Rating: 4/5, good
I was really excited to read this book. I’ve seen Annalee Newitz speak a bit in SF and I was a big fan of i09 while that was still running so I was really curious what they would write. They have a lot of experience in tech journalism and it comes to bear in this debut scifi thriller.
Autonomous is a woven story with two plotlines: one follows a pharmaceutical pirate named Jack, and the other follows a robot named Paladin and a spy named Eliasz who are trying to capture Jack on behalf of the International Property Coalition (IPC).
At the beginning of the story, Jack has just sold a bunch of reverse-engineered Zacuity, a productivity drug invented by the pharmaceutical firm Zaxy, on the black market. Jack normally sells recreational drugs like Zacuity so that she can afford to synthesize and distribute necessary drugs to people who can’t afford them, but this time Zacuity is causing people to become addicted to work to the point where they die because they can’t stop to take care of bodily functions.
“Zaxy had always placed profit over public health, but this went beyond the usual corporate negligence. International law stipulated that no cosmetic pharmaceuticals like productivity drugs or euphorics could contain addictive mechanisms, and even the big corps had to abide by IPC regulations. Her discovery meant that Zacuity was completely illegal. But nobody would figure that out, because Zaxy was rolling it out slowly to the corps, keeping any addictions carefully in check.”
The problem with Zacuity originates with Zaxy, but we know Jack is going to end up paying for it. She sold it illegally, but Zaxy still created and beta’d a potentially dangerous drug. The book is making a pretty clear statement that it’s not right to put a price on healthcare and that pharmaceutical companies often have enough money and political power to escape accountability.
Paladin and Eliasz, who are trying to capture Jack to enforce intellectual property laws, are kind of the bad guys but Newitz never really makes that judgement explicit; in fact, Paladin is a very naïve and relatable character that’s very easy to project onto. This book has very strong ideals but it never beats you over the head with them like many other idea books will do, and I actually really appreciate that about it.
Paladin and Eliasz do some really bad, violent things but it’s literally their job, so you can’t really fault them for it. However, it made it hard to sympathize with them after a certain point.
Paladin and Eliasz have a very strange relationship… Paladin is a biobot with a human brain situated in its lower torso. It only uses the human brain for facial recognition and all its processing is done with its computer. From the beginning, Eliasz tries to get Paladin to think for itself, however it has coded instructions that it can’t not follow, so it’s not clear whether it’s possible for Paladin to think for itself.
Highlight for spoiler:
For the first half of the book, Eliasz thinks Paladin is male. Eliasz is attracted to Paladin and feels embarrassed about being gay, so he won’t admit it, but Paladin can read his vitals and knows. Then Paladin starts researching its brain and finds out that its human brain is actually female, and then Eliasz feels okay about starting a relationship with Paladin. It’s a little bit weird because Paladin doesn’t change physically, but that gender distinction means a lot to Eliasz. It’s also a bit strange because Paladin has just been booted this year, which makes him much younger than Eliasz. And then there’s the fact that Paladin is programmed to be faithful to Eliasz, which some readers could see as a violation of consent. However, I didn’t feel that way because I think if you feel something, like Paladin feels love for Eliasz, I’m not sure your “programming” matters much, just the fact that you feel it. We’re not always aware of our programming either, and I kind of wonder if we would choose to love if we didn’t have horomones and physical attraction… I also didn’t get the sense that Eliasz was coercing Paladin in any way, as he seems pretty concerned about Paladin’s feelings and if they love him back.
In addition to the question of whether robots have autonomy, Newitz pushes the reader to question whether humans have autonomy. In this world, indentured slavery is rampant because robots can be indentured, and because robots are supposed to have equal rights to humans now humans can be indentured, too? This part didn’t really make a lot of sense but Newitz’s description of the indenture system seems pretty realistic to how modern slavery works, just legalized. Even work in the general sense is not a choice for most people, so most adults under capitalism are not fully autonomous if you think about that way.
We all have things that we have to do and influences that make us act in certain ways, so in a sense, we’re like robots, but we’re still held accountable for our actions, so functionally, we have to behave as though we have free will.
The dedication reads: For all the robots who question their programming.
I think this book is aiming to make a countercultural statement. I can see little pieces of it (homophobia, robot abuse, slavery, and capitalism are bad) but I’m having a hard time piecing it together into a coherent whole.
Still, I think it’s pretty good for a debut novel. I liked most of the characters, though I sometimes found myself bored of reading about them because the dialogue was kinda flat. By the end I had a decent sense of who they were, though (except Eliasz is still a bit mysterious to me, but his character is an international man of mystery, so that’s to be expected). I kept vacillating between being super interested and being bored, and I don’t know if that’s just my attention span or something off about the pacing. It definitely took me a couple chapters to get a grip onto what I was reading about since it does plop you down in medias res.
The characters are pretty diverse, which I appreciated. Jack/Judith Chen and Threezed (an indentured human who escaped his owner) are both Chinese (Jack is descended from Chinese immigrants to Canada and Threezed is native Chinese). There are a lot of other minor characters of different ethnicities working in the labs.
The action scenes were actually pretty good, though I don’t want to spoil anything so that’s all I’ll say there. 😊
The sex scenes were so-so (there are quite a couple of them…).
The technology is probably one of the more interesting parts, though I wish I understood more of it. This is set about 100 years in the future, so things aren’t too different, but it seems people are taking climate change as a more serious threat so almost everything (including cell phones and canoes) is made to be biodegradable. Perhaps badass female protagonists with transportation that doubles as housing is becoming a thing – there was Mishima’s crow in Infomocracy and now Jack’s sub.
I think it appeals to a fantasy of having both the comforts of home and the freedom to take it wherever you want. Tiny houses and van life are popular with my generation and I can see the appeal as well. It’s cheap where traditional housing is becoming unaffordable, and mobile because work now is global and often unstable or scarce.
On that happy note, uh… I’d say this is a pretty good book. It’s got some interesting ideas (though not the most well-defined) without sacrificing that thriller feel (though it drags in places…). Maybe it’s best to say that it’s a somewhat uneasy hybrid of a thriller with idea-driven scifi. It’s kind of a second-rate both instead of a first-rate one or the other, and that’s probably it’s main problem, but there’s still a lot to like about it, from the freewheeling fantasy of Jack’s life to the explorations of robot sex to the little bits of wry humor sprinkled throughout.
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