Autonomous cover art

Autonomous

A Novel

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Autonomous

Written by: Annalee Newitz
Narrated by: Jennifer Ikeda
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From award winning tech-journalist and io9 founder Annalee Newitz comes a highly anticipated science fiction debut!

Autonomous will pull listeners into a dark and dirty world that feels, at times, a bit too familiar.

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?

 Cyberpunk Fiction Genetic Engineering Hard Science Fiction Science Fiction
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What the critics say

"The uncertainty, fear, rage, despair, and, ultimately, hope that the robots experience are all perfectly voiced by [Jennifer] Ikeda. A thrilling examination of intellectual property rights and personal identity." -AudioFile
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Canadian here, highly offended by the mispronunciation of our revered traditional headdress, the toque. It's pronounced tewk not toke. However, after swallowing my injured patriotic pride, I am willing to admit the narrator did a great job narrating the novel and that the novel itself was also fantastic.

A "toke"?

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Such a fantastic imagining of a potential future. An eerily possible future for mankind and the implications of personhood if robots do become what Newitz imagines. just wore.

WOW!!

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Annalee Newitz' Autonomous is unexpectedly a meditation on love, compulsion, freedom, property, possession, and identity. On its surface, it's the story of an intellectual property pirate trying to blow open the story of a toxic drug being marketed by a corporation while being pursued by murderous IP protection agents, but at it's core, it's asking questions about what it means to be autonomous under capitalism, and if the term even has meaning when one is commodified and when the commodity system makes survival tenuous, and the way this contrasts with overt domination. It also explores the ways that economic compulsion distorts relationships, with others and with oneself.
This is thought-provoking, socially-committed sci-fi in the best tradition of LeGuin, Banks and Leckie in a bio(-cyber)-punk setting. It won't be everyone's cup of minted Moroccan green, but it's excellent and ambitious work and worth the time to read or listen.

What does it mean to freely love?

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