Newitz delivers a smart punchy sci-fi romp that feels both thrilling and unsettlingly plausible. Set in a world where patented drugs and corporate control run wild it follows a pirate scientist and a military agent as their paths collide over questions of autonomy and free will. The pace is fast and the themes hit hard diving into gender identity ownership and what it really means to be free.

What stands out here is the rich layering of ethics and action without ever feeling preachy. The characters are messy flawed and fascinating and the world building wraps it all in a sharp satirical glow. Perfect for anyone who enjoys their sci-fi thought provoking but still packed with chase scenes and moral tension.

A pirate and runaway slave join forces with a medical research bot to take on Big Pharma while dodging a soldier and military bot assassins.

Engrossing and easy to read without getting too bogged down with technical jargon. It raises many complex questions of autonomy, freedom, morals and gender but does not seek to resolve them. Instead they linger long after you have finished reading.

This was a great debut sci-fi, with hints of cyber-punk and dystopia centred around drugs and the medical industry with a sprinkling of political intrigue added.

For me this was an above average sci-fi, it was not the most groundbreaking but I thoroughly enjoyed the plot and characters, the setting was beautifully inventive and the hints of the medical storyline were really engaging.

A solid 4 star book!

This is another piece of work which seems a good starting place for stimulating discussion of the ideas and concepts it contains.....and therefore strikes me as perhaps aimed more at a YA readership. There are certainly aspects of the author's narrative, themes and characters which I would like to explore further with younger readers - such as autonomy/slavery, humanity, morals/ethics, gender, sexuality, free market/patents/quality control/economics and so on.
The story is well written and succeeds in combining and contrasting the lives of several characters who illustrate a variety of states of being and levels of/lack of/developing autonomy within a realistically futuristic setting - and there is certainly much potential for learning or inspiring further thought within this tale..... Yet as an 'adult' novel I just feel it's somewhat lacking. Whereas, as a YA Novel it would have probably left me feeling that it did what it set out to do, as general fiction I was left wanting a little more.

There is an awful lot going on in this novel! It tells the story of Judith 'Jack' Chen, a pirate who re-engineers patented drugs, Threezed, an escaped indentured slave, Eliasz, the IPC agent tasked with tracking down Jack and Paladin, the robot who assists him. The basic plot is pretty straightforward and moves at a good pace. What is so interesting here, is the world that Newitz has created. The action takes place just over 100 years in the future and it seems very plausible that we would be fully immersed in biotech in the manner in which it is described in the novel. I really liked the search for identity that permeates a lot of the robot action and while I didn't necessarily understand all of the science around bio-engineering and drug testing, it was certainly fascinating and seemed very authentic to a layman like myself. There were areas that I thought the narrative got a little bit too bogged down with the intricacies of the science and technology, which left the characters a little bit adrift. I felt that while some of the character development was great, there were other characters who got a bit of short shrift. Overall., though, this is a really thought-provoking and engaging novel and I think that there is much more to explore in Newitz's vision of the future.
I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

In the future of 2144, things are not bright, even if the cover of this book is orange. The chained robot arm depicted here reflects the spirit of the time - corrosive property rights and free market ideology that have displaced states and tainted science, a shadowy International Property Coalition using its own armed forces to investigate and punish transgressions, patents - seemingly of indefinite duration - treated as Holy Writ and the poor sold into indentured servitude.

The insatiable lust of the market to turn everything into property is illustrated by a glitteringly casuistical argument: once it was accepted that bots, which start as property can, being intelligent, earn their autonomy, it also surely follows that humans, born free, can enter servitude (read: slavery). And the consequences follow - in a particularly grim scene, we see the "human resources" markets of Las Vegas where "The Alice Shop" sells just what the name suggests.

Yet there is hope. Free Labs attempt to generate inventions outside the proprietary system, and bio pirates reverse-engineer and clone drugs for the benefit of the poor. But they are always waiting for the moment when their labs will be raided by the IPC's goons.

Against this background, Newitz sets up a deceptively simply story, essentially a chase. The notorious "Captain" Jack Chen, is a pirate, smuggler and, to the IPC, a terrorist. She has inadvertently copied a new drug which is very dangerous indeed. The IPC will kill to protect its secrets, so as she attempts to put right the damage she's done, Jack knows there will be a pursuit.

That pursuit is led by a man - Eliasz - and an indentured robot, Paladin, enforcers for the IPC. As we watch them close in on Jack, we see how ruthless they can be, alternately wheedling their way in with activists, scientists and the counterculture generally, and using extreme force ("That was the last useful information they got out of her, though they continued to beat and drug her for the next three hours...")

Eliasz and Paladin seem like monsters. They certainly often act like monsters. Yet at the same time, they are in a delicate, evolving and even beautiful relationship, which Newitz portrays all the more powerfully for there almost being no references that we can use for what it is. Even as he murders and mains, Paladin is running queries, trying to understand what Eliasz is feeling. There are almost humorous scenes where he seeks advice from other robots.

And yet there's a power imbalance here that casts a shadow over the relationship, if we follow through the implications. Paladin is shackled to Eliasz, not physically but by little routines and programs with cynical names like "gdoggie", which manipulate and control his responses. He is not "autonomous". And ultimately Paladin is owned by IPC, not even by Eliasz himself so whatever accomodation arises between them may not survive the duration of the mission. As the two grow close we have to wonder how far Paladin would be free to say "no". Questions of freedom, of control and of destiny hang in the air.

At the same as we are learning about Eliasz and Paladin, Newitz gives us episodes from some 30 years earlier showing Jack's early life and the web of relationships that formed around her as she grew up, progressing from youthful radical to jailed activist to smuggler and pirate. These, together with her travels, and those of the IPC agents, between Canada and North Africa, the main locations in the book, sketch what society has become and establish a wealth of believable characters seeking, in various ways, to subvert or ameliorate the grip of the corporations on peoples' lives.

The plot itself may be straightforward, but with all these carefully layered and nuanced relationships Newitz deftly echoes the themes of autonomy and dependence which she explores with Paladin and Eliasz. The result is a satisfyingly complex read where nothing is ever quite what it seems and nobody - human or bot - is entirely in the right (or the wrong).

A genuinely fresh and thought provoking read and a book I stayed up late into the night to finish.

I have been in two minds about whether to post my review for this book ever since finishing it. Like a lot of book bloggers I am not a fan of giving negative assessments on novels; writers put A LOT of time and effort into the creation of a book and, unlike when giving my thoughts on movies, criticising a book just feels a lot more personal. Having spent a large portion of my life writing I know how much of myself I have put into my prose, so if someone was to say a bad thing about my writing it would sting, if only a little. But I want this thing (*motions towards the site as a whole*) to be seen as a legitimate source, not that people who avoid giving negative reviews are not legitimate sources, I just want to present a full spectrum of my thoughts... So, with that in mind.

I did not like this book. 

I have read [far too] many bad books in my life, Autonomous is not one of them, yet I had difficulty making my way through it; at least once or twice a chapter I read something that drew me out of the world the novel inhabits, leading me to question the reason why author Annalee Newitz presented the events in such a way. 

Autonomous is definitely an ambitious book and a hell of a debut, yet it feels like it is trying too hard, ultimately falling short of its perceived goal. The novel attempts to shine a light on the thoughts surrounding what it means to be alive / the idea of humanity / free will plus the moral implications inherent with them, whilst offering discussions on intellectual property and the expansion of large commercial entities. Yet by having such a broad scope I feel that not enough time was given to each element; to paraphrase a great television show - all of the plot points felt half done, I would have much preferred to have seen less ideas crammed into the book and more focus on what remained. 
One of my main points of contention with the novel comes in the form of the "love story" that is used to parallel the thoughts on free will and what it means [for a robot] to be alive. Pushing aside the links to transgender politics - mainly because I am in no way qualified enough to discuss such a thing, plus the insistence of the robot characters that they have no gender and that it is just an anthropomorphism placed on them by the humans -  when the 'relationship' parts of the story came up I became very uncomfortable as, based on the whole free will thing, I had a hard time gathering whether one of the participants actually gave their consent to the events that transpired, even when it was apparently given it was worded in such a way that I doubted the individual involved fully understood what was going on. Whether this was the authors intention I do not know (It's a possibility especially considering the theme of indenture and slavery that runs throughout the novel) yet I could not help but link the whole process to a robotic form of sexual assault. This marked my thoughts of the characters involved, which only made my continued reading of the book harder as they appear rather prominently throughout. 

Another thing that I had difficulty with was that many of the events seemed to occur by chance. A character was looking for a specific individual and just so happened to find someone who knew them within moments of looking, or they needed an invitation into an event and just so happened to be given it by a stranger despite sharing hardly any dialogue with them. Everything felt like it was set along a linear path, that everything was pre-destined. Now if this was worked into the discussion of a characters free will - by perhaps having a human question whether they were indeed human and not a machine - then this coincidental means of story telling would have added to the intrigue, yet within this particular story it just felt lazy as the characters did little to progress throughout the narrative; the story came to them rather than the other way around. 

As mentioned earlier this is by no means a bad book. I just had a hard time enjoying it based on my interpretation of the events within it.

A great concept with a really well realised future world. Lots of lovely details that give you a clear understanding of a very possible future. But spoilt by a plot that never seems to go anywhere and characters that I could never really raise the energy to be invested in.

There are two science-fiction ideas expanded on in Annalee Newitz's Autonomous, or maybe just the one if you want to reduce it down further to the basics of exploring human behaviour and questioning moral responses in relation to science and technology. Let's stick with two ideas however because Autonomous has two ways of looking at the subject; one from the perspective of a human and the other from a robot. Both of them are rather concerned in their own ways about human behaviour, and even if both have their own conflicts of conscience and allegiances, the situation that they find themselves in is one that means they are setting out to conflict with each other to resolve them.

The conflict that represents the main dilemma is one that Jack has been struggling with for a long time; the use of drugs and the dominance of Big Pharma to control their use and distribution. Known as Jack, former genetic engineer undergraduate Judith Chen's response to the control of potentially life-saving drugs is a moral one, and she has resorted to anti-patent piracy, reverse-engineering products and making them available to the general public for free. There are risks involved not only from the legal viewpoint, but also working with the drugs that affect and potentially alter human neural activities. One such piracy release has left her with just such a dilemma, putting a performance enhancing drug called Zacuity out on the market that is having an extreme impact on users, leading to a number of deaths. Either the drug hasn't been properly tested by its developers Zaxy, or the results of its negative effects have been made public. Or perhaps the drug has other purposes that aren't suitable for general public use...

Jack isn't usually so careless with her piracy activities and sets out to try and fix things, understand what has gone wrong with the drug and see if there is a way of fixing the problem. Aside from the trouble and damaging headlines it is causing, the need to fix things is rather more urgent as Jack knows that the pharmaceutical group who have been secretly preparing this drug will want to cover up any negative press that might be traced back to them, and they have the means to do so. In 2144, advanced human-like and military robots are in common use, and despite having some measure of autonomous thought and behaviour, most are indentured for a specific period to the corporations and federations who have created them. Paladin is one such indentured bot for the International Property Coalition, and has been teamed up with a human operative Eliasz to track down whoever has illegally released Zacuity on the market. Jack knows someone will be coming from her and time is against her, but she has picked up a few bots and friends along the way who might be able to solve the problem and make it public before Paladin and Eliasz get to her.

If the first question posed by Autonomous is a human one relating to the moral question of the use of science to develop lifesaving drugs and the impact - intentional and incidental - and the struggle to wrest such control away from Big Pharma, the second question matter that somewhat complicates the question is the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence. The question of 'indenture' or enslavement is the one of the most likely consequences of such a relationship. In Autonomous, and from the perspective of Paladin, who has not yet had the experience to fully understand human behaviour, this relationship takes an unusual form in the confusing area of human and robot sexuality that he becomes aware of when in close contact with his mission operative team-mate Eliasz. The attempt to unravel the complex feelings of attraction between robots and humans seems like a rather unusual point to devote so much attention to, as it seems entirely unrelated to the Zacuity Big Pharma conspiracy plotline, but there is a deeper purpose here that eventually becomes apparent.

And it's a point that is worth waiting for and worth persevering with, even when it seems that Autonomous is going to be not much more than a long drawn out chase between government officials trying to track down a suspected felon by following a path of her known associates. As well as maintaining an element of danger and adventure that keeps the action moving along, the writing and the interactions between the characters - as uncomfortable and unusual as it might occasionally seem - also manages to give a good sense of the nature of the future world that Annalee Newitz wants to explore. What comes out of those uncomfortable relationships, and the backgrounds that the characters have lived through, is the complicated nature of indenture or enslavement as something that affects not just robots, but humans chained and bound to the capitalist system as well. In that respect, like all good science-fiction, Autonomous has something to say about how we live today as much as it presents a warning about the future.

I apologise in advance as I am really not sure how to review this book, and I don't want to give any spoilers. Set in a very grim future this is hard Sci-Fi to be sure and there is a lot going on, Big pharma, pirates, robots. It also deals with some hard hitting issues such as slavery, sex and sexuality. I enjoyed this book, being a Sci-Fi geek, but it was not what I was expecting. It won't appeal to everyone but thankfully there are a lot of other sci-fi geeks out there who will enjoy this book.

This is my kind of book. I love science fiction and leaving real life for a few hours is bliss at times.

This could have been a great example of such a read. But at times it feels very preachy about real life stuff (an absolute no no in this type of book) and oh my, the sex parts have scarred me for life. If you don't believe me, then go back and read them again ((shudder))

What could have been a 4 star book...

I hate to admit defeat but I just couldn't connect with this book try as I might, hopefully others will like it more, just not for me I'm afraid.

In Newitz's future the world has become ultra-corporatized with big pharmaceutical companies owning the parents for the best new medicine. Only money can buy you a long, healthy life unless you manage to score some pirated drugs from anti-patent activists like our protagonist, Jack.

Alongside this commodification of medicine there's a similar development on life itself. In a world where the rich can buy the drugs and health to keep them ahead of the competition the poor, sick and ill-educated can "indenture" themselves (and others, including their children), crafting a nightmarish modern slavery market. And it's not just humans. Most bots (many with a biological element that may or may not play a part in their personalities) begin their existence in a similar indenture, locked out of their own memories and functions until they manage to earn their autonomy.

In this world we have pharm-pirate Jack who, in a rush to finance free anti-vitals for the poor releases a pirated productivity drug. Unfortunately, it is so powerful that it's users work themselves to death, becoming totally addicted to homework, house-painting and other menial tasks. Jack knows she had to fix her mess and hopefully bring to light the criminal properties of the stolen drug. On her tail are Eliasz and Paladin, a human-robot law enforcement partnership in more ways than one.

It's a world that definitely plays on the fears of today (and all days) with activists for freedom and equality of access are tagged against soulless corporations. It focuses on the nature of free-will and autonomy and raises interesting questions about politics and gender. These are the elements most reviews focus on and I don't deny the ideas are intriguing if not entirely original. What seems to get glossed over is the quality of the writing. And it is not good. The prose is bloated with long passages of unnecessary technological detail:

"An input mechanism in Yellowknife triggered a query to a molecule database in Bern, seeking several specific strings in one data field. One hundred sixty milliseconds later, the query returned a set of pointers."

I know that this is Newitz's own area of expertise but the narrative is saturated with passages like this that totally paralyse the narrative. Neither the plot not the characters receive anything like this level of attention or description making them flat and lifeless. The irony being that Paladin, the AI character, is (marginally) more flagged or than the rest.

There is also a frankly patronising series of flashbacks designed to make sure that readers do understand that making healthcare available only to the wealthy is a BAD THING. Of course, not everyone is lucky enough to live in a country with universal healthcare (also a BAD THING) but I have serious doubts that the readership of this novel wouldn't be able to reach this conclusion without being walked through the reasoning.

The plot resolves itself so easily and quickly in many cases that it becomes difficult to follow. When finding a solution to the various conflicts that arise is so consistently Smith it's hard to be invested and the complete lack of tension just keeps everything skimming along until it hits another wall of technobabble or an unnecessarily long, or plain unnecessary, dialogue.

The prose is consistently stuff and stilted, the dialogue painfully poor and if human/AI relationships are permitted by the judges there is more than one scene that could definitely be a strong contender for the Bad Sex Award this year. They're really toe-curling, and not in a good way.

In the end the writing kills the potential laid by the imagination. Or was a significant struggle to finish and I doubt it will leave many impressions unless I revisit that bot sex in my nightmares...