Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

Other authorsWill Staehle (Cover designer), Liz Gorinsky (Editor)
Hardcover, 2017-09

Status

Available

Call number

PS3614.E588 A95

Publication

Tor (New York, 2017). 1st edition, 1st printing. 304 pages. $25.99.

Description

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?… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member JJbooklvr
Come for the Pirates and Robots. Stay for the hard hitting commentary about where we are & where we are headed. One of the best Science Fiction books I have read in a long time. So much to think about. Full review still to come.
LibraryThing member pwaites
Unfortunately, Autonomous did not live up to my hopes.

This vision of the future is a corporate dystopia that’s sometimes a bit too eerily close to our lives today. After the creation of self aware AI’s, laws changed to allow them to be legally indentured until they’d worked off the price of
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their creation. And then laws changed again to allow humans to become indentured labors, in effect creating a slave class. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies hoard patents on life saving drugs, selling them to those who can afford it while letting the poor die.

Jack is a pirate. A pharmaceutical pirate. She reverse engineers drugs then distributes the medicine to those who can’t afford to buy it. She funds her good deeds by selling entertainment drugs to the middle class on the side, the latest of which is a drug that makes ordinary work more enjoyable. Unfortunately, it turns out to be addictive (the company that made it totally knows this), and Jack’s soon standing at the center of an epidemic of lethal overdoses. She hastily sets out to make a cure, but she’s drawn the attention of big pharma, who wants to shut her down at any cost. On her trail is a newly created military robot, Paladin, and his human partner.

So, there’s a thing in Autonomous that really bothered me. It happens about 15% of the way through, so I don’t think it constitutes a significant spoiler. Just be warned. When we first meet Jack, she kills a stranger who’s broken onto her submarine to steal drugs. With him is someone she initially mistakes for a robot but who she soon realizes is an indentured human, Threezed (his name comes from the last two digits of his number). He’s young. Jack thinks he’s a teenager, although much later in the book we find out he’s actually 20. When Threezed realizes that Jack’s planning to basically dump him in the nearest port, he says he wants to “repay” her for everything he’s done for him. Jack idly wonders if he’d been trained to do this in his indenture. When she asks if he’s sure, we get this line:

“He bowed his head in an ambiguous gesture of obedience and consent.”

Then Jack sleeps with him. I found this incredibly disturbing and couldn’t stand Jack’s character afterwards. I really hate it when books have their protagonists play fast and loose with consent, and this is outright referred to as ambiguous consent. And that’s not even getting into the fact that Threezed is so much younger than Jack (and I was assuming he was a teenager when I was reading this scene) and the fact that he’s been enslaved and abused. Later on in the story we find out that, yes, that abuse was sexual. This whole scene is just so messed up, and the narrative never suggests that Jack did the wrong thing. The entire thing was just so sleazy, and that’s not even going into how Threezed was described as looking “like a yaoi character,” which I found uncomfortably fetishizing.

I considered quitting the book right then, and I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t. I guess I was hoping that the story would improve? It didn’t really. Autonomous turned out to have a number of craft issues. For one thing, the story became bogged down by repeated and unnecessary flashbacks of Jack’s backstory. I don’t really need to know Jack’s life story since college? I’m not sure what discussions about her ex-boyfriend and deceased ex-girlfriend added to the narrative.

One of the elements that drew me to Autonomous was that I heard it explored gender and sexuality with robots. Paladin is the other major perspective character. He’s roughly three months old, and hunting for Jack is his first mission. His newly assigned partner, Eli, possibly has romantic or sexual feelings for him, and the exploration of this relationship is how Paladin starts defining himself. Only, Eli’s homophobic (which is never dealt with or explored), so Paladin begins considering gender as well, trying to find out if the human brain included among his parts belonged to a woman. And if it does, would it change anything about him? A lot of the ideas in Autonomous felt half baked or underdeveloped, and this is certainly true when it comes to Paladin’s explorations into gender and sexuality. Seriously, if you’re looking for a science fiction book that deals with gender issues, it’s been done a lot better elsewhere.

Autonomous has the makings of a good book, but it doesn’t live up to the promise. I feel like I can see the shape of what it could be. How unfortunate that I didn’t get that book.

Originally posted on The Illustrated Page.

I received an ARC in exchange for a free and honest review.
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LibraryThing member Kellswitch
There are two somewhat overlapping stories in Autonomous, the first is about Jack, a pharmaceutical pirate and notorious anti-patent scientist who reverse engineers expensive drugs to give them to the poor, who stumbles upon a drug designed to make workers more productive that was also designed to
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be addictive.
The second story follows a military agent and his partner, Paladin, a young military robot, who fall in love against all expectations.
I enjoyed Jack’s story and the anti-patent culture, in fact I enjoyed the world that was created here overall, it felt real and lived in. I found Eliasz and Paladin quite a bit more problematic.
We see their story through from Paladin’s perspective and at first that was refreshing and interesting enough to overcome my issues with these two characters and their story but eventually that wasn’t enough. Their relationship felt forced and seemed to come out of nowhere and with nothing to back it up and make it feel believable. I found their story arc in general to be unsettling, and not just because of the forced relationship, but also because of what their characters were doing and how and I’m not sure if I was supposed to find them sympathetic or not, and I definitely did not so I found how their story ended unsatisfying. Seriously, their story arc really, really unsettled me.
The book started out strong, started to drag in the middle and then felt way too rushed at the end as though the author had to squeeze certain things in by a certain number of pages but overall was an interesting read and my issues aside I found it worth reading. I enjoyed the world the author created and it defiantly made me think and question things.
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LibraryThing member kateprice88
A book I had my eye on for some time was Autonomous by Annalee Newitz. This is a book about autonomy, what makes someone autonomous, and a race across the globe as an illegally distributed drug begins to rack up an unexpected death toll.

Autonomous is, in a lot of ways, very dystopian. Or it wanted
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to be. I can’t help but feel that everything wrapped up much too nicely to be considered dystopian. (In the traditional sense of the genre and not counting the Young Adult Dystopians that relate more closely to dark fantasy/sci-fi than to adult dystopian).

The story follows Jack, a scientist turned pirate who doesn’t believe medication should be patented and whose made it her life’s mission to get medicine into people’s hands who couldn’t otherwise afford them. In order to make some quick cash, Jack reverse engineered a new drug that’s not yet available to the public. But the drug has been leaving deaths in its wake and a string of people addicted to work. Elias, along with his contracted robot, Paladin, are sent to stop the pirate by any means necessary.

Despite all of things this book manages to accomplish, caring for the characters was not one of them. I don’t like Jack. I found it difficult to empathize with her, even if her cause is an ultimately noble one, trying to do good despite using illegal means. Very often she seemed unable to fully realize the bigger picture. I simply couldn’t get a good read on her, and at first I was unsure why.

Well, I figured it out about halfway through the book. The characters, their feelings, and their motivations are always described, never shown. This created a certain distance between myself and the characters that I simply couldn’t overcome. If you don’t like books written in this way, do be warned.

Still, there is a lot to love here, and I do ultimately think this a book every fan of science fiction should read.

This is very much a book a questions, as speculative as anything of the greats in the genre, but it is not a book of answers. There are questions of autonomy. What makes someone or something autonomous, and if they are ever truly autonomous? If you are suddenly granted autonomy would that change anything or would you make the same choices anyway? Are there things that an entity must do, driven by something internal, whether that is to right a wrong or help someone from your past?

The question of autonomy is probably the most apparent in the story of Paladin and Eliaz. As a robot, Paladin has no autonomy, but can be granted autonomy after a certain number of years. Paladin struggles with the concept of autonomy and how many actions are simply the result of programming as opposed to more conscious decision making. But through Paladin’s observations we are introduced to some interesting ideas to human autonomy as well. Eliaz might have autonomy as far as the world governments are concerned, but Paladin often describes Eliaz in a very methodical, scientific manner – his pulse, his temperature, etc. Several times Paladin mentioned electrophysiological impulses and how Eliaz couldn’t do anything about those, no matter how he truly felt. This, I thought, was a rather interesting observation, leading to questions on how many of our actions are biologically induced and how that relates to autonomy.

In a lot of ways, Autonomous makes the reader come to their own conclusions. This is very much a book that really requires a second read. I feel that there is more to unpack in here, things that will become more apparent when I’m not quite so focused on what will happen plot wise.

Speaking of plot, this was a slower read with an ending that didn’t shock. I didn’t find myself on the edge of my seat at any point while reading despite this very much being a book about exciting things – a chase around the world as the main character struggles to right her unwitting wrongs with many lives in the balance. The ending was predictable enough as well.

I liked a lot of aspects about Autonomous by Annalee Newitz. I found this book difficult to rate. One the one hand I enjoyed the setting and the speculative nature of the novel. On the other I found the plot a little predictable and never felt very attached to any of the characters. Ultimately, I think this is a book that I do recommend reading, and one I plan on giving a second read sometime in the future.
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LibraryThing member gypsysmom
When Neal Stephenson blurbs "Autonomous is to biotech and AI what Neuromancer was to the internet." and then William Gibson further blurbs "Something genuinely and thrillingly new." you expect the book to be good. And it met my expectations in spades.

Jack, formerly Judith, Chen is a genius at
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biotech. As a student she learned about how giant pharmaceutical companies control drug development and she vowed to change that. Thirty years later, in 2144, things haven't really changed but Jack does her bit by fabricating medicines that are too expensive for many humans and distributing them where they are needed. She finances this good work by fabricating other drugs that she can sell on the black market. Jack is a pirate (and she even lives in a pirate ship, well a submarine, in the Arctic Ocean). To her horror she discovers that a drug, Zacuity, which she reverse engineered and sold as a recreational drug, causes extreme addiction. She is determined to put it right but before she can get underway she is boarded by two thieves. She kills the head thief but thinks the other is a robot and just leaves him locked up. Then she finds out that Threezed is human and he was indentured to the man she killed. Jack figures she can drop Threezed off on her way south but Threezed has other ideas. Meanwhile the maker of Zacuity, Zaxy, has set the International Patent Control police on Jack. Eliasz (human) and Paladin (robot) team up to track her down. The hunt takes them from Iqaluit to Vancouver and Las Vegas to Saskatoon and then to Jack's hidey hole in Moose Jaw. They are fearsome opponents. Can Jack escape from their clutches?

There is so much packed into this relatively short book (just 301 pages in hardcover). The big issues is patent protection of course but there is also lots about artificial intelligence and gender identity and sexuality and ...well I could go on and on but you should really read it for yourself. I don't think Newitz is Canadian but she obviously has knowledge about Canada and its geography and culture. You can tell that from the first page where she quotes from The Arrogant Worms song "The Last Saskatchewan Pirate".
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LibraryThing member kmajort
Reminds me somewhat of Company Town (Madeline Ashby) and Becky Chambers' Wayfarers books. Looking at reviews, this seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it novel, which to me indicates a Good Book (even if I don't like it - can you say Gone Girl?).
A good book gets reactions, positive or negative.
Autonomous
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struck many chords with me - slavery, gender/identity, the on-going fight against Big Pharm. All with just a few characters that build and evolve in the story lines.
(Pirates = always a good thing)
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LibraryThing member Guide2
Fairly well written with some interesting ideas and characters, but the overall story is somewhat lacking in depth or reach.
LibraryThing member jdifelice
I liked this book. I enjoyed the character perspectives we were exposed to, and how different each character felt. They had unique perspectives and different experiences that I hadn't really read about.

I liked the concept of a patent pirate and how the synthesizing of the different drugs was a big
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part of the plot. The theme of autonomy was also done really well - I enjoyed the questions that came up around bots and humans and how indenture can apply to both. Also the concept of autonomy and how it is something earned and not something you are born with - in this world.

The idea around patents and public information was done really well as well. The concept that certain drugs aren't available to the general public because they can't afford them is a terrifying reality that is starting to come true.

Overall, this was a super interesting book with new ideas and concepts that made me think and I really enjoyed it.
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LibraryThing member rivkat
In a world where bots are born sentient but indentured, and repay the investment in creating them through service, humans can also be indentured (though they’re nominally born free). Jack, a patent pirate, unwittingly copies an addictive drug that starts killing people, and she tries to
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ameliorate the harm she caused. In the process, she unwillingly acquires a slave boy with whom she has sex; the question of his ability to choose is one of the issues we’re supposed to grapple with. This is paralleled, or at least contrasted, to the situation of the bot and human pair sent by the corporation that made the original drug to kill Jack and suppress any evidence of corporate involvement. The bot is programmed for loyalty; can s/he [the pronoun changes during the book] actually choose to enter into a sexual relationship with her human partner? I was less invested in this question than I might have been because I thought they were all pretty awful people, and even accepting that the bot had been programmed to be a remorseless killer and that “choice” wasn’t a particularly useful construct for judging her behavior (or was it?), reading her POV was no fun.
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LibraryThing member Gwendydd
Jack is a bioengineer who makes copies of patented drugs to sell to people who can't afford the name-brand. One of the drugs she has copied turns out to have fatal side-effects, so she must find and distribute a cure and expose the pharmaceutical company that originally made the drug. Meanwhile,
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the international patent police are after her, in the form of a man and an enslaved military robot.

The book is a page-turner, and in general the characters are interesting. The most interesting character is the robot, who wants to please her master Eliasz, who it turns out has a thing for robots, so their relationship takes some weirdly sexual turns. Eliasz regenders the robot as female, because he is uncomfortable with the idea of being attracted to a male (apparently being attracted to a robot isn't a big deal).

In Jack's storyline, there are a lot of queer relationships, and topics around sex workers and slavery are explored. However, in the robot's storyline, there is some unresolved moral ambiguity that left me feeling squeamish - first of all, Eliasz's homophobia is never explored. Even more worrying, Eliasz is very violent (he thinks nothing of torturing people), and the robot is too. As much as there seems to be character growth, in that Eliasz and the robot come to terms with their love for each other, there is no exploration of the moral consequences of their torture and murder of innocent people. More thought is given to the torture and murder of robots, and I was hoping the robot would eventually realize the connection between murdering robots and murdering humans.

All in all, this was an enjoyable read, but I felt like there was a lot more depth that could have been explored.
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LibraryThing member macha
autonomy vs property as opposing principles, played out on a world stage in a plausible and richly-imagined 2144. reminiscent of Bruce Sterling's work, and a worthy successor to Gibson's Neuromancer.
LibraryThing member lucasmcgregor
Surprisingly political. It is when sci-fi is good and uses possible futures as a lens to talk about the human condition and how the society we live in shape it. This isn't really a book about the future as much as it is about property rights.
LibraryThing member nkmunn
the juxtaposition in the way the addicted in the reverse engineered cohort respond vs the way those in the target population are controlled, and the question of who the real control group(s) are is worth the price of admission.

and there’s plenty more going on here to keep you turning the pages -
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even if you’re among a group that’s bound to be irritated, facepalming, or otherwise “coulda-been” about parts of this, especially the BladeRunner redux questions - the glass separating this world and our own is pretty thin and getting more transparent by the minute
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LibraryThing member xiaomarlo
As mentioned earlier, cyberpunk just doesn't do it for me these days. I do appreciate the diversity of characters and points of view in this novel, but I wasn't very interested in the world or the plot. I also thought the gender issues could have been handled better, as others have mentioned in
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their reviews. If Paladin really didn't care about gender in the human way, why not show that in the writing by using "they" or even "it" when it's Paladin's POV?

I just read The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie, who is quite adept at depicting gender. The narrator in that book didn't have a discernible gender, and it was handled just fine. I didn't even really notice until I was reading others' reviews where they referred to the narrator as he/him, and I thought, no, that's not right.

I kind of see what Newitz was trying to do with the relationship between Eliasz and Paladin at the end, in that people are often in a relationship for very different reasons, and their perception of the other person may be wildly inaccurate. But Eliasz had very few redeeming qualities, and Paladin was basically a baby when they met, so it just feels icky, even aside from the horrible homophobic stuff that gets brushed aside.
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LibraryThing member cindywho
Newitz explores a future where corporate/patent law and big pharma play parts in a society where humans and robots are more often indentured than autonomous. Jack is fighting the latter by reverse engineering drugs, but messes up big time and in her quest to right the wrong is pursued by a
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seemingly pitiless team of enforcers - one human, one robot - who find each other along the way. Good stuff.
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LibraryThing member bell7
Judith "Jack" Chen is a pirae who reverse engineers patented drugs and sells them so that your average Joe and not just rich people can afford their drugs, releases a copy of Zacuity, which turns out to be highly addictive and have some pretty rotten side effects. She's in a race against time to
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figure out what's wrong with it before the big pharma company releases their official version to the public. Meanwhile, a bot named Paladin is teamed up with human Eliasz to find Jack and arrest her for piracy.

The plot goes back and forth between Jack and Paladin's stories while staying in third-person. This page-turning science fiction set in the 22nd century has some elements of dystopia and cyberthrillers, raising a lot of ethical questions both about ownership: can you - should you - have a patent on a drug and for how long? Who has the power to decide? And what happens to autonomy when people and robots can be owned or free? The ending felt a little rushed, but overall this was an entertaining novel by the founding editor of io9.
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LibraryThing member grandpahobo
This is an interesting book on many levels. Its a commentary on capitalism, intellectual property and authoritarianism. But mostly it is an exploration of relationship between humans and the things we create. At its core, the book is exploring whether there is any real difference between human and
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artificial intelligence.
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LibraryThing member livingtech
Felt like it took forever to finish this book. And while it was satisfying... I didn’t like at least one of the main characters at all... and it felt like the author maybe did? Not sure. They gave the character a “happy” ending, even though it made one of the other characters seem way more
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pathetic as a result.

Okay, I’ve been dancing around it to avoid spoilers, but thinking more about it, I have to check the box and rant...

Essentially it was the military guy I hated. What an asshole. And the bot he seduced... isn’t “she” essentially less than a year old? Is it not pedophilia when it’s a robot? I mean, she thinks she’s making autonomous choices... that’s definitely what the book is getting at, but don’t we all think we are capable of making perfectly good choices when we are teenagers? And how many of us do? Consensual sex is still statutory rape when it’s with a minor.

I mean, ultimately the book is about the return of slavery, and it’s a super fucked up dystopia. I kept waiting for the two military characters to switch sides and become part of a revolution, but instead they just kill all the sympathetic characters but one... and then flee to mars.

I’d initially given this 4 stars, but thinking back on it, I’m removing one. I did enjoy parts of this quite a bit, a lot of the tech imagining is cool, but ultimately it was dissatisfying and felt like it didn’t have a message at all.
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LibraryThing member 3j0hn
This is really good. Lots of really interesting dystopian ideas about intellectual and "human" property. (Robots are people but it makes sense for Robots to be owned, therefore it is okay for humans to be owned too). Also, a lot of the action is set in Saskatchewan - bonus points. This is a soft 5
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though, "4.5" since the ended felt rushed, and I found Eliasz POV chapter near the end was especially weak though clearly pretty central the last act.
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LibraryThing member elenaj
A violent, complicated, beautiful book set in a future dystopia not so very different from our own dystopian time. It's both a deep philosophical exploration of the theme of autonomy and a rollicking adventure story.
LibraryThing member Bodagirl
I'm on the fence about this book. The concepts Newitz brought up about drug companies and patent control was intriguing and a little terrifying. However, the characters' relationships seemed forced and the issues surrounding consent with Threezed and especially Paladin were troubling. I wish the
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arguments surrounding bot autonomy had been as well fleshed out (no pun intended) as the patent bits.
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LibraryThing member zeborah
Biopunk I guess? Problem is I've always bounced off *punk and I can't figure out why; probably the things that people read for in *punk are things that I think are cool and all but just aren't the things I want to carry the story. So here the world is interesting, the human protagonist engages in a
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worthy cause (albeit having made a tragic mistake), the robot sidekick to the apparent antagonist is an interesting character, but it kept feeling like I was wading through it and each time I put it down I was less inclined to pick it up. It didn't help that there seemed to be two burgeoning romances, both of which seemed to me to be coming from a seriously unhealthy dynamic which the book seemed to partially acknowledge but not enough that I could trust in an ending that wouldn't leave me deeply unsatisfied. I'd vaguely like to know how things turn out, but not enough to keep wading through. Mileage of course will vary.
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LibraryThing member banjo123
lots of interesting ideas (autonomous bots, indentured humans, "big pharma" creating meds that increase productivity, but bring a huge risk of addiction.) However, the plot of the book was a bit weak. Probably worth it if you would like to read dystopian Sci Fi, with AI and Gender issues
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highlighted.
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LibraryThing member lavaturtle
Picked this up since I really enjoyed one of the author's other works, and the hook is super intriguing. Jack is a great character, and I loved her cohort of counterculture friends and associates. The worldbuilding is central to the story, and does a good job tying together disparate threads about
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bots and slavery and capitalism and drug companies. Paladin is also a really interesting character who reminds me a bit of Murderbot, and an interesting POV given that until late in the story her perceptions are altered by software. I kept waiting for Eliasz to realize he's on the wrong side, or Paladin to realize that she can do better than someone who fetishizes her body and doesn't understand her at all... but he didn't get there until maybe ambiguously at the end, and she didn't get there at all. The ending was variously ambiguous, frustratingly realistic, and hopeful.
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LibraryThing member pontusfreyhult
Very promising concept and rather fast paced, but I ended up only liking this (and would have expected to think better of it).

Awards

Nebula Award (Nominee — Novel — 2017)
Lambda Literary Award (Finalist — 2018)
Locus Award (Finalist — First Novel — 2018)
Otherwise Award (Long list — 2017)

Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

2017-09-17

Physical description

304 p.; 5.79 inches

ISBN

9780765392077

Local notes

Inscribed (San Francisco, September 2019).
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