Comment

Sep 28, 2017Michael Colford rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
Annalee Newitz's debut novel, Autonomous, is a bit of a bait and switch. Newitz pits two forces against each other, both being fairly morally ambiguous. The year is 2144, and Jack is a pirate, basically a futuristic Robin Hood who fights against patent holders who make designer drugs that could help society impossibly expensive and unable for most people to obtain. Jack reverse engineers these corporate drugs and make street versions available to the public, acting as a great equalizer. But one of the drugs she reverse engineers starts killing people, she realizes that she must do something to both stop the spread of this drug, and also come up with a way to counteract the effects of bother her reverse engineered drug and the corporate drug that it was based on. On her trail is law enforcement, who hold this piracy as the source of the problem, and send a team out to find and stop the pirates. Eliasz is a human officer, and his partner, Paladin, is a newly aware robot, military grade who is really just learning how to interact with humans. Their part of the story focuses both on their pursuit of Jack, and the developing relationship between the two. Newitz creates a very plausible future world from strands of today's issues in bioengineering and copyright. While Jack is clearly breaking the law, and perhaps even occasionally making some bad decisions, her heart is clearly in the right place, and I read those around her as the "good guys." The problem is Paladin and by extension, Eliasz are just as much, if not more so, the protagonists of this story (as telegraphed by the title of the novel.) Therein lies my problem. Paladin and to a far greater extent, Eliasz, are not very interesting characters, are much more hateful in their actions, and much more implausible in their discoveries. Yet by making the arguably the protagonists, Newitz expects us to care about them, and possibly even to root for them? While the novel didn't end as badly as I feared it might, it still lacked a certain satisfaction by focusing so much on the two less interesting characters. The bones of a great science fiction story are there, but the focus was too askew for me to enjoy it fully