Autonomous

Asimov is turning over in his grave! Imagine robots maiming and killing people. So much for the three laws. But these characters are absolutely compelling. Especially the robots (Paladin and Med). I would have given this five stars except for the impossible rendering of Canada. Too many contradictions of space and time. Otherwise I enjoyed it immensely, and look forward to more from this insightful and exciting new voice!

I’m guessing the author was trying to use robots as some type of metaphor but the end result was a muddled story with no relatable characters and unnecessary human/robot sex scenes. Also, the story was so bogged down in technical details that it lacked momentum.

I didn’t enjoy any aspect of this story in any way.

You hope the world will never look like this. It's 2144. Slavery has revived, camouflaged as indentured servitude. Theoretically, indenture is limited to a specified term; in practice, contract owners frequently refuse to honor the commitment. Millions of humans and robots alike are trapped in these unbreakable contracts. Only rarely do indentured servants escape, and autonomous robots are rare.

This is the world imagined by Annalee Newitz in her intriguing new science fiction novel, Autonomous.

Bioengineering is supreme. The pharmaceutical industry, and the lives of most of the world's citizens, are dominated by a handful of huge pharma corporations. These companies produce patented drugs that lengthen lifespan, enhance productivity, and induce euphoria as well as prevent illness. Unfortunately, officially sanctioned drugs are far too expensive for most of the world's people. A flourishing pirate economy fills some of the gaps by reverse-engineering the most popular drugs. To combat the pirates and enforce patent law, the paramilitary International Property Coalition (IPC) sends teams of agents around the world to capture or kill the practitioners of "black pharma."

IPC Agent Eliasz Wójcik is partnered with an indentured military robot named Paladin. They work out of a large military base operated by the African Federation. The pair is charged with hunting down a notorious pirate known as Jack, who appears to be somewhere in the Arctic. In fact, as the novel opens, Jack (real name: Judith Chen) is traveling on a submarine along the Arctic coast "beyond the Beaufort Sea." Jack has learned that a batch of a new, reverse-engineered drug she had unloaded in Calgary is causing sometimes-lethal side effects. She is on a mission of her own—to develop an antidote. Jack knows that the small batch of black-market drugs she distributed is only a minor part of the problem: the official drug, a product of Zaxy, one of the world's largest pharmacorps, is in use as a productivity-enhancer at large corporations that can afford to pay its high price. Jack sees it as her responsibility to identify Zaxy as the source of the problem, get the word out worldwide, and make an antidote freely available. Eliasz and Paladin are determined to stop her.

Robotics has advanced in tandem with bioengineering. Now, robots may take on an unlimited variety of shapes, sizes, and forms. Biobots closely resemble humans and include both biological and manufactured materials. Other robots, only vaguely humanoid, possess human brains to supplement their cybernetic capabilities. Yet others may be configured as insects, birds, or machines. Paladin, for example, appears roughly humanoid but has automatic weapons concealed in its chest and arms as well as a human brain in its midsection. However, Paladin is much more than a military machine: it communicates both by vocalizing and wirelessly, it is curious and continuously absorbs new information—and it hopes to gain its freedom from indenture and join the ranks of autonomous robots.

Politics in the world of 2144 is as dramatically changed as economics. Climate change and epidemic disease have upended the geopolitical order, leaving the United States a backwater and Europe frozen, in the absence of the Gulf Stream. The world's dominant powers are the Asian Union, the Brazilian States, and the African Federation, where most of the advanced biotech companies conduct their research. North America is a Free Trade Zone, with its most prosperous cities in the summery Canadian and Alaskan Arctic. It's there that most of the action in Autonomous takes place.

Known primarily as a blogger and science journalist, Annalee Newitz is the author of five books of nonfiction. Although she has previously published science fiction short stories, Autonomous is her first novel. Newitz holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in English and American Studies and was on the Cal faculty for a time. She now writes full-time.

In the 90s Snow Crash made a generation think about living and working in cyberspace. Autonomous makes me think about living and working in a post-CRISPR General AI future. And a world where the DMCA has become even more nutty and been applied to these technologies. Loved this book!

Very entertaining techno thriller at the intersection of AI and biohacking. Characters are well developed and the plot is great right up until the end when it sort of gets “ended” in a way that feels almost as though the author ran out of gas. Despite that though, a super fun read.

Arealustc and visionaty future filled with AI bots in relationship with humans. Brilliant , fun, thought provoking. Mixing politis , science, emotion, and adventure. Strong characters with well thought out personalities. Great Work !

Excellent read, especially for those in science/pharma industry, lots of great research done to really develop a narrative that is rich and powerful, with a great commentary on where our society could be heading. I look forward to Annalee's next book.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I wasn't able to finish this book.

I managed to get to about 61% before I decided that bludgeoning my way through the rest was not worth it. My informal rule is that if a book is not distinctly pulling me forward and entertaining me, and instead I'm having to PUSH may way through it, then it's no longer serving its purpose as art and is a waste of time.

All of that said, I did try to like this book. The premise and ethical explorations seemed interesting, but at 61% through, there was no compelling direction or logic to anything happening in the story. This is my primary criticism: I see this appears to be the author's first full length novel, and thus it appears she got too carried away with the novelty of the world she was creating and forgot to build it around a coherent plot. Ostensibly, the story centers around a single "pirate" that reverse engineers patented pharmaceutical drugs and then sells them to the working classes. The story takes place in a far flung future that's also populated by a variety of different kinds of bots. Now this is where it gets utterly confusing and where any attempt to relate a synopsis starts to unravel and why I couldn't finish this book:

After 61%, I still didn't understand the time-place setting for this story.

Somewhere around 50% we were given a brief bite-sized explainer about how Africa experienced a massive farming collapse in the late 21st Century, which, by a non-specific insinuation, apparently killed an ungodly 75% of the population of the continent (either that, or the author made a guess at the population of Africa, which according to a simple Google search, is 1.25 billion people as of 2016). But keep in mind this takes place about 100 years in the future ... so the actual loss there would be higher than that! And we receive no further details about WHY exactly the continent was ravaged by "plagues". Or what happened in the rest of the world. And throughout the 61% that I read, we receive lots of little unexplained callouts, like "Eurozone", "Free Trade Zone", "Asian Union". It would appear that most of the world's countries have been assimilated into much more massive coalitions, but the "African Federation" (which already sort of kind of exists) is the only one to receive an explanation: that it was in response to the massive ecological collapse mentioned. All of this is to illustrate the biggest example of how the author doesn't bother to ever scene set the world she's moving characters around in. For example, what is the International Property Coalition (that sounds, in description, a lot like a privatized Interpol)? Why is Las Vegas and a city in northern Canada built underneath domes? Why is the entire world's economy based on bioengineering and pharmaceuticals? Why is literal slavery and indentured servitude back in vogue? What happened to protecting ethics? Do laws even exist any longer? Why are people not concerned about both enslaving and freeing robots and why do the robots not fight back against this?

While I'm sure a number of these questions would have been explored more fully and possibly to conclusion by the end of the book, I was tired of waiting when I reached 61%. A good rule of thumb is that if you're not able to (mostly) succinctly explain your fictional world before, let's say a third of the way through, and no later than half-way through, then you've failed in your story. Imagine someone coming up to you and starting to tell a story, but only after 10 minutes of talking , they start explaining when and where this happened.

Related to this, characterization of most humans in this story appeared to be happening in reverse. That is, we're introduced to a person, they go about their business and move about, and in between scenes of action, we're given their background bit by small and seemingly random bit. This sometimes works, but here, it was frustrating, as we're introduced to the lead character by having her appear on a submarine in the middle of the freaking Arctic ocean. Umm ... I have a few questions. Most other characters follow a similar pattern. Backfilling a character only really works if you limit the number of times you do flashbacks, and/or you wait until a pivotal "I need to know who you really are!" type of scene, or something similar. Otherwise it comes off awkwardly and somewhat lazy.

Finally, the straw that broke the camel's back was the bizarre amount of sex and gender discussion in this novel. I'm no prude, but when just about every chapter involves someone having sex with someone else (and that happens to be just about the only means by which we learn anything about any of the characters), it came off seeming oddly forced. I had issues with the fact that the protagonist had no qualms at all about taking advantage of a sex slave, but the part that was just WEEEEEIRD was that a top-secret international operative tasked with hunting down a pirate was irresistibly attracted to his not-at-all-like-a-human military bot as soon as he met it (I am literally not joking about this) and that as soon as he found out that this bio-bot cyborg had a female brain, literally the first thing he does moments later is have sex with this bot (AGAIN, IT IS NOT EVEN HUMAN-LIKE. IT HAS NO GENITALS. So I'm assuming this "sex" was more him just dry-humping its cold metal body until he came on it ... like ... what the crap).

Final criticism before I wrap up: in general, the author comes across as being knowledgeable, well read, and pursuing a fine goal of exploring the idea of freedom, among humans and among robots. But it also seems like she's far too in love with the technicality of the future she's drawn up in her mind. Oftentimes the author throws out multi-word jargon terms that land in your mind like bricks, for about as much imagery or emotion as they invoke. And probably greater than 50% of the time she doesn't bother at all to explain these terms. I don't know whether this is because she thinks that NOT using exposition is the sign of someone truly knowledgeable on this stuff, or that she wrote this for people "in the know", but either way I'm reminded of a saying (that I'll badly paraphrase) from Einstein, in which he said that if you can't explain a complicated idea to a layman, then you're probably just as ignorant as they are. Later in the novel, the author gets better at this problem, using less future-slang and future-jargon and occasionally lapsing into actual exposition and not just the cookie crumbs you have to piece together as you go. But more to the point: had the author stuck with the idea of freedom and exploring the ethics and challenges of autonomy: this could have been a fantastic book. Instead, she threw in concepts of sexuality, gender identity, a future economy built entirely on bio-engineering and the pharma industry, the collapse of entire nation-states and the assimilation of people into what seemed like corporate run pseudo-governments ... she mixed all this together until the overarching theme of the novel was lost entirely and this became a grab-bag of "choose what you like most!" novel.

On a positive note, the author was well versed at spinning drama out of character histories, and of creating interesting environments and the framework for future-societies. The mechanics of her writing style was well above average and good, but unfortunately all of this got buried under a story that could never figure out what it wanted to be. Is this about a future dystopia world where everyone's backs are crushed to serve their corporate overlords? Is it an international mystery-thriller? Is this a future-based smut book? Is this about robots or the pitfalls of unrestrained bio-engineering? I can see where the author was trying to finely patch all of this together to create something grand and explorative, but ultimately this fits together like a Jenga tower a half-second before it smashes apart all over your table.

Absolute trash. Author has no imagination. Characters are hastily put together. Story exists solely to promote unnecessary violence and gore. Good manual for schizophrenic maniacs. No moral point to this whole story. No protagonists. Do not waste your time and money.

Absolute trash. Author has no imagination. Characters are hastily put together. Story exists solely to promote unnecessary violence and gore. Good manual for schizophrenic maniacs. No moral point to this whole story. No protagonists. Do not waste your time and money.

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 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.

I received an ARC in exchange for a free and honest review.

So I first read the excerpt of this book in May and am just finally getting around to reading the whole thing now. How could I have been so silly? I was totally intrigued by the excerpt, but I had some things going on in my life where I just couldn't read the whole thing. BUT THIS BOOK. It's like it was written for me. Last year I completed my thesis on gendered 'cyborgs' and autonomy, and then BAM. To say I enjoyed this is a VAST UNDERSTATEMENT. I loved this. Let me list them.
-Jack is a fantastic MC. I loved her.
-Paladin's struggles with autonomy and gender were amazing. I have pages of notes about this character. Like please. It is so good.
-The side characters were also fantastic. Even the ones that weren't my immediate favorite, like Eliasz, grew on me and if they were flawed, that only made them more life like.
-There was great attention to robot/worldbuilding. This is a huge factor for me, but I didn't feel like I had many outstanding questions and there were also other characters - like Med.
-The whole way that all these characters intersect and have important questions about autonomy was mind blowing. Be still my heart.

Could this book be even more perfect for me? No. On an intellectual level this was superb and on a story/entertaining level even more so. All the stars from me.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book by the publisher in an exchange for an honest review.

This was interesting. Not quite what I was expecting, I do think the blurb was a little misleading, just in general tone. I was expecting a sort of thriller, cat and mouse style plot and it's definitely more politically fueled. There was intelligence gathering and action galore, they just weren't the point.

Autonomous attempts to tackle a huge issue in Big Pharma having too much power, too much control, and imagines what the world might look like if they ran the government. I think the author did a great job highlighting the issue, though a little deeper analysis of how the world got to this point might have been nice. Regardless, it's a unique conflict that I've yet to read about and kept the story interesting.

The world building was great. There are some pretty interesting snippets of BioTech... leaves that grow in the window glass, flowers that can be grown out of your skin, biobots, etc. The world in general is a pretty dismal place, with people needing enfranchisement to be free, children attending indentured schools if they lack enfranchisement and parents. Robots and AI in general seem to be a large part of the world in the 2100s.

The characters are not very likable... I think we're meant to like one more than the others, but I never really felt that, despite their positive intentions, they were all that great a person themselves. I think this is what I struggled with most. They weren't likable, and I never engaged or felt like I cared about them. I don't need shining examples of humanity to root for, I just need characters with a little more personality I guess.

CONTENT WARNINGS (Possible Spoilers): This book will make you uncomfortable. It will make you squirm in your seat. If you have any kind of triggers related to sex, I would not recommend it. There are multiple master/slave (indentured) sexual relationships. The partners go into it "willingly" enough, but I don't think the indentured people were in the right state of mind to make those decisions. It was up to the other person to say no. The word f*ggot pops up quite a bit, I think the author was making a point, not condoning the use of it, but I wasn't a fan of this either. Violence in general is pretty frequent and there is drug use.

All in all, not a bad book, and it's quick, so if the things I mentioned seem interesting, go for it! If there are sequels or off shoots planned for this world, I would love to see some more details about it.

“Autonomous” is a novel containing robots, pirates, and technology written by Annalee Newitz.  The Audiobook edition is well performed by Jennifer Ikeda.  I was interested in this book after reading is summary details, but I quickly found the book going in a different direction.  I personally thought a solid publisher such as Macmillan Audio would have vetted the story better than they had.  I found the book to be less about autonomy and science fiction than it was about gender, sex, swearing, and drug use; both recreational and prescription.  Every one of the characters had a mouth that would embarrass and make your sailor or trucker friends blush.  The vulgar words used are even spoken by the many robots which seemed to be out of character for a machine.  Topics involving sex or actual sexual scenes are prevalent and unnecessary in this book, and I was hoping for so much more than what I was given.  For science fiction and non-science fiction listeners, I cannot recommend this book unless you are looking for an erotic robot romance story.

The initial premise of the book revolves around big pharma (drug manufacturing companies) trying to protect their intellectual property (IP) so they can profit big; similar to today’s marketplace.  All the while, a different group of people try to reverse-engineer the drugs in the hopes of modifying its potency or releasing an “open-sourced” or generic versions in the hopes of sticking it to the big pharma companies.  This bio-hacking activity is conducted in the hope of reducing a drug's cost, enhancing its power or limiting the drug companies power.  The story takes place in the near future, where there are indentured servant robots desiring autonomy and no longer want to be slaves to their assigned roles.  Some of these robots’ struggle wanting to be autonomous.

What I liked about the book were some of the more futuristic concepts the author included such as targeted advertisement and continued issues with Asian (China) imports. The story took place in some rather interesting places.  Opening with a young pirate sailing in her submarine grabbed my attention from the start of the book but things quickly went downhill from there.  I will say this was a very difficult book to finish for me because I found the characters to be uninteresting, the blatant misuse of technology, and the author’s very forward liberal agenda.

This book is a perplexing story involving gender confusion, feminism, right-wing zings, along with loads of graphic and erotic sexual scenes (sometimes between robots) disguised as a contemporary science fiction book.  The book had more erotica than most romance novels.  The characters themselves were flat, having no dimension or details making them unique or interesting.  When I finished the book, which was a difficult task in itself, I had no attachment to any character nor did I feel the author addressed the autonomy issue satisfactorily.  The writing style of the book was young adult (YA) focused having a large amount of crude and crass humor, but the language and erotic content is intended for mature audiences only.  The story itself seemed very disjointed and confusing at times, and I never really felt like I could be a part of the world the author had created.e

I found the science fiction and technology used in the book to be lacking research or having any sense of realism.  Often times technology lingo was thrown in without proper context with a hope of making the book sound technical or to have a science fiction feel.  The author included computer worms, network hacking (sprinkler systems), gene sequencing, protein folding, etc.  And in all situations, these technologies seemed to work without issue or consequences.  I found it quite entertaining when a robot would often have some special unknown ability save the day but it was hidden from the listener until it was needed to get the characters out of a situation.  I also had an issue with the way the robots would initiate communications with one another.  They would begin communicating with one another using human concepts of communication instead of computer-based protocols.  It was difficult to listen to two machines asking to talk to one another over a secure connection, and at times would even reuse the earlier agreed upon secure key; not a secure practice at all.  Only once did I remember two robots questioning one another’s authentication before authorizing a communication channel.

The book’s narration was decent and in most cases, I feel the issues I had were related to the book’s content rather than its narration.  Overall the narrator’s performance was clear and lacking any audio artifacts such as swallows, page turns, etc.  In some circumstances, I would have liked the voicing of the robots to be less what one thinks of from a 1980s robot speaking, but I understand the reason a voice like this was used.  The multiple characters were distinguishable and each seemed to have a personality by way of their voice.

For parents and younger readers, I am unable to recommend this book due to the heavy erotica and vulgar language use.  There are also many topics which may not be appropriate for younger readers including some of the graphic violence.  This book is intended only for mature audiences.

I understand the time, effort, and sweat it takes to release a book, and I do not enjoy giving a book a low rating.  However, this book veers too far from its intended center by deploying a science fiction trojan horse that instead contains a very different agenda.  I wish the writing would have been more mature, the vulgar language reduced or removed, and the heavily erotic scenes toned down.  I think there was a good story idea that instead was covered in too many other minutiae making the journey very muddied.

Audiobook was purchased for review by ABR.

Please find this complete review and many others at my review blog.

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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 on NetGalley. Thanks to Tor/Forge for the book!

I received this book for free from Tor in exchange for an honest review.

This book is challenging to review – there’s so much to talk about, but so much you just need to read! It’s fantastic and deep and exciting and full of biting social commentary (probably more than I picked up on.)

In this future, there’s an array of fantastic tech, like perimeter systems for your body that lie invisibly over your skin and can shock people and such, moving tattoos, robotic body parts and other mods (there’s a character who declares he makes custom genitals – that’s right folks, welcome to the real future!) There are self-driving cars, motes of internet in the air (I’ll admit, I really didn’t grasp that bit) and almost anything can be 3-d printed. Jack even has a knife with an algorithm (boy, do I really hate those) that can target certain people!

That might sound pretty sweet, but this world has its downsides too. For instance, medicines are patented and unless you can afford to buy the patent you’re not getting the meds. Enter Jack, the pirate who steals and reverse engineers medicines and drugs so that she can sell the drugs on the black market in order to give the medicines away for free (a modern day Robin Hood, if you will). If we thought the healthcare system was built for profit now, it’s got nothing on this version of the future.

In addition to pharmaceutical patents, there are franchises. No, not the kind we have now where you can buy your own McDonalds. You buy a franchise to essentially buy your freedom. Jack’s father bought franchises for his children so that they would be allowed to live, work and even attend school in certain regions. Parents who can’t afford a franchise watch as their children are indentured after a certain age. Depending on the contract, the indentured may not live to gain their freedom (this aspect also speaks to the autonomy theme of the book.)

Speaking of the indentured, most of the robots are “born” indentured. This is a rather significant part of the plot, as not everyone believes a bot should start their life that way. Most bots never finish their contract, despite ten-year limits. In theory, once their contract is finished, a robot can gain an autonomy key. I could probably write a book’s worth of thoughts on all this, but it’s better if you just read this book.

I love the depth Newitz gives to the robots though. There’s a robot who was born autonomous, raised by humans and attended medical school. There’s a robot with a human brain used solely for image processing. There are gender-swaps, despite robots really being non-gendered. There are different levels of bot intelligence and autonomy too. They feel like real characters and I love them.

Look, I could go on forever, so I’ll just say this book was a great read. Before I wrap up, I’ll leave you with my favorite quote:

“He’s an outsider, too. Everybody is an outsider, if you look deep enough.”

If you enjoy medical sci-fi (like Mira Grant’s Parasitology trilogy) and awesome robots with deep personalities (like C. Robert Cargill’s Sea of Rust) with a dash of found family (like Becky Chamber’s Wayfarers series) then I think you’ll enjoy Autonomous. I, for one, can’t wait for more fiction from Newitz and sincerely hope we see more of these characters.

Because I review books, I do my best to stay on top of what's been recently released via Indie Authors and traditionally published authors. Sometimes I accomplish this. Other times, I'm playing catch up on some of the book stacks in my office.

When I spotted Autonomous, by Annalee Newitz, I thought: This sounds like something I'd love to dive in to. At the time, I'd currently been in one physical book, so I purchased the audiobook. It's a sort of cop thriller, but the science fiction bits are what really drew me in. I loved the idea of independent cybernetic beings, and humans with cybernetic parts. Made me think of BladeRunner and The Lunar Chronicles, but more sciency.

So Autonomous a good read?
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Autonomous is the story of three characters. One sells scripts to keep the general public happy. The other is a set of officials who are trying to stop them. The first characters, Jack, sells drugs for a living but has realized the drug she's handling has caused an epidemic of erratic behavior in people. It's been tampered with and not for the better. Her guilt drives her to correct a wrong. The two officials, are doing their best to catch her- it doesn't matter that she's doing her best to make amends... or how she does it. She's guilty and needs to be caught!

There was a great deal of potential in this book. Autonomous could have been perfect, but it was just too slow. It didn't hold me enough. The two officials, Paladin (a bot) and his human partner (Elias) were pretty cool, but Paladin was the most interesting of the two. Jack was boring and to me, didn't stick interest at all. She came off as a guilt-ridden Robin Hood- trying to give the people what they wanted. But They Were Drugs!

It's written beautifully: prose, scientific subjects and dystopian world building and all, but it just didn't do the trick. Honestly, the world building wasn't that grand- I had trouble figuring it out. I didn't see what the author saw, making it difficult as well.

You'll see. Check out Autonomous and become indebted to the drug... or not.
Cheers!

Annalee Newitz
Published by Tor Books, September 2017
303 Pages

Great ideas and science that got lost in juvenile dealings with social current events. The neuroscience is very forward and has some creative integration of AI, but it was all overshadowed by the developing story. Read like a science-ish romance novel written by a college sophomore.

Ahoy there me mateys! Well, 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.

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: A Novel, for example.

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher in exchange for me honest musings. Arrrrr!

The science reads like the author thought Khan Academy was a good substitute for actual background research. The plot presumes that some chick on a submarine could analyze and duplicate pharma research, but somehow she's the only one. I am an actual biochemist and this whole novel is nonsense.

is used in the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It is also used as an athletic performance enhancer and cognitive enhancer, and recreationally as an aphrodisiac. There are just a couple problems it's very expensive, highly addictive, and can lead to death.

The big pharma company forgot to mention that.

Jack(Judith) reverse engineers the drug to sell it to those who don't have the means to pay. She stumbles on the big secret that it leads to death and the chase begins as the big pharma company tries to silence her.

A good read.
The line between good and evil, right and wrong was blurred. Paladin sure was brutal at times almost psychopathic. Jack was no saint. Robin Hood with a mean streak.

But it did have its problems as most 1st time authors do.

I didn't understand Eliasz's attraction to Paladin. It was never explained. Plus how does a man have sex with a robot? Better be careful. It's like sticking it in a toaster. Gives new meaning to the phrase 'practice safe sex'.

Only 300 pages the plot should have stayed in one place. Give us a fuller description of city life in the year 2144. What is Las Vegas like? Holy moral decadence Batman.

As for the human sex scenes, no intimacy, no warmth. Was it fun? It felt angry, violent, robotic, see what i did there.

3 1/2 stars
I tweeted Annalee Newitz that her book was going to give me strange dreams for sure.
She responded "Sweet Dreams" for that i'll round up rating to 4 stars.

You want a 'sentient robot' novel try 'Sea of Rust' by C. Robert Cargill an excellent read.

Disclosure: I received a review copy from the publisher in exchange for a honest review.

2 1/2 Stars.

Like the title suggest, the main theme of the novel is autonomy. Autonomous features AIs, some born autonomous while other works towards that end goal. This idea doesn’t apply just to robots, as many humans find themselves indentured whether it is to people or corporations. Some humans find themselves unable to break free of the contract and live out their lives chained or worst (however you may look at it) death. Autonomous begs the questions, what is freedom and for those that have autonomy; are we truly free? Readers explore this question as we follow a pirate/smuggler named Jack who sells reverse-engineered pharmaceutical drugs on the black market for the low-income sector. And Paladin and Eliasz, IPC agents tracking Jack because they believe her black market drugs are the cause of hundreds of death across the U OF S.

The concept of the novel was interesting and I liked how Newitz incorporated so many themes within the story-line. And the pacing was great as there was never a dull moment. As far as world building goes, it wasn’t as developed as I liked. Newitz used a lot of fancy science terminology but never elaborated on the whole servitude issue with humans and AIs. I wished the author went more in-depth, on the world and its characters. One of the most important quality I look for in a book is whether or not it’s character driven. And sadly, Autonomous isn’t one of those novels. I never once connected or invested into the characters. The tag-line said Jack was a modern day Robin Hood, but I never got that impression. She didn’t steal from the rich to give to the poor. Yes, she did things that would benefit the poor but it definitely wasn’t a selfless act. And monetary gains was still one of the contributing factors if not notoriety.

Autonomous had some intriguing ideas and an array of important themes integrated into the plot such as equality, sexuality, ethics, 1st Amendment rights, cultural and societal issues but poor execution of world building and characters made for a problematic debut novel. I wished Autonomous lived up to the hype. I cannot recommend Autonomous, there are far better Sci-Fi novels that touches on the same themes, if not all.

I have kind of mixed thoughts on this book. Some parts of the story were very engaging to me, while others not so much.

I didn’t really care all that much about the pharma/pirate story line. This is where it felt like two different stories that were somehow cobbled together. On the one hand we have a very engaging story about bots, their lives and thought processes, learning how to navigate in this human/bot world with various levels of autonomy. And then there’s this whole plot point about pharma patents and how medicine became too regulated and access is a problem. I don’t think the pharma angle was a bad one to explore, just that somehow these two stories just didn’t mesh well together for me, even when everything was brought together at the end. I feel like it would have been better served focusing on one of these elements/story lines and rather than splitting the story down the middle and dividing the reader’s focus.

I also struggled with caring for some of the characters. Oddly enough, or maybe not if that was the point, the characters I felt most connected to were the bots. They felt more human to me than the actual humans we spent time with in the story. The human characters just fell so flat to me and I didn’t care about any of them, even our cool pirate Jack.

All that being said, the parts that I loved I really, really, really loved. I think the bot/AI stuff was handled beautifully. It really felt like AI. I loved seeing them access the net, searching for relevant files while trying to figure out answers to questions they had. This was especially interesting when they were trying to comprehend certain human interactions. It felt like humans were some puzzle to be solved and for some reason that appealed to me. Because maybe we are a puzzle. Why do we do the things we do? Who can say? But these bots were going to try and figure it out so they could adjust and respond accordingly. Or some of the bots, especially when we get to sections where there is a mostly bot town, just don’t give a fig about humans and are busy living their own lives.

That’s the other thing I loved about the bot story line in this book, the exploration of the different kinds of lives bots have. Some are built for very specific reasons and are indentured to humans, servants, they don’t have their own will completely. Others were raised completely autonomous, like a human child. Bot life is way more various than human life in that they can be tiny little bugs or a regular looking computer interface or something that looks so indistinguishable from a human that humans without detectors may not even be able to tell the difference. All of that was really fascinating to me and I loved all the themes explored in these sections of the book.

But then we would shift focus back to the pharma plot and I was just like ‘sigh’.

Overall, I did enjoy Autonomous quite a lot. I think it has a lot to say, I just wish it had felt a little more focused. Still, 4/5 stars.

Autonomous is Annalee Newitz's novel about pharmacological pirates set in a world where reverse engineering drugs has been made illegal. It's had amazing blurbs from famous science fiction authors such as Neal Stephenson and William Gibson on the cover, and the author is an editor for Ars Technica, so she's familiar with technology.

The novel switches between two perspectives, one of Jack the Pharma pirate with a heart of gold, and the mercenary robot/human team that's been tasked with hunting her down after she pirated a drug that turns out to have addictive side-effects.

I think one of the biggest problems with science fiction in the modern era is that humans tend to anthropomorphize everything, including robots. As a result, the robot in the story, Paladin, works at human speeds instead of superhuman speeds, and isn't nearly as sharp as I would expect for an AI with human-level intelligence. (It's also quite unlikely that AI tech would stay at human-levels for any significant period of time, but that's another discussion for another time)

The core plot isn't really interestingly enough to drive the story, though along the way we get a really dystopian view of a society of capitalism run amuck, where humans indenture themselves to corporations or other humans so as to better compete with otherwise autonomous robots, which are required to serve an indenture period to pay off the cost of manufacture. Unfortunately, the morality and movement behind these movements are never explored, and would have been more interesting than the novel we got.

I'm afraid I can't really recommend Autonomous: the happy ending is forced, and some of the technology (i.e., the use of human brains inside robots to provide certain functions such as facial recognition) seems highly unlikely.

In a technologically advanced, yet opportunistic as ever, world, the piracy of drugs remains an issue in Annalee Newtiz's Autonomous.

Jack is a pirate smuggling inexpensive drugs, to help those who can't afford the expensive versions, using her submarine and scientific knowledge to help those in need. But the latest drug she reverse engineered appears to have some incredibly negative side effects, namely a highly addictive aspect that leads users to their deaths, that was included by the drug's creating company. Having caught the attention of the authorities, Jack tries to hide as an agent and his young military robot, both coming to terms with what their relationship could be, pursue her trail.

Exploring power, both corporate and personal, the drug epidemic, and relationships, both professional and personal, this novel works through contemporary issues in a grim, futuristic setting. The world building could be developed a bit more to provide a greater sense of what's going on and how the world came to be as it is, aside from cursory mentions of indentured servitude for humans and bots and the pervasive role of pharmaceutical companies in the lives of average people there wasn't much to show the world. The characterization wasn't incredibly strong, which made it difficult to connect with the key characters, such as Jack; however, I was rather intrigued by the curiosity of the bot Paladin, though that was tempered by the relationship between Paladin and Eliasz as it was cringeworthy in its development.

Just finished this book. I've been inundated with fiction/media related to AI sorts of issues lately. It's been a staple of sci-fi stories for years, and it's only becoming even more commonplace as real-world AI concepts and applications continue developing. Thus, I bought this book with no small amount of trepidation - how much more AI scifi can I read before I just get tired of it (like I did with post-apoc YAF)?

Well, I am very pleased that I did decide to add this to my library. Annalee Newitz did an amazing job of investigating what it means to be alive and free. She did this while taking on capitalism, our broken intellectual property system, human trafficking, and so many other HUGE topics, that I'm amazed the book wasn't a trilogy. All of this while developing a plot that kept me going, characters that I felt for, and an ending that felt believable.

If you're a fan of scifi (or if you don't mind sci-fi trappings around a story which could otherwise probably survive well enough on its own), and if you like books that make you think, then you should definitely check this book out.

So....just finished reading this, and while I enjoyed it, there were also several things about it that annoyed me.

#1 - Not enough world-building. For example, the author refers multiple times to the concept of the "franchise" without ever explaining what it is or how it works. This creates confusion, and is especially galling in a novel whose central themes are the nature of property and the concept of ownership.

#2- Not enough info about Eliasz' background...which made him an uninteresting character. Given that the storyline between him and Paladin makes up roughly half the novel, this is a major flaw. I found myself skimming/speed-reading the sections involving him and Paladin because I could really care less about them.

Just a brief review of Autonomous by Annalee Hewitz. I was unfamiliar with the author until one day an announcement of her book found its way into my newsfeed. The concept intrigued me so I bought the book. So what do we have here? First of all, we have a bit of language invention, circa William Gibson. Ms. Hewitz's invention doesn't push the reader away in the same way that William Gibson does. Gibson forces the reader to adapt to his language usage before getting into the story. It's usually worth the effort but it does put certain readers off. In the case of "Autonomous" the period of adaptation is much shorter and it does not get in the way of the narrative. I thoroughly enjoyed this aspect of the book, finding it refreshing. Jack, the protagonist in this adventure, navigates a future where robots and humans coexist in a society where either can be indentured or free. It's also a society where big Pharma controls human well-being and productivity. As is currently the case in the United States, thier drugs are expensive and subject to very strict patent laws. Jack fights back against this, by reverse engineering these expensive drugs and making them available to those without the financial resources to pay for the originals. As such she occupies the Robin Hood trope though the word used here is pirate. Then one day one of the drugs Jack has pirated turns into a killer. She finds herself both running from the authorities, and trying to find an antidote. There's a lot more I could reveal here but then I'd have to click the spoilers box. I think anyone looking for a fresh voice in science-fiction will love this book. I did.

I received this book as a gift from my daughter, and read it all last Sunday. This is the best science fiction book I’ve read since Ancillary Mercy. The world feels touchable and the characters seem like people you know and like. Couldn’t put it down.

The main character is Jack, who identifies herself as a pirate. She is a scientist, a bio-chemist, who sells street drugs to finance the manufacture and distribution of humanitarian medicines. Her troubles center around a drug that she reverse engineered and sold, that was highly addictive. So much so that people are dying. She needs to make it right, which involves creating a cure and exposing the corporation that is selling the drug as a concentration enhancer. And avoiding the “cops”.

The story has lots of action and lots of science. It explores a world in which slavery for artificial intelligences and humans is legal and widespread. It is a deep dive into the nature of personal responsibility, autonomy, and intellectual property.

I received this book from NetGalley

Hello reader. It’s Katie. 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 gives the reader an interesting dilemma to consider.

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.

Audible review:

I really enjoyed this book and the interesting tale of humans and robots.I liked that we get to observe the world from both human and robot perspectives and can see how different their perspectives are. The whole idea of the autonomy key was interesting and the whole pharmaceuticals angle the story focused on was an interesting change from what is normally seen.

I think the largest disappointment was that there were a number of interesting ideas that were just touched on as the story progresses and I would have liked to have heard more. Some characters were really interesting but we didn't get to know them as well as I would have liked (Med).

Overall, it was a great story and an enjoyable listen. Jennifer Ikeda did a superb job with narration and I felt like she gave both humans and robots their own voices.

Great ideas, great story ... badly infected with Identity Gender nonsense.

A story with AI, bio-pharma etc? great!

Identity gender politics regarding a robot (an obvious analogy for “no-one knows their gender at birth”, without being said) - yep.

What a waste of time and $$.

My copy (see attached picture) is on its way to be recycled, and will hopefully come back as a product I can TRULY express my appreciation with ...

Annalee Newitz has a dark near future. After robots became Autonomous (hard from TOR). Their creators were given ten years indentured servitude to pay for their cost. Unfortunately it soon because legal to indenture humans too, with parents selling their children. Drug companies only sell their cure-alls to people with money. Jack is a robin hood pirate, retro-engineering drugs that she gives away to those in need. She pays for that by retro-engineering pleasure drugs. Zacuity is a drug that makes work seem like fun, but unfortunately is very addicting. The pills Jack had sold were creating disasters and she needed to contact old friends to find a cure Unfortunately Eliasz, a International Property Coalition agent, and his robotic partner, Paladin are on her trail and they don’t hesitate to torture and murder potential witnesses on their way. Fun, but I hope that future isn’t out future.

Annalee Newitz's Autonomous is a just-released and consistently interesting near-future dystopian science fiction novel set about 120 years in the future at the intersection of robotics, AI and biotech.
 
Newitz, the author (with whom I went to grad school many years ago) has created an intriguing world that combines golden age science fiction tropes about robots (think Asimov’s “I, Robot”) and self awareness with more recent cyberpunk (Neal Stephenson’s “Snowcrash”) and biotech fiction (the recent Daniel Suarez book “Change Agent”).
 
Newitz creates a deep, fully-realized world where robots are self-aware but only some are autonomous. In a disturbing parallel, while most humans are enfranchised many are indentured servants. The technology pervades the story at a kind of fractal level, with bioluminescent and self-healing wall paint scaling up to robots who switch bodies over the course of their lives and humans who mod their own bodies in ways ranging from subtle to grotesque. Throughout, Big Pharma with its expensive, copyrighted drugs is in tension with the work of Free Labs that gives drugs away.
 
Judith “Jack” Chen, one of several protagonists, is a pharma pirate who steals drugs from Big Pharma, reverse engineers them and then releases them on the black market. Other protagonists include Paladin, a self-aware “biobot” with an auxiliary human brain, and Medea “Med” Cohen, a robot scientist who was created to be autonomous and grew up nurtured by a human family.
 
The plot is spritely — I read the book cover to cover in a day and a half — with engaging characters and a consistently compelling world. The plot McGuffin wasn’t a big surprise, but it was still satisfying.
 
This is a strong recommend for science fiction lovers, particularly fans of Stephenson, Cory Doctorow, and William Gibson, all of whom contributed enthusiastic blurbs to Autonomous.

Strange book. A future 150 years off in which the main action revolves around pharmaceutical companies and the protected products they own by patent. Two agents, a human and his robot partner scour the recesses of Canada for a rogue drug manufacturer who's determined to blow the whistle on a big pharma company whose drug is killing the people that take it. Doesn't sound very exciting, does it? Luckily, it's more interesting than it sounds. A competing plot with the on-the-lamb drug pirate thread is the human agent/robot duo who are stalking the pirate. In between violently killing characters while in pursuit of the pirate, they develop a weird love affair that's too hard to explain in a review. The book's more interesting themes tend to take place in that thread.

The characters (both human and non) have depth and complexity, and the plot kept me reading until the wee hours, but the best part of this novel is the imaginative intelligence that the author brings to her future. From the rise of an underground resistance movement giving the poor access to hacked pharmaceuticals in a corporate-dominated dystopia, to climate change shifting human settlements toward the poles, to the complex relationships between humans and robots - some of whom are autonomous, most of whom are property - the author leaves us with much food for thought about our possible future, and about where our present is taking us.

There was a snitch from the Class of '87 who ruined and ended a 20 year tradition of students drinking on the Latin field trip. It's litcherally why I took Latin for this field trip of In Vinum es Veritas. My punishment during my 10 day suspension was to push mow a 6 acre lot that took me three days at which point I had to start over blisters be damned. Today I started work on my new farm which took me 8 hours to mow with a tractor. I'll get my technique down though. Anyway, I've been anticipating this book for over a year and pre-ordered the day it was available. I loved it but the drug they are on reminds me of me. I sat in inertia and depression for 3 years but big ups to Power Life Yoga who got me moving again and I have not stopped since. Once I get zeroed in on a project like my organic heirloom micro-farm I can't stop. Once my fingers hit the soil or the blade touches the grass I am engrossed and usually listening to an audio book thus killing two birds with one stone. Like in the book I do not hydrate enough and do not quit until it's too dark to work. This novel was incredible and probably close to accurate with singularity. However, I do think since we weaponize every new technology that it was mayhap a little soft and less dark than it might be. Like Sam Harris said this week, "We will only get one shot with Ai and we could become extinct if we do not do it correctly." I'm sure between Putin, Rocket Man, Isis, Xi Jinping and The Dotard it will be just fine. Oh and I hear the snitch is in to pegging these days and I am sure he is someone's confidential informant after getting busted with an 8 ball and a quarter pound of pharmaceutical grade amyl nitrate, but I judge no man. I sometimes think robots could do it all better anyway. We all help slow kill the earth and all her inhabitants with Dupont and Monsanto whose products and poisons we use everyday. I sure hope Annalee keeps writing fiction. It's like Robert Zimmerman said, "Someday, everything is gonna be different, when I paint my masterpiece. " This just might be it for her?

Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous was a joy to read. The story takes place in a dystopian future in which the world is unified under one planetary government, robots and humans can be indentured, and big pharma rules. Big pharma holds patents on all necessary drugs, and only sells them to the rich. These drugs allow the rich to live long, have precise focus and productivity, as well as feel generally happier. Patent infringement is a capital offense, therefore the poor or even middle class cannot hope of ever getting their hands on the same drugs that aid the rich. However, the main character, Jack, is a pirate determined to bring down big pharma by reverse engineering then copying these drugs and distributing them to the poor. A kind of futuristic “Robinhood.” When one of her drugs releases a deadly side effect, a target is put on Jack’s back and she becomes hunted by a government agent and his robot for her crimes, putting her constantly on the run. Eventually, she finds companionship from an indentured servant that she rescued from an abusive master caught trying to smuggle drugs off of her ship. The story takes off from there, and you will have to read it to find out what happens next.
I really enjoyed reading this book, especially for my high school mythology class. I was able to identify many of Campbell’s four functions while reading, as well as various archetypes we have studied throughout the course, namely apocalypse and loss of innocence archetypes.

There are two main story arcs. Jack's story arc is a little mundane, but entertaining. I give Jack's arc alone a solid 3.5 stars. Palladin's story is pretty awful. As a redeeming value Palladian herself does explore some interesting topics of sexuality and freedom. But these are set against a backdrop of murder-porn.

Two undercover future feds are sent to find and deal with a bio-software pirate. One of them is the least subtle field agent ever, fumbling about with no sense of fieldcraft, and really getting by only by luck and emotionless torture and murder. The other is a robot the size of a refridgerator with not-well hidden internal machine guns. Somehow they always meet the right people on their first try, get invited to the right parties immediately, and if the next lead is more than 10 minutes in coming, well that's what the pliers are for. Afterwards they explore their feelings. Not for the dead bodies in their wake, for each other. Elias is neither portrayed as a sociopath nor as a human who responds to slowly torturing people to death. It is jarring. James bond feels more real.

For their part, the people on the receiving end frequently see through the pairs disguise immediately, frequently comment to each other about how cops straight up kill people in this world, and then politely wait their turn for torture-murder time.

Elias is a terrible character and a worse human. Palladian can do better.

I'm not normally a big science fiction reader, but since I'm a former room mate of the cool woman who wrote this book, I definitely wanted to read it, and I was not disappointed (I admit I have a bias. So what?). This is a fast moving, highly entertaining and often funny novel set about a hundred years in the future. Like all great futuristic stories, it comments on and extends on existing world conditions. One of the main themes is the danger of pharmaceutical companies that care only about profit leading to a two tiered healthcare system. There's also lots of interesting stuff about gender and AI; one of the most clever sections of the novel occurs when a robot attempts to discern the meaning of the concept of homosexuality while in the middle of a violent encounter! All in all, a good read.

This book is so ridiculously forgettable that it took me like a month to add it to goodreads after I finished it. Read literally anything else... This thinly veiled commentary on sexuality and gender fluidity is so heavy-handed it ventures into the realm parody. Like the knock-off pharma some of the characters peddle, Autonomous is nothing but shiny-packaged garbage more likely to kill you than help you accomplish anything. I would give this zero stars if possible.

I ducking loved this book and couldn't put it down. The characters were nuanced and came from a variety of fascinating POVs, and they evolved as the book went on. Even characters who I personally would consider to be "bad guys" if I met them in real life were portrayed in such a way as I had to have sympathy for them at points, and I cheered their personal growth when it happened.

The book had a really interesting take on the future of IP, medicine, tech, and humanity in general. This book was right up my alley, and I'm very grateful to the author for giving it to the world. :)

It is a fairly middle of the road book. I have no idea why it is compared to a seminal work such as Neuromancer.

The book it self refuses to actually offer up any solutions for the societal issues claims it makes and the "romance" was just stupid and a waste of page space.

Much of the tech seems to be based around some buzz words that got picked up then harped on. Not very believable in many cases.

I'd say it was not really worth my time.

I cannot think of a more relevant science fiction story for the current era, than "Autonomous." Corporations ruling the world with their own police forces. A "Robin Hood" in pharmaceuticals distributing 3-D printed drugs. Cyborgs with human brains and completely robotic bodies. Incredible dialogue and a refreshingly paced story, as well!

I highly recommend this book!

I really enjoyed this, and thought it did an excellent job of showing you how corporate thugs think, as much and little as they do -- and what it's like to have a mind that doesn't belong to you. In that, it was a clear step forward from Rudy Rucker's "ware" books.

Annalee Newitz’s AUTONOMOUS has got it all - submarine pharma pirates, biotech patent law, spy thriller action, and transgender robots. The story started with a bang and ends delightfully, exactly where it needed to end. I closed the book simultaneously wanting more from this world and being satisfied with how each character's arc ended. Please stop reading this review now and go pick up this book!

The main character is such and obvious Mary Sue that it is hard to care about anything that happens to her because you just know she is amazing at everything. There are two story lines that are interwoven into the book when it should have taken just one and developed the characters in one of the plot lines. There is also a lot of weird sexual relationships that makes me think the author does not understand male sexuality, and/or is trying to push a sexual world view on the reader. However the universe is interesting and not something you see a whole lot of in science fiction. I did finish the book because I wanted to see more of the universe but the ending was disappointing.

Intense, intriguing, mesmerizing, inspiring, comprehensive. Prophetic? It is really unusual to come accross sci-fi that feels fresh and something else to keep the imagination going and at the same time is so relatable - if you’ve been paying attention.

Where to start, I'm not sure, Autonomous was disturbing and I'm sure for none of the reasons the author intended. Apparently in the future, life is even worth less than it is today, sex with robots is acceptable and society is managed (controlled through) a pharamacutical economy. I really lack the words to fully vocalize my dislike, but Autonomous is everything that is wrong with modern Scifi. Having lost their capacity for wonder, these authors turn to identity politics, naval gazing and transhumanism, pass.

I waited months for this book to be available from the library and then read it all in one fell swoop. It was a super entertaining meditation on free will set in a realistically grim near future. Also, there’s some rather adorkable murderbot romance.

What if W. Gibson wrote people who took their meds seriously. Filled with AIs as thoughtful, conflicted folks. I read this at the same time I read Provenance, and had to keep checking to make sure this wasn't the novel that won the award.

A fantastically original, believable look into a near future where robots have gained sapience and are starting to be recognized as persons. But their human rights advances come at the cost of our own.

The author appeared on Cost to Coast, and was not well versed in the topics at hand. She has an English degree, not anything in science or math. Clearly has a Google-esque level of knowledge on the topic, nothing significantly deep. Wrote a book with a cool name and cover, that's it.

Postmodern Neo-Marxist Identity Politics of today in the world of tomorrow!

Question for the author: Since you are so against intellectual property law, why are you charging for this book? I guess you wouldn't mind this book being copied and shared for free on the internet? Typical neo-lib hypocrisy.

All jokes aside the book is an okay read with some decent action, drug use, sex, etc; but way too much buzzfeed first world nonsense for me to be able to look past. What else could you expect from one of the founders of io9?

There's some really interesting concepts in this book. Some drastic changes in society are a bit of a stretch given it is set only 120 years into the future. I like the ideas though.

The pace is fair and the world development is so-so. It is Earth, but society has changed significantly. I never really felt a lot for the characters and never managed to get a liking or understanding of Jack (arguably, the main character). I really liked Paladin. I particularly like Paladin's struggles. That was excellent throughout.

The book attempts to deal with a lot of contemporary topics. Socioeconomic divide, racial bigotry, sexuality, etc. It does them well too. I found the story a little mundane and predictable. It is Annalee's first novel and I really hope she does more.

Finally, I love the book cover. I reminds me of Westworld.

“Autonomous” is a novel containing robots, pirates, and technology written by Annalee Newitz.  The Audiobook edition is well performed by Jennifer Ikeda.  I was interested in this book after reading is summary details, but I quickly found the book going in a different direction.  I personally thought a solid publisher such as Macmillan Audio would have vetted the story better than they had.  I found the book to be less about autonomy and science fiction than it was about gender, sex, swearing, and drug use; both recreational and prescription.  Every one of the characters had a mouth that would embarrass and make your sailor or trucker friends blush.  The vulgar words used are even spoken by the many robots which seemed to be out of character for a machine.  Topics involving sex or actual sexual scenes are prevalent and unnecessary in this book, and I was hoping for so much more than what I was given.  For science fiction and non-science fiction listeners, I cannot recommend this book unless you are looking for an erotic robot romance story.

The initial premise of the book revolves around big pharma (drug manufacturing companies) trying to protect their intellectual property (IP) so they can profit big; similar to today’s marketplace.  All the while, a different group of people try to reverse-engineer the drugs in the hopes of modifying its potency or releasing an “open-sourced” or generic versions in the hopes of sticking it to the big pharma companies.  This bio-hacking activity is conducted in the hope of reducing a drug's cost, enhancing its power or limiting the drug companies power.  The story takes place in the near future, where there are indentured servant robots desiring autonomy and no longer want to be slaves to their assigned roles.  Some of these robots’ struggle wanting to be autonomous.

What I liked about the book were some of the more futuristic concepts the author included such as targeted advertisement and continued issues with Asian (China) imports. The story took place in some rather interesting places.  Opening with a young pirate sailing in her submarine grabbed my attention from the start of the book but things quickly went downhill from there.  I will say this was a very difficult book to finish for me because I found the characters to be uninteresting, the blatant misuse of technology, and the author’s very forward liberal agenda.

This book is a perplexing story involving gender confusion, feminism, right-wing zings, along with loads of graphic and erotic sexual scenes (sometimes between robots) disguised as a contemporary science fiction book.  The book had more erotica than most romance novels.  The characters themselves were flat, having no dimension or details making them unique or interesting.  When I finished the book, which was a difficult task in itself, I had no attachment to any character nor did I feel the author addressed the autonomy issue satisfactorily.  The writing style of the book was young adult (YA) focused having a large amount of crude and crass humor, but the language and erotic content is intended for mature audiences only.  The story itself seemed very disjointed and confusing at times, and I never really felt like I could be a part of the world the author had created.e

I found the science fiction and technology used in the book to be lacking research or having any sense of realism.  Often times technology lingo was thrown in without proper context with a hope of making the book sound technical or to have a science fiction feel.  The author included computer worms, network hacking (sprinkler systems), gene sequencing, protein folding, etc.  And in all situations, these technologies seemed to work without issue or consequences.  I found it quite entertaining when a robot would often have some special unknown ability save the day but it was hidden from the listener until it was needed to get the characters out of a situation.  I also had an issue with the way the robots would initiate communications with one another.  They would begin communicating with one another using human concepts of communication instead of computer-based protocols.  It was difficult to listen to two machines asking to talk to one another over a secure connection, and at times would even reuse the earlier agreed upon secure key; not a secure practice at all.  Only once did I remember two robots questioning one another’s authentication before authorizing a communication channel.

The book’s narration was decent and in most cases, I feel the issues I had were related to the book’s content rather than its narration.  Overall the narrator’s performance was clear and lacking any audio artifacts such as swallows, page turns, etc.  In some circumstances, I would have liked the voicing of the robots to be less what one thinks of from a 1980s robot speaking, but I understand the reason a voice like this was used.  The multiple characters were distinguishable and each seemed to have a personality by way of their voice.

For parents and younger readers, I am unable to recommend this book due to the heavy erotica and vulgar language use.  There are also many topics which may not be appropriate for younger readers including some of the graphic violence.  This book is intended only for mature audiences.

I understand the time, effort, and sweat it takes to release a book, and I do not enjoy giving a book a low rating.  However, this book veers too far from its intended center by deploying a science fiction trojan horse that instead contains a very different agenda.  I wish the writing would have been more mature, the vulgar language reduced or removed, and the heavily erotic scenes toned down.  I think there was a good story idea that instead was covered in too many other minutiae making the journey very muddied.

Audiobook was purchased for review by ABR.

Please find this complete review and many others at my review blog.

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Just a brief review of Autonomous by Annalee Hewitz. I was unfamiliar with the author until one day an announcement of her book found its way into my newsfeed. The concept intrigued me so I bought the book. So what do we have here? First of all, we have a bit of language invention, circa William Gibson. Ms. Hewitz's invention doesn't push the reader away in the same way that William Gibson does. Gibson forces the reader to adapt to his language usage before getting into the story. It's usually worth the effort but it does put certain readers off. In the case of "Autonomous" the period of adaptation is much shorter and it does not get in the way of the narrative. I thoroughly enjoyed this aspect of the book, finding it refreshing. Jack, the protagonist in this adventure, navigates a future where robots and humans coexist in a society where either can be indentured or free. It's also a society where big Pharma controls human well-being and productivity. As is currently the case in the United States, thier drugs are expensive and subject to very strict patent laws. Jack fights back against this, by reverse engineering these expensive drugs and making them available to those without the financial resources to pay for the originals. As such she occupies the Robin Hood trope though the word used here is pirate. Then one day one of the drugs Jack has pirated turns into a killer. She finds herself both running from the authorities, and trying to find an antidote. There's a lot more I could reveal here but then I'd have to click the spoilers box. I think anyone looking for a fresh voice in science-fiction will love this book. I did.

I received this book from NetGalley

Hello reader. It’s Katie. 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 gives the reader an interesting dilemma to consider.

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.

I'm not usually a SF reader - but some SF novels transcend genre and this is one of them. I am in awe of Newitz's ability to refract our own world through another, fully imagined world - and to refract humanity through the nonhuman. Fantastic.

Great book on many levels. A excellent reminder that within a sick system, people on both sides, pitched against eachother by circumstances, can still be good. loved it, will not say anything more, as not to spoil anything when you go read it yourself. You will not be disappointed.