Review: Autonomous

Autonomous by Annalee Newitz
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This one has almost all the ingredients to be a provocative sci-fi contemplation of the nature of being human. It’s just missing the most essential one.

The heart of this novel is that very question, what does it mean to be human, and it addresses it from two directions. On the one hand, our protagonist, a woman known usually as Jack, is a kind of Robin Hood of the 22nd Century pharmaceutical world. She steals from the wealthy corporations so she can give back to the poor.

In so doing, she’s alert to the degree to which such drugs protect and define us as humans. There are drugs that can break our will, making us reveal secrets we’d otherwise never share. There are drugs that protect us against diseases which allow us to grow fully in physical and emotional terms. It is, in short, a world where we have substantial external control about the ways in which we emerge as human – it’s a chemical humanity.

On the other hand, some of our central characters are ’bots that creep toward becoming entirely human. Paladin and Med (short for Medea) may be robots, but they are hoping for ‘autonomous’ status – status as citizens of the world even though they are built instead of born. They are machines that, in those central cases, show more humanity that the people they’re indenture to.

Newitz asks all those questions in the context of a thriller – will Paladin and his master, Elias, be able to stop Jack from proving nefarious conduct by one of phara-giants. We get a back-and-forth perspective, with one chapter from Jack’s angle and the next from Elias’s.

As I say, it’s almost there. The central problem is that Newitz never quite develops her characters. Jack and Elias remain types moreso than people. Newitz does some intriguing sexual positioning for each – Jack is unremarkably bisexual and Elias falls in love with his robot Paladin, sometimes crossing the line on human-robot interaction – but such material seems appended to their work as Robin Hood scientist and international special agent. They’re data that add to what each character is doing, but they don’t culminate in making the characters feel alive.

That’s a problem in any literature, but it’s especially a problem in a story about what it means to be human. There’s a lot of interesting stuff swirling here, but, in the end, it’s hard to take seriously the answer of what it means to be human from a work that can’t seem to give us any characters who feel genuinely human and genuinely alive.


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