Autonomous: A Novel

· Sold by Tor Books
4.2
60 reviews
Ebook
272
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

"Autonomous is to biotech and AI what Neuromancer was to the Internet."—Neal Stephenson

"Something genuinely and thrillingly new in the naturalistic, subjective, paradoxically humanistic but non-anthropomorphic depiction of bot-POV—and all in the service of vivid, solid storytelling."—William Gibson

When anything can be owned, how can we be free?

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?

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Ratings and reviews

4.2
60 reviews
Anton Preisinger
May 2, 2018
Very interesting and fun read. I only gave it 3 stars because the author skillfully set up so many great philosophical challenges and dilemmas and then didn't use any of them as the story finished out. It could have been so much more challenging and complicated. The ending just shifted gears in that regard too much for me. I really enjoyed the dive into such a wild distopian future that may just not be fiction enough for my liking.
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Brooks Johnson
June 1, 2018
A lot of the themes in the novel were interesting to think about but the sci-fi worldbuilding felt forced. I never really felt like I was in the world, the writing just kept reminding me "hey, don't forget this is the future!"
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Serge Fjetland
December 23, 2021
Very solid story that blends the utopian technology of extreme AI, and biopunk, with the distopian world of corporation takeovers. The ending was a bit abrupt, but would love to see more in this world.
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About the author

ANNALEE NEWITZ is an American journalist, editor, and author of fiction and nonfiction. They are the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from MIT, and has written for Popular Science, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post. They founded the science fiction website io9 and served as Editor-in-Chief from 2008–2015, and subsequently was Editor-in-Chief at Gizmodo and Tech Culture Editor at Ars Technica. Their book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction was nominated for the LA Times Book Prize in science. Their first novel, Autonomous, won a Lambda award, and their second was The Future of Another Timeline.

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