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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)
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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
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.
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.
Autonomous is, in a lot of ways, very dystopian. Or it wanted
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.
Jack, formerly Judith, Chen is a genius at
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".
A good book gets reactions, positive or negative.
Autonomous
(Pirates = always a good thing)
I liked the concept of a patent pirate and how the synthesizing of the different drugs was a big
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.
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.
and there’s plenty more going on here to keep you turning the pages -
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.
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.
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.