those in need. She operates from a submarine that moves her between manufacturing centres in Northern Africa and her home base of northern Canada. But Jack has a problem. Her latest batch of reengineered drugs is killing people although, as it turns out , not for any mistake of hers but because the manufacturer had been lying about its potential side effects. So she sets out to make amends.
Meanwhile the corporation has hired some muscle to clean up the mess. Artificially intelligent battle robot Paladin is paired with a human Eliasz and they are sent to hunt Jack down. Through this search, Paladin leans a little bit about what it means to be human through a deepening relationship with Eliasz and some self discovery. He (later, as it turns out, she) also learns about robots living autonomously in a world where indentured slavery of a kind has also been reintroduced for humans.
The plot itself rattles along, occasionally dipping into Jack’s colourful past as a rebel turned researcher turned pirate. At the same time Paladin and Eliasz cut a swathe through the illegal drug market. So that current issues of patent protection for drugs, climate change, slavery and artificial intelligence all get dealt with in interesting ways.
Newitz has by no means created dystopia, her world feels plausible and lived in. But there is the usual corprotocracy and the corporations, as always are self-serving, ruthless and a slippery. Overall, Autonomous is thought provoking science fiction with engaging central characters, a fascinating and believable milieu and a page turning plot.

In general I liked this book a lot, with one big caveat.

The relationship between Eliasz and Paladin. I put down the book for a while after they slept together because I was pretty angry. Their relationship and Paladin's choice of pronoun/gender seem really fucked up. Eliasz has no problem with a relationship with a bot but gets hung up on the bot needing to be female, which just seems like a weird bit of cognitive dissonance. Apparently he got called a faggot once and is now traumatized for life? I don't know, I felt that really needed to be developed more because it seemed like weak reasoning and there was not enough about general relationships in the world that was established to give it context. In fact, Jack sleeps with people of both genders and no one seems bothered by it, though she's not military so there's that. As for Paladin's pronoun. She clearly views herself as not having a gender or at least not a gender as humans think of it. She knows and repeats that her human brain has no real influence on her personality and feelings. And yet. She decides to use female pronouns purely to assuage Eliasz' internalized homophobia and they pretty much fall into bed the second after the decision is made. It just feels disingenuous and creepy and weird. Eliasz is doing all kinds of mental acrobatics to justify his supposed sexuality and Paladin is changing her identity purely for someone else and not how she actually feels. It's just a hot fucking mess. By the end I really just hated Eliasz and wanted him to die and for Paladin to either find a healthier relationship or just learn what it means to be autonomous on her own. But no, they waltz off into the sunset together. Ugh.

‘Autonomous’ follows the international chase for the notorious med-pirate, Jack Chen, as she evades Intellectual Property agents in this surreal, cyberpunk romp. But I wouldn’t categorize this as a thriller. Newitz examines gender, capitalism, and...yeah...the nature of autonomy through alternating character studies following Jack and the agents (human Eliasz and robot Paladin), leaving the plot largely as an afterthought (albeit neatly handled). There’s also a fair bit of cool-signaling...references to technology that doesn’t do much for world building, but that seems only to be referenced for the sake of referencing it. That being said...it IS cool tech (plant furniture! body mods!), but seems to bog things down, especially in the early chapters.

I appreciate that there are a fair number of muddy moral moments, especially with the relationship between Paladin and Eliasz, which I felt could’ve been explored more. I definitely preferred Paladin’s scenes and robo-musings and would even like to read more about her experiences in a folow-up work. Makes for a surprisingly good book club/discussion pick.

The hard science take didn’t leave much room for levity, but I did enjoy the dark humor of a Tim Horton’s employee ravaged by a pirated productivity drug. It’s....funnier than that sentence makes it seem.

A love letter to Canada. A realistic glimpse at the near future. A fresh, confident voice in cyberpunk.

I had no idea what to expect with this one. I loved the cover and the blurb talked about AI – I was sold. The premise is very simple and I raced through the novel. When I reached the halfway mark I thought to myself, ‘how has she managed to write an entire novel out of this?’ Without the pace dragging or feeling like it was bloated with unnecessary tangents, Autonomous is a simple, elegant little story of political rebellion, emotional connections we establish with others, and the cultural expectations that define who we are. From something really very simple, Newitz explores some deep issues, all the while entertaining throughout.
‘Nothing like drugs to take the edge off drug problems.’
Autonomous follows patent-pirate Jack, her mission to bring affordable medicine to those who can’t pay the bloated prices pharmaceutical companies set. To pay for this life, Jack reverse-engineers and sells party drugs. As noble as her goal might be, it is a line of work that entails great risk. But her downfall turns out to be something she hadn’t even considered.
Zacuity, the latest must-have drug Jack puts out on the streets, gives users a sense of purpose; they start to love what they do. Unfortunately, the drug is not just a great way to kick procrastination to the curb. The drug is so effective that it causes users to become addicted to their work to the point where they literally work themselves to death.
Jack must avoid the authorities long enough to help those she put in danger in the first place. And while she’s at it, she will happily take down big pharma.
‘Everybody is an outsider, if you go deep enough. The trick is reassuring people you’re their kind of outsider.’
Science fiction is at its best, I think, when tackling social issues. The trouble is, it isn’t an easy thing to do well. Standing on a soapbox and yelling about your ideals is never going to win people over. What worked so well with Star Trek back in the day was that it presented a future with analogous social problems to contemporary Earth and showed how incredibly dumb they were. That’s what Newitz nails in Autonomous. From big pharma’s stranglehold on global health to our views on robotics and consciousness, slavery, academia, and more.
While tackling these issues, Newitz never actually gives the reader a definitive decision on them. She doesn’t say that Jack’s way of life is the ‘right’ way to do things, nor does she condemn the enforcers of patent law or those that try to rail against the system within the confines of the law. All are presented as valid options with their own flaws.
‘People assigned genders based on behaviours and work roles, often ignoring anatomy. Gender was a form of social recognition. That’s why humans had given him a gender before he even had a name.’
Newitz’s prose is paired-down and easy to read. It never imposes itself on the story, keeping the language telling the story as simple as the story itself. Despite the novel featuring a world with autonomous robots and true AI, the simplicity of the language keeps the concept grounded. None of it – even the most outlandish elements – felt out of the scope of the possible, in large part as a result of her prose.
In addition, Newitz creates wonderful characters. These aren’t characters you will necessarily ‘love’ – in fact, I didn’t particularly like any of them. But each of them feels real. They are all flawed in understandable ways that never fall too far into a stereotype. She manages to create both a closeness to the characters while keeping readers distanced enough to appreciate the characters’ flaws for what they are.

Verdict: Autonomous is great fun and far meatier than it has any right to be. Newitz shows real skill when it comes to taking a very simple plot and creating something thrilling, fast-paced, and full of interesting characters.

The summary of this book doesn’t convey the ethical issues this book is delving into. This is one of the perfect examples of using science fiction to explore issues in the real world (another good example would be Infinity Wars). I think getting people to engage in discussions of personhood, of autonomy, modern slavery and also the ethics of patents (particularly where pharmaceuticals are concerned).

Side bar: Did you know that the woman who invented the fidget spinner couldn’t file a patent for it because she didn’t have the requisite $400 so the idea initially didn’t take off and then people just manufactured billions of them and she didn’t get a cent. That’s awful. It makes me sad…and I don’t even like fidget spinners. End of side bar.

This book has the detailed nature of a comprehensive science fiction setting down. From clothing, to road surfaces, to computer designed tattoos this is a future you can see yourself living in – for reference it’s set about 120 years from now. There’s some gorgeous descriptive writing in here, I’d love to see the concept art for some kind of hand drawn animation of this book, or maybe a graphic novel? It’s just got that well-thought out essence that can transport you completely into a setting.

I also found myself very enamoured with the characters. There are so many amazing characters in this book. Jack herself made me so happy, she’s a wonderfully complex character whose personality you can never quite work out. That’s perhaps what’s so great about these characters, it’s hard to say whether anyone in particular could be called ‘good’ or ‘evil’ in the same way that you can in a lot of books I have read recently. This is a good thing, and it’s a realistic look at a lot of the ethical issues this book tackles.

The one time it really bugged me, so much that I had to deduct a star, was when one character is overtly homophobic and it is just never addressed. It’s brought up a few times, but he’s never called out. It bothered me mainly because the rest of the book was quite good at representing people of different sexualities and genders. I think it’s realistic to recognise those people exist (I’ll be annoyed if they do still exist in 120 years) but it was odd that it never got called out. Perhaps adding to that ‘nobody’s perfect’ narrative that’s going on. Anyway, it made me a little uncomfortable and it may do the same for you – we all interpret things differently.

Essentially, this is one of the most refreshingly interesting books I have read in 2017. I think it engages with a lot of different issues, some of which I haven’t seen approached in such an effective way before. It’s wonderful writing, a wonderful setting and it’s so close to being absolutely wonderful in my eyes.

My rating: 4/5 stars

Autonomous is available now.

By the way, I received a digital advanced review copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I honestly did not finish this book, as the characters did not grab me. Interesting premise.

The first thing that intrigued me about this book upon actually starting it and getting a good 10% or so into it is that it takes place largely in Canada (or what is… sort of left of Canada, in terms of territory being owned by corps and not countries). The first good chunk of this story happens in Nunavut, of all places, in the pretty sizable city of Iqaluit. Now… present day Iqaluit is the capital of Nunavut, but it’s ahh… it’s not really very big, lol. Its population is about 7500. That’s 10k less than that of my hometown, a small, mostly rural Ontario town. So, I’m intrigued first of all that in the year 2144, we still have Iqaluit at all, and that climate change hasn’t erased it (and let’s be honest, most of Canada) from the Earth, but also that we’ve made it an interesting technology-driven city. This is what caught my interest, anyway!

Most of this world is controlled by corporations, and we have both human and robots who are indentured to these companies and can ‘earn’ their way into autonomy. As you can imagine, the world of the future has drugs for just about anything you can possibly think of, but drug patents and so on prevent most of the good stuff from being available to people who aren’t unbelievably rich. Stuff like the drugs that keep you young.

Enter Jack, the drug pirate, who sells reverse engineered drugs to the masses for far cheaper than the big pharma companies sell them for. She’s distributed one such drug, a knockoff of the drug Zacuity, a drug used to make work more desirable, to the masses, but what she didn’t realize was that Zacuity is really, really addictive. So people are dying of dehydration because they’d rather do homework than drink. They’d rather paint the house than eat. They’d rather work on insurance claims than sleep. That sort of thing.

Enter Eliasz and Paladin. They are agents of the African Federation’s International Property Coalition. They’re looking for Jack to bring her to justice, and they’re hot on her trail. Paladin is a brand new, bulky, gun-filled, indentured military bot, and Eliasz is an autonomous human male. Despite their obvious differences, Eliasz finds himself attracted to Paladin, and Paladin, who can see how Eliasz is reacting to him physically, starts very curiously learning about human sexuality when he has an opportunity.

The whole subplot regarding the relationship between Eliasz and Paladin was… bizarre and sort of maddening, in a way. I won’t go into details, because I don’t want to be spoilery, a lot of details surrounding the whole relationship between Eliasz and Paladin made my eyes roll really hard.

That aside, I thought the book was okay. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t too bad. The prose was really great in parts, but it felt really, really long sometimes. The plot kind of plodded along to get where it was going at times, and I wish we had a tad more back story so that I could understand how we ended up building giant awesome cities in the frozen north since that is what intrigued me at first. But, all told, I thought it was an alright read. Certainly good enough to finish it, even if most of the Eliasz/Paladin situation made me roll my eyes so hard I think I saw my brain.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. Thanks to Tor/Forge for the book!

A great concept with some cute, funny and daring moments. This book isn't for everyone, but those who it is for will absolutely love it.

Hello reader. It's Cyanide. Here comes my review.
 
What a journey! Autonomous was a heavy book and this review took a while to write because of it. This story builds a beautifully rich world futuristic world of bio-engineering marvels where sentient robotic AIs coexist with humans. Through this story, we follow Jack, a Chinese-Canadian medical pirate attempting to find a cure to a disaster of a drug she'd recently distributed. Attempting to arrest her are Eliasz and Paladin, a human operative and his indentured military robot from the IPC (International Property Coalition), for violation of pharmaceutical patent law.
 
One of the strongest points of this book is the character development. Jack has an incredibly complicated and rather tragic backstory that's slowly revealed to the reader. We get to see her progress from a wide-eyed researcher dreaming of making a change in medical IP law to a jaded pharmaceutical pirate. Regardless of whether you agree with her actions, she certainly makes for a compelling main character.

My favorite character, however, was Paladin, the indentured military robot. I'm likely biased towards robots (because robots!), but it was so enjoyable watching it gain worldly experience and grow. Sure, its body is one of a murderous military robot designed to kill people if necessary to complete its objectives (as it does on multiple occasions), but reading from its POV gives such a complex and interesting character. Paladin and Eliasz's relationship revolves largely around the growing sexual tension between them and while it's clear Eliasz is in love with Paladin, I found Paladin's feeling for Eliasz murkier. It seemed Paladin's originally went along with Eliasz's interest in part because of its indentured programming, but also part in curiosity of the human emotion bots aren't programmed to feel. Autonomous offers an interesting take on the differences in human and AI psyche.
 
One of the best parts of this book was the biopunk science. I loved seeing all the possibilities in bio-engineering play out in this book. There are drugs for every possible want or need, bio-degradable phones and other disposable objects, body mods for wings, vines for hair, etc. I believe there was even a space elevator mentioned in the end. Despite the heavy feature of science, everything is described in direct layman's terms, making it very easy for a reader not familiar with the field to understand.

Science aside, the other heavy focus of this book was addressing the ethics of human and bot autonomy. Most bots, when created, are indentured for a number of years to one corporation or another to pay off their price of creation. Humans, on the other hand, are not born indentured, but can indenture themselves or have their indenture contract sold for money, shelter, work, etc. For bots, this means they don't have exclusive access to their memories and programming. For humans, this is akin to slavery. There is one scene in particular that describes a place to buy and sell indentured humans of all types of human, of every skill or trade or even age, being displayed and sold. And the most horrifying part is that some group of people, some time in history, fought for the right for humans to be indentured alongside bots.
 
While Autonomous never presents a straightforward answer, we see different perspectives on the situation from different characters, and it makes for an interesting dilemma for the reader.
 
Perhaps the one weakness of this book was the plot. While it wasn't necessarily bad, I didn't have a heavy investment in what would happen in the end, so much as I did just reading about the characters and the world. The climax I felt was rushed and the timing seemed just a little too good to be true. I liked that the author was unafraid of killing off characters and introducing new ones as needed, but given the short span of the book, more time could have been dedicated to expanding the climax at the end.
 
Overall, this was a thought-provoking near-future science fiction novel that I definitely enjoyed. I rate this book a 5/5.
 
That is the end of my review.

Autonomous is a stand-alone sci-fi novel by Annalee Newitz. The text explores the meaning of autonomy through several lenses. The first is more abstract – the intellectual. In a world where almost everything appears to be patented and under a corporate aegis, the sense that research can be enacted free of a business agenda is one severely under threat. On a more visceral level, the text also examines a system of indenture, which applies to artificial intelligences, forced to work for a company until they’ve recouped their manufacturing costs. That system is also pervasive in the non-AI community, with people willing (or at least needing) to sell themselves into years-long indenture contracts in order to settle debts, or simply to survive. This is a text which wants to look at notions of ownership, what they mean, and what effects they can have on an individual and social level.

Those are big questions, to be sure, and ones the book explores in a fairly nuanced manner; but while looking at the big questions, Autonomous also knows how to show a reader a good time. There are pirates. Actual pirates, with a submarine. There are combat robots and world weary, noir-esque agents of nebulous authority. There are combat robots with shield-wings who can shoot out your eyeball at a thousand yards, but also ruminate on how much of their responses is enforced by their programming and lack of autonomy. There’s a high stakes chase story in here, and an intimate, layered set of personal relationships which have the sort of raw emotional energy that makes them feel real.

This is a world which has a sense of pervasive ownership about it, and also one which is clearly a near-future of our own. Climate change has broken nation states, and left governments in an uneasy and often subservient partnership with megacorporations. The businesses are, unsurprisingly, keen to own everything, and charge for everything – and if there’s a cultural pushback against this, a sense that not everything needs to live under the banner of what the market will bear – well, that pushback can be managed by tame governmental agencies, with private armies and a license to kill whilst protecting the rights of their corporate colleagues. It’s a world where nothing is entirely free, whilst also being a recognisable and innovative future. The reader can see the rise of AI in the robotic characters in the text – but the history of their struggle to own themselves, and the sense of ongoing oppression are delicately webbed in the narrative subtext, and plausible in the context of the advances of today. Similarly, the rise of consumer-grade designer drugs, to allow greater stamina, greater intelligence, greater focus – these are clear extrapolations from the modern world. That they’re used by corporations to eke more productivity from their workers, personal benefits secondary to the bottom line, is an equally plausible premise.

That’s the world which Newitz has drawn – one which takes our current state, and moves it forward a few steps. Some of those steps have dystopian accents, and others are reactions against that less-than ideal universe. In any event, this is a world which feels familiar, whilst carrying accents of the vividly weird. It’s also one which thoughtfully approaches the question of ownership – not just in calling for freedom, but in examining the pressures and roots of property and indenture in themselves. It’s a quietly clever book, one which asks the reader to pinder big uestions under its breath, in between the interrogations, gunfire and romance.

From a character standpoint – well, there’s several perspectives. I was particularly drawn to that of Paladin, a recently activated combat AI, struggling to understand their place in the world. Paladin ‘s struggle to understand themselves, humanity and the world around them is written with skill and panache; Paladin’s responses to their circumstances aren’t always even close to the ones the reader might make, but they are equally valid. Newitz has put some serious work in to give us a non-human perspective, and largely succeeded. There’s a delightful conversation at one stage which calls out the danger of anthropomorphising for both AI and humanity, and it was a sharply observed and clever piece. Paladin struggles not just to be seen as a human, but to be seen as themselves. That they’re a heavily armored, gun-toting war machine as well as their other roles is another matter entirely. That what they feel they want and need may be circumscribed by programming designed to restrain and keep them happy, something else again.

Paladin is paired with Eliasz, an agent of a bureau which enforces intellectual property. Eliasz is a hard-edged professional, though he clearly has his own issues. If Paladin’s autonomy is ring-fenced by programming, Eliasz has his own limits, perhaps slightly less obvious. He’s a witty, intelligent interlocutor, a killed undercover operative, with a long streak of ruthlessness and an absolute willingness to engage in horrifying levels of violence in order to achieve his goals. Autonomous isn’t afraid to give us characters we can empathise with one minute, and be horrified by the next.

Perhaps more sympathetic is Jack, the intellectual property pirate. Jack has a wry cynicism, and an idealism which contrasts nicely with the violent pragmatism of Eliasz and Paladin. Jack works to break the monopoly of pharmaceutical companies, reverse engineering patented medicines in order to disperse them to those unable to afford corporate prices. Unsurprisingly, this puts her in the sights of Eliasz. But Jack has enough problems already. Her history with other researchers is complicated, and her radical views and willingness to break the law make her a mix between a folk hero and a pariah to her colleagues. There may also be a personal catharsis in what she does. Over the course of the book, we learn about the previous life and loves of Jack – and her energy, enthusiasm and raw determination leap out and seize control of every page that she’s on.

Between the agents hunting Jack and Jack herself are a far larger cast of reprobates . From body-modifying graduate students, to indentured servants, from AI that present as moths and have an interest in history, to recreational drug designers, the sheer diversity of individuals on display is dazzling. Each has enough room on the page to feel alive. In this they’re helped by the environs – lavishly described dome cities, tightly guarded military camps, and, yes, submarines.

Autonomous purports to be the story of how Jack investigates why one of her reverse engineered drugs has horrific side effects, and how Eliasz and Paladin attempt to track the notorious pirate down. But it’s not just about that. It’s a love story, as well, and a story about what people decide they should be, and how they may want to be free, and how that freedom expresses itself. There are foot-chases, interrogations steeped in violence and terror, there’s gunfire and redemption. It makes up a rather good thriller. But this is also a book which isn’t afraid to reflect on the big questions, and invite the reader to do the same. It’s an intelligent, thoughtful, multi-layered text, and also an absolutely cracking read. Give it a try!

Mucha gente me había recomendado este libro y no me extraña. Se trata de una novela bastante verosímil, fácil de leer y con trasfondo sociológico que hará las delicias de los aficionados a la ciencia ficción de futuro cercano, con títulos como Nexus de Ramez Naam o Homeland de Cory Doctorow.

La narración se divide en dos puntos de vista en el mismo momento temporal (uno de ellos con flashbacks) condenados a encontrarse. Por un lado, tenemos a una activista en contra de las patentes de medicamentos y drogas, que hace ingeniería inversa de estos productos para sacar versiones libres al mercado. Por otro, a una pareja de agentes que protegen la propiedad intelectual. El punto de unión, una nueva droga para que los trabajadores “disfruten” de su trabajo en la que algo sale mal.

La prosa es bastante funcional y no tiene florituras, pero es que no las necesita. Sería injusto decir que la autora se dedica a poner una palabra detrás de otra, porque me he encontrado con algunas frases bastantes potentes en cuanto a contenido, como esta:

But everyday, she felt her mother´s judgment, as if her mitochondrial DNA contained a list of everything that was wrong with her.

O esta:

The sky rained pixels and the market awnings expelled cool mist as fine as smoke.

La parte especulativa me parece muy apegada a la realidad, a veces incluso demasiado. Sería de esperar que en más de un siglo de avances científicos la biología hubieran avanzado más cuando en otros campos como el desarrollo de inteligencia artificial el salto es espectacular. Obviando este hecho, que quizá ni siquiera es tan importante, la narración consigue conjugar con éxito los robots con las drogas de diseño haciendo una afilada crítica social.

Este apartado de crítica es el que me parece más destacable. Aparte de enarbolar la bandera del “conocimiento libre”, Newitz habla sobre la esclavitud a la que se ven resignados las personajes de origen pobre. En analogía con los robots, que deben cumplir un periodo de trabajo obligatorio para “compensar” a la empresa que los crea antes de ganar su libertad, los humanos pueden y muchas veces deben “venderse” para poder subsistir. Este símil con la sociedad actual, es aún más demoledor cuando las víctimas de esta trata de blancas legalizada son niños. La brecha creada por la desigualdad económica es prácticamente insalvable.

El libro tiene a mi entender una pequeña pega estructural, porque las dos tramas se encuentran cuando el libro está muy avanzado, quizá demasiado. Es casi como si estuviéramos leyendo dos historias separadas que se podrían sostener por sí mismas perfectamente, pero a las que les falta un elemento cohesionador.

En cuanto a la discusión sobre la autonomía, parece que por definición un robot no puede tener libre albedrío, ya que siempre dependerá de los programas que rigen su comportamiento. No sé si estoy totalmente convencida de la explicación mediante la cual los robots consiguen su “libertad” mediante una clave que les permite acceder a esos mismos programas, pero estoy dispuesta a conceder el beneficio de la duda para ver cómo sería el nacimiento de una inteligencia artificial.

En definitiva Autonomous es un libro que dará mucho que hablar. ¿Lo habéis leído? ¿Qué os parece?

DNF @ 29%
I'm sorry but I can't. I thought I could but I can't.
The slur that has just been used (so shockingly, so suddenly, so out of the blue) is just something that makes my stomach turn. In my opinion it's one of the most sickening words in the English language (and one of those that is able to inflict the most pain) and I can't wrap my head around the fact that a book set in 2144 would continue to have that word in its lexicon. I hope that my great-great grandchildren will not live in a world in which their sexuality/gender identity are still targets of such vitriolic hate that this word (and many others) represents. I'm done

Previously I had read and liked an excerpt of Autonomous on NetGalley, so when I saw the full book listed, I had to request it. Overall I found the story enjoyable, so I'm sticking to my 4-star rating. The world building was good and the characters came across as three-dimensional and engaging. I also really enjoyed the story premise, looking at ideas such as intellectual (and physical) property. The only things that let it down for me, reading on from before, were: 1) Pacing--after a slower start, the end felt a little rushed; and 2) I wondered if Newitz would have done better to stick to just one message. In dividing page space between the debates on intellectual property and autonomy, both discussions felt somehow incomplete at the end. Even so, if you enjoy thought-provoking sci-fi that still includes plenty of action, Autonomous is the book for you.

A great primer for anyone wanting to get into Sci-Fi. Loved it!