Autonomous: A Novel

Annalee Newitz

Sep 2017 · Macmillan Audio · Narrated by Jennifer Ikeda

About this audiobook

From award winning tech-journalist and io9 founder Annalee Newitz comes a highly anticipated science fiction debut!

Autonomous will pull listeners into a dark and dirty world that feels, at times, a bit too familiar.

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?

Ratings and reviews

Right from the beginning, the author is bad at world building. There just is so very little rationality to the setup to be able to really grab my attention, and I consume a lot of science fiction. For instance, the addiction science is just straight up wrong or outdated, and thats the best of the technobable Next, the big problem... as a trans person and an enby, this book is extremely homophobic and transphobic. This is written by a well meaning person... who could not be assed to do an ounce of research, and just clumsily stumbles through and insults us all. Thats the big problem overall. No research was done. pop sci tech, ignorant gender ideas, and lazy geopolitics. If the author half listened to one expert this could have been passable as ok. Martha Wells or Becky Chambers are far more worth your time and far less insulting to your intelligence.

Lazy sci-fi, boring. The author spends most of the time narrating the sexual dynamics of the characters. The main dynamics of this book are: present a future scenario, then proceed to ignore the implications of such future and instead talk about love affairs among the characters. I could barely drag myself to finish it

Using the logic of code for a light and the fabric of genetic "sequins" for texture we are pulled and pushed past old pronouns in a very new way.

About the author

Annalee Newitz is an American journalist, editor, and author of both fiction and nonfiction. She is the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from MIT, and has written for Popular Science, Wired, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. She also founded the science fiction website io9 and served as Editor-in-Chief from 2008–2015, and subsequently edited Gizmodo. As of 2016, she is Tech Culture Editor at the technology site Ars Technica. Her books include Pretend We're Dead and Autonomous.