Annalee Newitz: Autonomous (2017, Little, Brown Book Group Limited)
English language
Published June 10, 2017 by Little, Brown Book Group Limited.
When anything can be owned, how can we be free
Earth, 2144. Jack is an anti-patent scientist turned drug pirate, traversing the world in a submarine as a pharmaceutical Robin Hood, fabricating cheap scrips for poor people who can’t otherwise afford them. But her latest drug hack has left a trail of lethal overdoses as people become addicted to their work, doing repetitive tasks until they become unsafe or insane.
Hot on her trail, an unlikely pair: Eliasz, a brooding military agent, and his robotic partner, Paladin. As they race to stop information about the sinister origins of Jack’s drug from getting out, they begin to form an uncommonly close bond that neither of them fully understand.
And underlying it all is one fundamental question: Is freedom possible in a culture where everything, even people, can be owned?
pharma pirate roaming the Arctic. Bots having orgasms. Meditations on love, freedom, consciousness, and agency. Great story, great characters. I'm glad Newitz is delving more into the Terraformers world, but I want more stories about Med, Jack, Threezed, Elias, Paladin. Any or all.
Content warning Spoiler für die Sex-mit-Abhängigen Storyline
Ich hätte nicht so lange warten sollen, jetzt erinnere ich mich gar nicht mehr an so viel aus dem Buch, primär an das Gefühl der Enttäuschung. Ich hatte das Gefühl, dass kaum, dass die Story langsam begann, an Komplexität zu gewinnen, schon wieder Schluss war. Somit blieb alles irgendwie oberflächlich. An anderer Stelle, wie als Leute aus Nostalgie Club Mate trinken, die immer noch bescheiden schmeckt, fühlte ich mich peinlich berührt. Da versuchte Newitz zu sehr cool oder ironisch zu sein, doch der Effekt war mehr Anbiederung.
Die Charaktere blieben für mich leider flach, das Worldbuilding auch, weshalb ich den Hype um das Buch wirklich nicht verstehe. Aber gut, es ist ein Erstlingswerk, vielleicht sind die Folgebücher ja "runder".
In einem Kommentar schrieb ich bereits, was mich an dem Buch sehr störte, dass die 50jährige Protagonistin mit dem von ihr abhängigen ~20Jährigen ins Bett geht. Immerhin ging das Thema nicht gänzlich sang- und klanglos unter, wie in so vielen Stories, in denen alte Typen Beziehungen mit von ihnen abhängigen jungen Frauen haben: An einer Stelle kommentiert der Jüngling immerhin, dass es wohl immer so sein wird, dass die Machthabenden ihre Untergebenen sexuell ausnutzen. Hmm, da wäre mE mehr gegangen, aber immerhin wurde ihr Verhalten so kontextualisiert.
Generell sind die Beziehungen in dem Buch aber weird, auch die Roboter/Vorgesetzter-Geschichte ist irgendwie icky und gleichzeitig nicht überzeugend.
Alles in allem einfach nicht mein Buch, ich werde wohl mal in ein anderes von Newitz reinschauen und hoffen, dass consent-what-consent kein durchgehendes Leitmotiv wurde.
Hard to believe this book is six years old; the author works a lot of very relatable and still timely concerns into her characters. I thoroughly enjoyed the themes of interconnectedness and corporatism, and the characters' searches for meanings and identities all converging was reminiscent of The Wizard Of Oz. I enjoyed the senses of urgency and purpose, and appreciated how the author described intimacy (always difficult to convey in a pleasing way). This work could make an excellent film, and I hope the author continues to create many similar worlds for us to enjoy.
Of course an author has less say on the cover blurbs of a book, but I don't consider this book the Neuromancer of biotech and AI. For me it's about a balance of autonomy and conformance, and where your balance as an individual is centred. The mix of absolutes and different perspectives makes it worth reading, although somehow the characters can feel a bit shallow, just missing some depth. For me some of the instant click with the main characters is missing, but this builds up over time.
It took me a long time to finish this book, well over a year, even though I really liked the first part of it where the key players are introduced. The worldbuilding here is thorough and ambitious, with much of civilization pushed up towards the poles owing to climate change, corporations which are the global power players, and an understanding of what is normal and expected for humans and for bots. I had a harder time focusing in on the settings and some of the characters, maybe because they were both somewhat alien to me and in some ways not different enough from the way places and people seem in our own world with our own current preoccupations. The depiction of how bots think and feel was the most interesting part to me. I don't know if I'm qualified to say a lot about the way the author develops an …
It took me a long time to finish this book, well over a year, even though I really liked the first part of it where the key players are introduced. The worldbuilding here is thorough and ambitious, with much of civilization pushed up towards the poles owing to climate change, corporations which are the global power players, and an understanding of what is normal and expected for humans and for bots. I had a harder time focusing in on the settings and some of the characters, maybe because they were both somewhat alien to me and in some ways not different enough from the way places and people seem in our own world with our own current preoccupations. The depiction of how bots think and feel was the most interesting part to me. I don't know if I'm qualified to say a lot about the way the author develops an analogy between human-bot relationships and gender roles in our own time since it is so far from my experience. I was surprised that the ending took such a happy tone for the characters considering how much violence they had to go through over the course of the story.
There are several scenes of torture and brutality in the course of interrogations, which bothered me because they didn't lead to any consequences for the ones committing those acts. More than the mind manipulation through pharmaceuticals and the pervasive surveillance, the moral code I could glean from what happened in the two timelines in this book were frightening to me for the way characters could just be taken out with just the barest mention of their passing. At the climactic fight scene, I really could not tell who was going to survive among the combatants, and not sure whether the ones I liked really ought to end up as survivors either.
I, too, would fuck the robot
