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Sep. 12th, 2018 05:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretAutonomous by Annalee Newitz
I'm... not sure how I feel about this. At first, the general sense was "Cool world-building, clunky prose." There's a lot of fairly tedious exposition, a lot of Now I'm Going to Jump Back in Time to Give You Backstory, a lot of prosaic dialogue. But by the time the book ended, the world-building had paid off handsomely in story terms, so it feels misleadingly damning to criticize the prose too harshly. In spite of the technical flaws, Autonomous packs a punch.
It's set in a fairly near future, a few decades off, where certain kinds of autonomy we take for granted no longer can be assumed. Countries have been replaced by economic unions, bound together by trade deals and patent covenants. Citizenship is not a right, it's something purchased. If your parents can't afford to support you, your autonomy can be sold at auction to the highest bidder. And all of these mechanisms are reinforced through an amped up intellectual property law that limits access to dangerous ideas and tools.
In this environment, Newitz sets up a cat and mouse game between a biochemist selling pirated trademarked medications on the black market and the intellectual property police chasing after her, particularly a Polish human of poor stock and his indentured robot. The chase takes them through a cleverly imagined group of biopunk settings across the planet, with colorful people and colorful places, during which time all of these characters plus more experience the complexity of what is truly meant by autonomy...
My favorite was the Autonomous Jewish Robot Doctor, needless to say. Definitely requesting Med Cohen fic for Yuletide if I do Yuletide.
But the primary trio wind up in a really dark endgame that took me by surprise and which I'm not sure the book did a good enough job of setting up, or if it's my fault for not understanding the stakes Newitz was establishing. I dunno, I liked it, but it crept up on me and did things I didn't expect it to and I am still thinking about it a couple days later.
I'm... not sure how I feel about this. At first, the general sense was "Cool world-building, clunky prose." There's a lot of fairly tedious exposition, a lot of Now I'm Going to Jump Back in Time to Give You Backstory, a lot of prosaic dialogue. But by the time the book ended, the world-building had paid off handsomely in story terms, so it feels misleadingly damning to criticize the prose too harshly. In spite of the technical flaws, Autonomous packs a punch.
It's set in a fairly near future, a few decades off, where certain kinds of autonomy we take for granted no longer can be assumed. Countries have been replaced by economic unions, bound together by trade deals and patent covenants. Citizenship is not a right, it's something purchased. If your parents can't afford to support you, your autonomy can be sold at auction to the highest bidder. And all of these mechanisms are reinforced through an amped up intellectual property law that limits access to dangerous ideas and tools.
In this environment, Newitz sets up a cat and mouse game between a biochemist selling pirated trademarked medications on the black market and the intellectual property police chasing after her, particularly a Polish human of poor stock and his indentured robot. The chase takes them through a cleverly imagined group of biopunk settings across the planet, with colorful people and colorful places, during which time all of these characters plus more experience the complexity of what is truly meant by autonomy...
My favorite was the Autonomous Jewish Robot Doctor, needless to say. Definitely requesting Med Cohen fic for Yuletide if I do Yuletide.
But the primary trio wind up in a really dark endgame that took me by surprise and which I'm not sure the book did a good enough job of setting up, or if it's my fault for not understanding the stakes Newitz was establishing. I dunno, I liked it, but it crept up on me and did things I didn't expect it to and I am still thinking about it a couple days later.