This was great, I expected a little bit more from it but overall it was a compelling and fast read!

Autonomous by Annalee Newitz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Pirates and bounty hunters on the high chemical and electronic frontier! Add a bit of transgendered robot issues, a bit of do-gooder pharmaceutical mayhem, and time split between labs, parties, sexual repression, and a few really big questions explored deftly and interestingly, and we've got ourselves a very interesting SF.

Let's look at the top layer a little. Slavery issues. The novel takes them on for both robots and humans equally. I'd expected that from both the blurb and the cover, of course, but I don't think I expected the writing to have such good world-building thrown in. The whole chemical and big pharm complications were neither simple or dismissable, and that was only on the human side.

What would a world be like with open patents and sharing of chems and development, all of which is still being slowly strangled by capitalism? Take it a bit farther. Now let's start programming or deprogramming ourselves since we're so reliant on our own biologies.

Seriously, this is some pretty neat stuff and while we've had a bit of a discussion in this field for decades already, Newitz makes a cool tale and makes some very deft comparisons and mirroring here.

The tale itself if good if not spectacular. I had a good time. Still, I obviously appreciate the explorations of the messages more than anything else. :)

Thanks, Netgalley, for the ARC!

Jack Chen is an anti-patent scientist turned pirate who is trying to fight Big Pharma by bringing reversed engineered drugs to the people who need them, but can't afford them. Eliasz is an agent of the IPC and is sent to track down Jack and stop her after incidents of lethal overdoses of a pirated drug start popping up. Paladin is a military robot paired up with Eliasz and is working towards earning his/her autonomy.

I think what I liked the most about this book was the different stances and views of autonomy that are explored. No one is truly free and autonomous in this book and that says a lot about the not-so-distant future of the world that Newitz has built and the one that we are living in today. The different ideas about how humanity and robotics will potentially interact and overlap each other and the types of technology that is presented in the book were also something that I greatly enjoyed. Overall, the concepts and the ideas in the book are what really strike me as interesting and what drove me to this book in the first place.

However, I can't say that I agree with some of the overly high praise that this book has been given. Neal Stephenson was quoted on the front cover: "Autonomous is to biotech and AI what Neuromancer was to the Internet" and I think that is unfair not only to readers but to the book itself because it then begs readers to come to the book with outrageously high expectations and also compare it to a book that, frankly, I don't think it should be compared to. Yes, the concepts and ideas about bioware and robotics in this book could be seen as similar to the use of the internet and technology in Neuromancer, but that is where the similarities end (if you can even call it that). The writing itself, aside from the concepts of techonolgy and robotics, wasn't the best. Mainly that was due to the odd structure--why were there so many flashbacks to things that I don't care about and are not important?--and the constant shifting of PoVs. I honestly found Paladin, at first, to be the most interesting character, and I would have been fine just seeing the book alternate between Jack and Paladin--I was even into the "romance" between Paladin and Eliasz. However, I think that the use of Paladin as a means of queer representation or exploration was off-putting and was not handled the way I feel it should have been.

Overall, I think that this is a fun read and maybe a good break in title for someone who is looking for a fun, easy way into the Science Fiction genre but, to be clear, this book was not breaking down any genre barriers or changing any of the rules of genre. Honestly, I think that if Newlitz would have leaned in more towards harder Science Fiction the book's ideas and concepts would have really shined. So come for the interesting concepts and new ideas about science and robotics and that's pretty much it.

This book is seriously odd, but I became more involved the longer I read. The plotline that concerns legal drugs from Big Pharma and their reach into society (or lack thereof) seems a logical progression from where we are right now. The return of slavery makes a lot of sense too. The relationships between humans and robots, on the other hand, seemed convoluted and jumped from one point to another with little scaffolding. Interesting book.

Jack Chen pirates popular, corporate made drugs to fund reverse engineering of drugs that save lives and cure sickness. This time, however, she's reverse engineered a popular work-reward drug called Zacuity, and left chaos in her wake. It seems Zacuity's creators broke international patent law, and made the drug actually form addictive paths in the brain, making workers fatally addicted to whatever work they were doing while taking the drug. People are dying, and the authorities are blaming her instead of Zacuity's makers. They want her dead, and the Zacuity scandal safely swept under the rug.

Combat robot Paladin begins to have thoughts and experiences he never figured on encountering when he's assigned to go undercover with Eliasz. He finds himself contemplating humans and human behaviour, and the nature of his own biological components-- namely the bio brain safely tucked away in his carapace. Are the feelings and curiosities he's experiencing going to change if he ever gains autonomy?

Newitz gives us a rich, interesting (if quite grim) view of a future where capitalism has reach it's apex--prioritizing property rights over human rights. There are a few problems I have concerning some facets of a relationship featured in the book, but despite that the book does entertain and make the reader think about where our future is going if medicine continues to prioritize profits over people.

Science fiction used as a great way for us to review our thought patterns regarding medical ethics. At least it made me think about current ethics, big pharma, and society. 3.5 stars

Like the title says: autonomy, in all of its permutations, perversions, and absences, is the operative concept in Annalee Newitz’s adept debut novel, Autonomous, a thematically meaty sci-fi thriller set a dozen odd decades (or 20 minutes) into the future, in a not-quite-dystopian landscape in which much of the world has been carved up into economic zones, in lieu of the nation-state. Commerce is run mostly through multinational (or, maybe, multi-zone) corporations in a pervasive system that values property—intellectual, human, robot, and molecular—over just about anything else. Newitz, who cofounded geek haven io9 and penned a work of futurist nonfiction that considers how we’ll survive the mess we’ve made of our planet, has built a 22nd century with the hard hit of something illicit, something that turns the borders wobbly and indistinct, rosy and itchy at the same time. And man, is the comedown hard.

We are introduced first to Jack Chen, cruising her submarine across the mid-Atlantic, ferrying pirated pharmaceuticals of her own creation to the North American zone. Jack started her career in piracy as a true believer, a biotech student railing against the injustice of a patent system that locks cures from all but the wealthiest patients, and floods the market with lifestyle drugs engineered to make a quick buck. (Maybe less than 20 minutes into the future, then.) Jack’s not precisely a the zealot she was anymore—you don’t go from a promising young student to a scarred pirate without facing something harrowing in-between—but she’s still bound by a personal ethical code. So sure, she retroengineers junk lifestyle drugs herself, but only to pay for the more lifesaving kind.

On Jack’s sub, two things happen in rapid succession: she learns a drug she replicated and sold is killing people, and her sub is boarded by the more literal breed of pirate, set on a high seas smash-and-grab to steal her pharmaceutical cargo. She kills the pirate and subdues his indentured slave, and further investigates the bad news of her newly pirated lifestyle drug, ostensibly intended to alleviate the boredom of repetitive tasks, which is instead, when used illicitly, causing who take it to become addicted to whatever boring repetitive task they were looking to make easier in the first place. A man paints his apartment until he drops; a student studies so hard her kidneys give out.

Jack and the stowaway, Threezed—an indentured kid raised by a system of slavery in all but name to be a form of polite, mannered chattel—strike out to stop the spread of this killer drug by exposing the truth about its side-effects, and to engineer a cure. Jack works back through her sources and her past, towing the rudderless Threezed in her wake.

Meanwhile, the International Property Coalition has sent two operatives into the field—a human mercenary named Eliasz and his robot partner, Paladin—to find the source of the pirated drug and eliminate it, along with any potential liability on behalf of the massive corporation responsible. Eliasz and Paladin break knees and socially engineer their way through Jack’s past and present, stalking their target with the ruthless efficiency of those who know they are on the right side of justice.

Though it doesn’t exactly look like it, indentured human Threezed and indentured robot Paladin are the novel’s metaphorical pivot point. In this furute, the legal concept of indenture—a 10-year contract of total servitude—was developed primarily to deal with the question of sentient robots, the idea being that years of labor pay off the resources it takes to create one of them—even a military bot like Paladin, who came online only months before the novel begins. Once indenture was enshrined in law, it spread to humans, because of course it did.

A number of people mouth the pabulum that humans only choose indenture as adults—fully autonomous entities—but Threezed’s life story puts the lie to this: sold as a child by impoverished parents to an indenture school, taught enough to be useful to a potential buyer, sold again when he came of age. And sold, and sold, and sold. By the time Jack kills his master, Threezed doesn’t know how to treat her as anything but another one, someone to appease through sex and servitude. He’s been programmed as surely as any robot.

Though human and robot are at different ends of their indenture—Threezed is tired, calculated, and sarcastic, where Paladin is inquisitive and something like an innocent—they nonetheless have a lot in common. Both are programmed creatures who question their programming as far as they are able, though that may not be as far as they’d like. Both end up in sexual relationships with their masters/mentors—people they are not precisely bound to, but are nonetheless personally consuming figures to one trained in servitude. Paladin’s relationship with their handler, the mercenary Eliasz, hinges on what Eliasz perceives to be Paladin’s gender: male at first, as naturally all military robots are male, then female, once the two learn the human brain Paladin uses to process facial recognition was harvested from a dead female soldier. Paladin perceives gender as an anthropomorphized construct, but accedes to Eliasz’s need to assign them one. Is this a function of programming, or a real acquiescence?

Similarly, Threezed works to make himself necessary to Jack. She tries to shed him multiple times—to set him up with a franchise, to give him autonomy. But he just can’t believe it. He offers his body, his skills, his very presence to Jack. When she takes him up on some, but not all of it, it confuses him. He can’t quite give consent, because he’s never lived in a world where his consent mattered. “Consent” is something only beings with autonomy, and autonomy is as slippery and imaginary a concept to Threezed as gender is to Paladin. Is this a function of his upbringing, or a real acquiescence?

But now I realize I’ve entirely forgotten to talk much about pharmaceuticals, property rights, or cyberpunk—the three things the book is ostensibly about. Autonomous is such a complex mix of ideas, it’s hard to know where to start, and even harder to keep the discussion confined to just one thing. Reading it, I recalled my experiences with early period Gibson—stuff like Neuromancer or Count Zero, books that blew my mind while driving me to turn pages late into the night, breathless to reach the end. Like a lot of cyberpunk, its ending is Pyrrhic: no hard wins for the good guys, no exact bad guys, nothing but the murk of people in all of their permutations trying to work out the messes they’ve made of their small lives. The vastness of a concept like autonomy rubs up hard against lived lives, makes the concepts smaller and the lives larger.