When the future comes to the Prairies, it’s not going to look like the future as it comes to Casablanca or Tokyo or Shanghai. I wanted to capture what happens when the future comes to these places that often get left out of science fiction.
Author explores gender roles, freedom in new dystopian thriller
Autonomous Annalee Newitz Tor
Annalee Newitz’s new book, Autonomous, is a thriller packed with robots, pirates, drug dealers, private armies and idealistic researchers fighting for a better world.
Newitz — the founding editorin-chief of the science fiction website io9, the tech blog Gizmodo and the author of the non-fiction book Scatter, Adapt, Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction — has delivered a meticulously crafted novel of a near future that’s compelling, distressing and ultimately hopeful.
For readers interested in a fastpaced novel that smartly analyzes artificial intelligence, the hostile corporate takeover of the nationstate and how identity is built from the inside out — this book is a tour de force of intelligent action and brisk storytelling.
Set a scant 126 years in the future, Autonomous picks up the threads of global warming, pharmaceutical patents and artificial intelligence, weaving together a world where private contracts have replaced human rights and robots compete with humans for both jobs and resources. Advanced pharmaceuticals can bring longer life and nearly permanent youth, but harshly enforced patents mean that only those with enough money or the right connections can afford these therapies.
The novel follows Jack, the female protagonist, a pharma pirate who reverse-engineers a drug that’s meant to bestow prodigious powers of concentration, but instead triggers compulsive addictions to house painting, doughnut making or city planning. She races against time to synthesize an antidote, all the while fleeing a squad of robot and human military police employed by a corporate nationstate to enforce its patents.
“The state has withered away and been replaced by corporate interests, and what we have are special economic zones that are kind of like a more troubled version of the EU,” Newitz says.
If you don’t have money to pay upfront for an “enfranchisement” for yourself and your family, Newitz’s world of feudal capital has a solution: indentured servitude.
It’s through these concepts of indenture and enfranchisement that Newitz is able to deliver her most pointed critiques of the present. “Aside from having human-equivalent robots, I think this is actually alarmingly plausible, especially with the erosion of so many social programs that the government once provided.
“At least here in the U.S., there’s a lack of a social safety net. People are desperate enough that they do jobs that essentially are equivalent to indenture. People sign brutal contracts, they work incredibly long hours, they do jobs they hate that they feel they have no choice but to do. They’re really not being treated the way a fully autonomous person should be.”
The world-building Newitz delivers is lush with detail. Though the book’s action jumps from North America to Africa and beyond, the bulk of the action takes place in recognizably Canadian cities: Saskatoon, Calgary, Iqaluit, Halifax. Though the ravages of climate change have arrived — people travel primarily on boats and Arctic cities are holding at a balmy 20 C — these locales are rendered with care by someone with a deep affection for the Canadian landscape, where she has often visited.
“A huge part of my family is in Canada,” Newitz says. “I did not grow up in Canada, I grew up in California, but for a very long time I’ve been spending holidays and as much time as I can to visit family in Saskatchewan. Now some of them live in Vancouver and some are in Quebec. Almost every place in the book, I’ve actually spent time in.”
“I definitely fell in love with Saskatchewan when I first went there, which was about 16 years ago now. It made a huge impression on me as the kind of place that often gets forgotten, both in stories about Canada but also in stories about the world.”
More often than not, Canada gets relegated to the background of modern science fiction, masquerading on film and television as someplace else.
“When the future comes to the Prairies, it’s not going to look like the future as it comes to Casablanca or Tokyo or Shanghai,” Newitz says. “I wanted to capture what happens when the future comes to these places that often get left out of science fiction.”
“It’s funny because Canada is such a ‘science fictional’ place. Like half of the science fiction shows on American TV are filmed in Vancouver, and they’re always trying to pretend that they’re in some other country. So that was a bit of a wink at the fact that so much of science fiction is actually happening in Canada right now.”
The book asks challenging questions about identity and relationships — not only between individuals and employers, but through characters’ relationships with each other. “I really wanted to think about how much our identities are created by other people’s expectations about us, and whether those are the expectations of institutions,” Newitz says.
Gender expectations play a big part in this. Though Paladin, the central robot character, has no internal conception of its gender, the humans around it continually insist Paladin is “really ” a man or a woman, often in a way that conveniently conforms to those humans’ pre-existing needs or desires.
Paladin’s robot friends scoff at this tendency, calling it “anthropomorphizing.” What Paladin does with these expectations and how they impact its relationships with humans and other robots is a lovely, subtle set of nearly existential observations on how our identities are created through our relationships with others.
“A big part of the play in the book,” Newitz says, “is trying to inspire the reader to think about what’s the difference between what you really are, and how you’ve been programmed, and how people are anthropomorphizing you. How are people trying to fit you into a role that may or may not fit with your experiences, and may not fit with your feelings and desires?”
In making one of her main characters a robot, Newitz is able to concretize questions of identity that might otherwise be pretty abstract: “You can tell a story that is, for a human, kind of metaphorical, but you can make it really literal with a robot. A robot has been actually programmed, and Paladin really does have desires that she (Newitz intentionally uses “he” and “she” interchangeably when discussing Paladin) can’t control because she’s been designed to be unable to get to the root of her own system.”
Although this dark story has some light moments, it pulls no punches when it comes to the wolf at the door.
“I’m hoping people come away with a couple of things,” Newitz says. “One is thinking about how tenuous our rights really are, and how easy it would be for us as a global civilization to return to having slavery be the cornerstone of our economy.
“We still have outright slavery in many parts of the world. We definitely have indenture, but not under that name, all over the place. I think it wouldn’t take much to tip us back into a situation where we’re just overtly trading people and trading human-equivalent beings.
“The other thing that I hope people will think about is, even when freedom is being curtailed and it seems like there is very little hope, there really are always ways to resist. Those ways might seem trivial, like just falling in love with someone, or having your one little submarine full of pirated drugs. Those are small forms of resistance but they do add up . ...
“We may not know about the historical forms of resistance because those don’t always get written down, but my real goal is to remind people that, as dark as things get, there always is hope. There are always going to be people trying to push back even when they are threatened with slavery and death.”
We may not know about the historical forms of resistance
..., but my real goal is to remind people that, as dark as things get, there always is hope. There are always going to be people trying to push back even when they are threatened with slavery and death.