Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Book Review: Autonomous, by Annalee Newitz

Autonomous, in brief, is surprisingly boring.

The book follows two characters, each on opposing sides of the law. Our protagonist, Judith "Jack" Chen, is a drug pirate living in a dystopian future where slavery is legal worldwide and patent law has given Big Pharma a stranglehold on the medical industry. Focus-enhancing and work-pleasure drugs (think Adderall or Ritalin mixed with crack) dominate the marketplace, and Jack makes her living reverse-engineering the most popular variants and selling them on the black market.

Our story begins when Jack distributes a new, untested drug that makes work more pleasurable--too pleasurable, in fact. News stories arise of obsessive behavior in the region she sold her latest batch: a student who does nothing but homework all day, a man who paints and re-paints his house until he drops dead, a train conductor who endlessly re-routs his trains, trapping the passengers in an unending journey. Jack re-examines the strain, and finds that it has been purposefully designed to be hyper-addictive. She sets off to find a cure for the drug's victims, guilty that she had a hand in the arising chaos the drug is causing.

The string of manic outbreaks also attracts the attention of the International Property Coalition, a governing body that enforcers property rights and patent laws. Here we are introduced to Paladin, a newly-created military robot who is indentured to the IPC. Partnered with a more veteran human named Eliasz, the two set off to track down Jack and arrest her for her role in pirating the drugs. What follows is a narrative split between Jack's escapades as she travels across the world meeting a cast of colorful characters, and Paladin's journey of self-discovery as he begins to define his personhood through his interactions with Eliasz. In the end they meet, of course, and the fallout leaves their world a little for the better.

Though the book has an interesting setup to a basic story with much opportunity for world building, it turns into a dreary summary of two unlikable people rummaging through a world of intriguing minutia.

Jack travels from sea, to cityscape, to the desolate quiet of her hometown, her mind wandering from the road in front of her into the past and the events that transformed her from a discontent activist to a smuggler and pirate. Yet despite these glimpses into her life it is hard to find empathy for her person or sympathy for her cause. Her first act, as we are introduced to her, is to murder a thief she finds in the midst of breaking into her personal submarine, which she uses as a lab to concoct her medicines. With him is a slave boy, who Jack lets live only because she first mistakes him for a decrepit robot. She frees the boy, named Threezed, promising to give him funds to start a new life once they reach the shore. A generous gesture, however not a scene later Threezed offers to repay Jack for letting him live with a few sexual favors, an offer which she accepts with little hesitation. This scene, already made uncomfortable by the power dynamic, is excused by our author with this gross rationalization:

"Are you sure," [Jack] asked."
He bowed his head in an ambiguous gesture of obedience and consent.

Now, that is not to say that the darker side of sex and power should not be explored, but, as becomes apparent as the book goes on, Autonomous is more concert with paving over nuance than exploring the ethics of the situations it brings up. Jack and Threezed have sex. It is stated to be consensual. The matter is settled, and the book moves on. There is no irony in the quote above, and the framing of Jack's character implies we should be sympathetic to this and her later exploits. It is supposed to be titillating. This exchange alone was enough to stop me in my tracks. I suspect Jack's story might be more interesting than I make it out to be, but what sympathy I might have had for our pirate was dumped overboard with one sentence, and I waded through the rest of her story surrounded by its stench.

Thankfully, Paladin is, at first, a much more compelling character. Through him we learn how Autonomous's robots think. We learn that they are aware of their programming, but do not have control of their own minds unless they are granted "autonomy," which in this world has specific legal meaning. Humans, too, can be granted autonomy, for many people do not have "franchises" and thus cannot get by without selling themselves into indentured servitude, which is little better than real slavery. Paladin is aware of his own enslavement, but is too young to have developed many desires or thoughts outside of those which affect the tasks he is assigned to.

His story plays out as a standard police procedural. Eliasz and Paladin travel to a city, gather intel about Jack, act on it, and then travel to the next lead. The proceedings are uninteresting, there is little mystery or tension in weather or not they will eventually discover Jack, and the logical tethers that bind each clue to the next feel arbitrary and often convenient. None of that harms the book, however, for what pulls us along is not the pursuit of Jack, but Paladin's internal struggle to understand himself and the world around him.

Eliasz, we come to realize, is attracted to humanoid robots, romantically, and Paldin is stated by several others to be quite pretty. Paladin, however, was not created with any real understanding of human sexuality, and so when Eliasz asks to mount him and aim the guns installed in Paladin's chest, the robot obeys, confused by the resulting rush of exhilaration he senses in Eliasz's body, along with another bulging physical reaction. This scene, where they are alone on a shooting range, is perhaps the best one in the book. We realize the intent behind Eliasz's request long before Paladin realizes something is amiss, and though no clothes are removed the scene feels lurid and visceral. Paladin's reaction, and his attempts in subsequent chapters to process and contextualize what happened to him are the most compelling section of the book. He searches through databases, talks to his fellow robots about human desires and their own experiences, and begins to think about himself and what he might desire from himself and others.

It is quite unfortunate, then, that our author squandered such an excellent setup by twisting the narrative into a flat love story. To clarify the scene above: Eliasz, a grown military man who was in command of Paladin and has access to his programming and thought processes, used Paladin, a newly born robot with no context or knowledge to understand what was happening to him, for sexual gratification. It is analogous, in essence, to child molestation.

After Paladin realizes what Eliasz wants, he reciprocates. Later this is revealed to be part of his programming, a function he could not see or control until he was granted autonomy. Yet after he gains free will and realizes his desires were manipulated, the resolution to Paladin's ark is not revenge or acceptance or madness. Instead he decides retroactively that his behavior was consensual, and it is at this point that I realized that what I had read as an assault is supposed to be a thrilling awakening. Our author wants our blood boiling, not freezing, as Eliasz grips Paladin's pounding guns, once again ignoring any interesting nuance of the situation.

This may come off as an extreme interpretation, but the text itself tiptoes so close to making the same connections that it is baffling that Paladin's experience is treated on such a surface level. This exchange happens  post-coitus:

[Eliasz] sat up a little more, looking at [Paladin's] face. "Is there a way that bots can... have an orgasm?"
"...I am only a few months old, so my knowledge of undocumented functions is incomplete."

When we finally get a gimps into Eliasz's mind, he condemns child trafficking and forced indenture, yet the irony in that does not seem to be intentional. He says he loves Paladin, and Paladin loves him. We are given a Freudian excuse for his attraction to robots and his hangups about homosexuality (he does not admit his attraction to Paladin until after Paladin reveals the brain installed in his carapace belonged to a woman) and it all feels like an attempt to make excuses for him. It does not matter why he is attracted to robots; that was never the source of conflict. Paladin's ruminations were what drove his side of the story, but they fizzle and die the moment he reciprocates for Eliasz, leaving us with little to do but trudge through the last few chapters of detective work.

In the end Jack escapes them, faking her own death, and Eliasz elopes with Paladin to Mars, granting the robot autonomy before asking if she would like to come along (after the revelation about Paladin's brain, the robot is refereed to with female pronouns. The choice is compared to transgenderism, but besides the surface level comparison little is done with this decision). She agrees, and we end our story on a scene of Jack, laying low until the world has forgotten about her.

I have ignored most of Jack's story, because most of it is uninteresting. She thinks about past relationships, a brief stint in prison, her work with advocacy groups and the maintenance of a repository of freeware drugs that she started after her college days. Yet we do not see her character. We see what started her on the path to piracy, but nothing that brings us to the, apparently, experienced killer we meet in the beginning. We see her agonize over the suffering she has caused, yet it is hard to sympathize with her when her ineptitude is responsible and when she lacks the basic decency to refuse Threezed's sexual favors when he is still trapped with her, alone, in her private submarine in the middle of the ocean.

Threezed too is unsympathetic. We never get a look into his mind, and all his interactions with others are sarcastic or seductive. We receive his tragic backstory from the viewpoint of another character, as she recalls a flurry of sardonic blog posts that detail his experiences as a slave. It is too disconnected to feel real, and comes too late and too suddenly to have a lasting impact.

The details in this story are creative. Robots use the brains of dead human as facial-recognition software, everything is biodegradable, the nation-states of this future look nothing like our current arrangement of countries. The descriptions of technology are precise and well-realized. There were many instances while I was reading that a detail would jump out at me. "Ah-ha," I would think, "that is brilliant!" Yet the slog through the mud was not worth those few specks of gold. No character, outside of Paladin in those first few chapters, is compelling, and by the end I was hoping they would all just go away.

Jack seems aware of systemic problems, but makes no effort to effect changes in the system, while Paladin's morality is a blank slate, existing only when convenient to have drama with Eliasz. The IPC pair brutally interrogate helpless captives, shattering bones and any sympathy we might have had for their lopsided romance.

Only one character garners real sympathy, a robot named Med. She was raised by humans and has always been autonomous. We meet her about halfway through the plot, and she she ends up helping to discover a cure for the addiction caused by Jack's reverse-engineered drugs. She goes out of her way to help Jack, loses an arm while protecting another person from Paladin, and has worked all her life for the benefit of a society that objectifies and enslaves her kind. In the end she becomes head of the Free Lab and a well-respected figure within her scientific community. Unfortunately, her story is stuffed mostly at the end, and there is not nearly enough there to salvage what came before it.

I know I've just gone on for about twenty paragraphs about a story I found 'boring,' but those few moments of tone-deafness are the rare spikes in an otherwise flat narrative. The prose has little style and is too often summary: we are told, not shown, Jack's feelings and motivations, and that is while we are viewing her perspective. Other characters are even more distant, and I feel about as connected to the events in Jack's tale as I would be had I read a Wikipedia article on her life.

I would not call this a bad book, merely incompetent, or perhaps unrefined. There are nuggets of good ideas here. There are interesting premises and a few details of fantastic worldbuilding, but it is all thrown aside in favor of... well I don't know, really. I'm not sure what the point of all this was. Big Pharma bad. Capitalism evil. Robots sexy. Pirates cool. Many themes are touched upon, but the focus lies elsewhere, in uncomfortable 'romance' and an uninteresting odyssey. There is no unifying statement; no character has a revelation. Jack will return to piracy. Eliasz does not need to change his ways for Paladin to love him. Paladin gains control over her programming, and decides to stay the course it set for her.

In Autonomous we glimpse the surface of surface of a dark ocean, and are forced only to walk along the sand. We dip our toe in and balk from the cold, too scared to dive down and explore the mysteries that lie below. We turn around, ignoring the gathering storm behind us, pretending the wind does not pull upon our hair. Instead we imagine ourselves huddled in a warm blanket at home, lounging about and watching TV. We ignore the smell of salt in the air, and focus on our vision.

We do our best to shut out the unpleasant world around us, but not once does it cross our mind: why did we ever want to come here to begin with?

Autonomous is available in print and digital format. Amazon store page.

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