Autonomous

[psocoptera]

Autonomous, Annalee Newitz. Structurally a thriller (people! on the trail of other people!) but carries a lot of its oomph in its worldbuilding. I found the start a little abrupt but then I ended up liking this a *lot*. The slow accumulation of world details and history, the Canadian setting (when was the last time you read anything set in the Northwest Territories or Saskatchewan), the complexity of the characters - they're all interesting, many of them quite likeable, and yet most of them do at least one awful thing, some of them multiple awful things. There's some very obvious critique of capitalism going on (drug Robin Hoods vs big pharma) and then there's a really brilliant somewhat meta move about robots and sci fi and metaphors and... yeah. Anyways, it's smart and complicated and I don't have a good comparison at the tip of my tongue but let's say if you like Vernor Vinge or Madeline Ashby, that's enough of a ballpark. Oh, and also some bonus genderfuckery! (Homophobic botfucker: are you REALLY a WOMAN? Large, vaguely birdlike, cheerfully agender/genderfluid military bot who's into him: suuuure, definitely. And then he's so good about her pronouns! for the dumbest possible reason!)

Comments

[oracne]

This sounds promising!

[glassonion]

I just finished this today, and really really liked it. I didn't think the obviousness of the "we are in a capitalist dystopia" was a problem --- it felt like scene-setting, and then everything she did with that scene was interesting.

I also really appreciated that she got past my "don't care about AI" guard by wasting zero seconds on the "okay, but can robots *really* be sentient?" question that i have found so unrelentingly tedious for let's call it the past 20 years, went straight to the questions on the other side of that one, and offered convincing evidence that some of those questions are interesting!