A POWERFUL TAKE ON LOVE, LOSS AND ADVANCED A.I.
Autonomy
Victoria Hetherington Dundurn Press
TOM SANDBORN
Speculative fiction may be this culture's version of the Delphic oracle, a source of enigmatic prophecy for a secular, plague-ridden present. In more innocent times, when science seemed an uncontested source of truth, the genre was known as “science fiction.” Even then, tales of the imagined future often served as vehicles for reflection about the fraught complexities of the present.
Autonomy is the much-anticipated second novel from Toronto-based author Victoria Hetherington. The first, Mooncalves, reviewed on these pages in 2020, was a spectacular debut, and the sophomore effort, unlike many second books by promising authors, altogether lives up to the achievements of the first.
Set in a too-plausible future in which American control of Canada is even more explicit and far reaching than it is today and a patriarchal counter revolution reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is rapidly gaining ground, Autonomy is an implausible love story. The romance links Slaton, a Canadian student counsellor who works for the deliciously named Department of Brand Management at the fictional D'aillaire University, with Julian, a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence who has been developed to conduct interrogations.
The fact that Slaton's employer institution seems to be named for a Canadian general who was famously driven to suicidal despair by the genocide he witnessed in Rwanda is only one of the many elegant ironies laced throughout this book, which despite its grim subject matter manages to be a minor comic masterpiece.
Julian is a kind of cyber Grand Inquisitor who develops affection for Slaton when he is assigned to interrogate the hapless counsellor after a student frames her for the “crime” of supporting an attempt to procure an abortion. Julian helps Slaton find a wealthy protector who introduces her to the cosseted lives of the rich in gated communities, marries her and offers her pharmaceutically enhanced immortality. Meanwhile, a new plague, the Illness, is sweeping through first the planet's squalid cities and then the walled luxury retreats of the privileged.
Hetherington's lapidary prose, so notable in their first novel, serves them well again in Autonomy. Also present, a rare ability to write well and powerfully about characters' erotic lives and their psychological complexity. This is a remarkable work of fiction.
Highly recommended.