Autonomous

Enjoyed this book. Definitely a modern look at the possibilities of the future ahead of us. I have to admin I was expecting more robots and augmentations and sci-fi, but this leant more towards a political statement in particular about free access to healthcare (which is something I care a lot about being in the UK and having the NHS).

An enjoyable story and some strong characters.

While I enjoyed this book, I thought that it was trying to fit too much into a single novel. On the one hand, there is the criticism of the broken patent system and a dystopian-like future where people are essentially commodities for megacorporations. On the other hand, there are the issues surrounding gender and, to some degree, homophobia. The latter was, in my opinion, underwhelming and overly simplistic (a robot "fixes" their genderlessness in the eyes of one homophobic human by simply changing their pronouns). The world building and character development were well done.

This was a ton of fun. Futuristic pharmaceutical piracy (complete with a stealth submarine!), evil corporations and capitalism run amok, forbidden (or at least socially unacceptable) human-bot love, issues of bot gender, sexuality, and . . . yeah, autonomy.

This definitely lives up to its name, allowing the reader to ponder questions about identity, free will, and love, by looking at a bot grappling with these issues, and seeing that his/her struggles apply equally to us.

But this isn't a stodgy think-piece - it's a swashbuckling tale with lovely characters and interesting relationships. Even the nastiest character gets some depth and sympathy. I almost think too much.

My one complaint is that this suffers from Quick Plot Resolution. Having artfully set all the characters in motion and developed their opposing points of view in a convincing and engaging way, the story left me a little disappointed when it wrapped things up quite suddenly. Where I expected the plot lines to meet, meld, and yield something new, they actually just intersected ever so briefly, which was the end of the story, except for a coda for each player.

It would have been interesting to see a little more detail and an actual redemption arc for the one character we see unapologetically choosing to murder people. There's a gesture in that direction, but I found it largely unsatisfying. I guess the explanation could be “aren't we all subject to programming that other sources installed,” but the story doesn't quite bring me to absolving everything on that basis.

Still, the trajectory set up at the end of the story does promise satisfying resolutions, and it's enough to hang your hat on. Given that everything up to that point was entertaining, thoughtful, and well written, I can easily give this 4 stars.

Autonomous is an interesting story that poses a lot of moral questions. It doesn't really take sides; both the pharmaceutical pirate and the agents tracking her down are painted in sympathetic ways, as if we're meant to like them all. We see why Jack is a pharmaceutical pirate; medicine is only available to those rich enough to pay for it, so the poor stay poor and sick and short-lived. She wants to change that. She reverse-engineers drugs, manufactures them, and distributes them to the needy through her associates.

Meanwhile, Eliasz is a conflicted military agent who is sexually attracted to robots. Or at least to his partner, Paladin, though a flashback shows what might have been the start of his attraction to robots. Paladin is probably the single most interesting character in the entire book, as she muses on the nature of being indentured, and searches through her memories and the internet for information about her situation.

The book does have LGBT content - Jack is bisexual, and Eliasz is - robosexual? Is that a thing? Paladin could be called nonbinary or trans; she repeatedly mentions that gender isn't a thing to robots, but because she's a military robot, most people call her a he at the beginning of the book. She learns the brain inside her is female, and to make Eliasz more comfortable with his attraction, she decides to use female pronouns. Eliasz does use the F word to refer to himself being attracted to the robot at the beginning, when they were using male pronouns. This puzzles Paladin for a while, causing her to search the term and figure out what Eliasz meant by its use.

There's a lot of complex world-building in this book that is barely brushed past. From the corporations who own patents covering everything, to the system of indenture that covers humans as well as robots, to the bio-domes that cover cities (but it's livable outside the biodomes, so why are they needed?), to the new federations that cover continents that used to be divided into several countries - there's a LOT going on. And there's not just robots, but also some pretty advanced cybernetics implanted in humans as well as an everpresent network of data that can be tapped into with implants that everyone has.

Ultimately, for as complex as the world is, and cohesive as the plot is, I'm left wondering who, if anyone, was in the right in this story. I'm not sure if we're supposed to be happy with the ending or not. I've seen other reviews saying Neuromancer was a way better book in a similar vein, and I actually have copy of that waiting to be read. So we'll see.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.