Autonomie

Decent debut novel about a dystopian future where pharmaceutical pirate Jack reverse engineers patented drugs to distribute cheaply to those desperately in need but unable to afford them. Fine so far, until the work-enhancement drug she reverse engineers turns out to be fatally flawed, a fact which the pharma company has been covering up. As Jack's copy of the drug causes serious fatalities, Jack rushes to find a cure while Big Pharma hire hit man Eliasz and robot sidekick Paladin to find and eliminate her in order to cover up the fact their drug is fatally flawed.

Sounds good so far, right? Overall it's a very interesting world and plot line, and I enjoyed the read. However, I found the character development rather awkwardly done and I never really felt really wrapped up with any of them. I probably liked Paladin best, but there's a plot thread where Paladin (a completely genderless robot) keeps having a gender identify forced upon it by humans and I didn't feel this was handled well AT ALL. The outright homophobia of Eliasz is never directly addressed or improved at all, and Paladin seems inexplicably accepting of being treated in ways that it frequently acknowledges to itself are completely incorrect and inapplicable.

There was also a potentially interesting side plot about how the emancipation of AI robots (who are manufactured with a period of indenture to pay off the costs) led to the corollary that if intelligent robots could be indentured then so could humans, creating an industry of essentially indentured human slavery. This was touched on in a few places but I thought it could have led to much more interesting details and ended up being a fairly irrelevant side thread of the story that didn't really go anywhere.

The conclusion was also a bit disappointing as there's a lead up to a big confrontation, which then isn't very clearly described, and then we simply find out in retrospective exposition what happened and how it neatly resolved all the hanging plot threads. It felt very abrupt and very deus ex machina. So, can't really give this a 5 overall but it was still full of interesting ideas and an interesting setting, and is an interesting debut novel.

Felt like it took forever to finish this book. And while it was satisfying... I didn’t like at least one of the main characters at all... and it felt like the author maybe did? Not sure. They gave the character a “happy” ending, even though it made one of the other characters seem way more pathetic as a result.

Okay, I’ve been dancing around it to avoid spoilers, but thinking more about it, I have to check the box and rant...

Essentially it was the military guy I hated. What an asshole. And the bot he seduced... isn’t “she” essentially less than a year old? Is it not pedophilia when it’s a robot? I mean, she thinks she’s making autonomous choices... that’s definitely what the book is getting at, but don’t we all think we are capable of making perfectly good choices when we are teenagers? And how many of us do? Consensual sex is still statutory rape when it’s with a minor.

I mean, ultimately the book is about the return of slavery, and it’s a super fucked up dystopia. I kept waiting for the two military characters to switch sides and become part of a revolution, but instead they just kill all the sympathetic characters but one... and then flee to mars.

I’d initially given this 4 stars, but thinking back on it, I’m removing one. I did enjoy parts of this quite a bit, a lot of the tech imagining is cool, but ultimately it was dissatisfying and felt like it didn’t have a message at all.

Autonomous came to my attention as a 2018 Nebula award finalist.
It happened to be in a 2 for 1 sale on audible at the time and I decided to give it a go.

Autonomous has all the right elements, a post apocalyptic world, a struggle against capitalism gone wild, gender politics, cool robots and advanced biotech.

So why is it such shit?

While reading Autonomous and after finishing it yesterday I've been struggling to define what kept me from enjoying this Novel.

What I've been able to come up with is that fact that there is no mystery to it. everything is laid out loud and clear. Nothing is left to the readers own imagination. At all times we know exactly what everyone is doing and what they feel.
But I think the most serious problem is that the characters too know exactly what they feel. There is no ambiguity, no one has doubts, and if they do, they get immediately resolved.

In the midst of a crisis between powerful corporations and patent pirates with lives on the line, with a budding human-robot transsexual romance involving a slave-master starting condition to boot, there is no actual conflict, everything gets resolved before the reader can feel anything.