Autonomous
Annalee Newitz, 2017
Tor Books
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780765392077
Summary
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? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where— Irvine, California, USA
• Education—Ph.D., Univesity of California-Berkeley
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay Area
Annalee Newitz is an American journalist, editor, and author of both fiction and nonfiction. Her most recent work is the novel Autonomous published in 2017.
Newitz was born in 1969, and grew up in Irvine, California, the daughter of two English teachers: her mother, Cynthia, at a high school, and her father, Marty, at a community college. Her father was Jewish, and her mother a white Southerner former Methodist, leading Newitz to call herself "biethnic." She graduated from Irvine High School, and in 1987 moved to Berkeley, California, where in 1998 she completed her Ph.D. in English and American Studies from University of California. Her dissertation focesed on images of monsters, psychopaths, and capitalism in 29th-century American popular culture,it was later published in book form from Duke University Press.
Career
Newitz became a full-time writer and journalist in 1999 with an invitation to write a weekly column for the Metro Silicon Valley weekly, a column which then ran in various venues for nine years. Newitz then served as the culture editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian from 2000–2004. During thoise years, from 2003-2004, she received a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship as a research fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Following her work at the Guardian she worked as a policy analyst, from 2004-2005, for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Then from 2007–2009, she served on the board of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Those years also saw the beginning of Other magazine, which Newitz co-founed with Charlie Jane Anders, a Hugo award-winning author and commentator.
In 2008, Gawker media asked Newitz to start a blog about science and science fiction, dubbed io9 (later merging with Gawker's Gizmodo blog). She served as io9's editor-in-chief until the end of 2015, when she joined Ars Technica as the Tech Culture Editor.
Works
Newitz has written short stories, the novel Autonomous (2017), and several works of nonfiction: White Trash: Race and Class in America (1997), Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (2006, based on her doctoral thesis), and Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (2013). In addition, she edited The Bad Subjects Anthology (1998) and She's Such a Geek (co-edited, with Charlie Anders, 2006).
Her work has also been published in Popular Science, Wired, Salon.com, New Scientist, Metro Silicon Valley, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and at AlterNet. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/8/2017.)
Book Reviews
Fascinating.… [Newitz is] an excellent writer, with an effortless style.… The inner science geek in all of us will uncover some really cool stuff.… A terrific book that covers an astounding amount of ground in a manageable 300 pages.… You will be smarter for it.
San Francisco Chronicle
(Starred review.) [P]henomenal…sure to garner significant awards…. [Newitz] sends three fascinating characters on an action-packed race against time through a strange yet familiar futuristic landscape.… [A] skillful inspection of attraction and identity.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [Newitz] takes some of today's key social and technical issues (the nature of artificial intelligence, the notion of property and ownership) and wraps them in a compelling, original story line [with] memorable characters.
Library Journal
[A] vehicle for some very interesting questions: is there a difference between owning a human being or a mechanical being if both possess sentience…? A strong and cerebral start if perhaps a little too open-ended.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Autonomous … then take off on your own:
1. Describe the state of things in the near-future world of Autonomous. What does this fictional world have in common with our present-day world — anything, or very little? It is a realistic, or far too extreme, outcome for "advanced capitalism"?
2. How would you describe Jack? Even though she is old enough to know the ways of the world, does she remain an idealist or has she become jaded through experience? What motivates her?
3. How do you explain the feelings that Eliasz has for Paladin? What do his feelings for the bot say about him and his own sexuality or gender identity. Does the fact that Paladin possesses a female brain make a difference in how we are to perceive the bot or how Eliasz perceives her/him/?
4. What are Paladin's feelings toward Eliasz? How do the loyalty and attachment programs running in through the bot's background affect her/him? Can the bot truly consent to a sexual relationship or not?
5. What is Eliasz's background and how has he been affected by it? What does it mean to be "indentured"?
6. Does anything change by the end of the novel? Is anyone held accountable for Zacuity? Is the basic power and economic structure still in place? Why or why not?
7. One of the big questions posed in Autonomous has to do with personal identity. Can one own a mechanical being if it is sentient?
8. What are some of the other questions posed by Autonomous in terms of ownership, free will, income disparity?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)