Book-Thirsty Thursday: Autonomous, Annalee Newitz
Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous is short but actually packed with some very thought-provoking questions on a lot of different subjects.
When Tor sent yours truly a copy of Autonomous by Annalee Newitz, I got about as far as the mention of pirates and figured that I’d be in just because pirates are cool, and pirates and science fiction can mix fairly well. What I was not expecting was what I got, which was alternatively a cat-and-mouse game, a meditation on a lot of questions, and also a story about robots.
The robots are one of the most fascinating parts of Autonomous. Newitz doesn’t restrict herself to just one kind of robot. Beyond any of her medical inventions or casual allusions to major geopolitical shifts, the robots, from Paladin to Bug to Med, often elicit more sympathy or interest than their completely human counterparts. Newitz even manages to actually tackle issues of gender with one of the robots. That subplot is perhaps a touch heavy-handed, but when the book is so densely packed as Autonomous is, it’s almost necessary.
It’s hard to really put into words how much you need to piece and patch together by yourself as you go through the book. There’s a spectrum between holding a reader’s hand and leaving them to figure it all out for themselves. Newitz certainly leans towards the latter end, almost too much at some points. It often feels that she’s barely scratched the surface of this world that she’s created. At other times, she dives deep, as she does for the story of Judith Chen, better-known throughout most of the book as Jack (the explorations of gender do not constrain themselves to robots).
Certainly, Newitz plays with the idea of protagonist as well in the book. Her world is too large to be constrained to one character, and not all of them are on the same side of the story. However, she manages to make both sides compelling for different reasons. Not to get too far into spoilers, but even the “bad guys,” such as they are, have their elements of humanity … or, to be more accurate, character development.
However, this large amount of story means that things happen on practically every page, which is both a blessing and a curse. (Put it this way: by page 33, a reader learns that some robots have human brains for some very specific reasons. Page 33. Most books are still trying to lure a reader in by page 33. Of course, robots with literal gray matter counts as a lure too. It’s just rather large for that sort of thing.)
It can leave a reader sitting and wondering exactly what some of the words meant. Newitz doesn’t stop to explain much at all, as we’ve already stated, and so it can turn what might be a fairly short read into a slightly longer experience as someone puts the book down and just tries to process it all.
And yet, at the end of it all, Autonomous ends up being rather compelling despite its need to tackle so many subjects in so little time, relatively speaking. Maybe it’s the robots. Okay, it’s definitely because of the robots. Remember: Human brains in robots. For specific reasons that are laid out in one of those things that Newitz doesn’t let her readers make sense of, because … well … it’s not really something you can’t not be specific about.
Next: Review: An Excess Male, Maggie Shen King
It’s hard to go really wrong with robots, but Newitz appears to have gone rather right with the robots, and she has mostly gone right with everything else she has managed to put into this book, too. We just wish that there was a bit more time for all of this to unfold, really.