Annalee Newitz Puns

Read this book pretty recently and thought it applied. The title says it all, it's just a bunch of historical and anthropological information about four lost cities; Pompeii, Angkor Wat, Çatalhöyük, and Cohokia. Even the section on Pompeii, the one lost city we all learn about in elementary school, had a bunch of knowledge that was new to me.

Alternatively if you're pressed for time you can listen to Adam Conover interview the author on his podcast Factually, which is where I heard of the book in the first place. Episode 91.

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Those of you who've visited the sci-fi section of your local bookstore recently may have noticed Autonomous on the shelf, quite possibly in a prominent position. You may have taken note of it because the cover looks like this. That's right, the front cover includes glowing praise from both Gibson and Stephenson (and Lauren Beukes is there too, Zoo City was cool, I guess).

Upon seeing this, you may, like me, pick the book up and read the blurb. This includes phrases like "anti-patent scientist turned drug pirate" and "a deadly military agent, and his indentured robotic partner".

Like me, you may feel the faint stirring of hope in your breast, like the unfurling of a trojan in a CPU. "Could it be?" I thought, "Is this a new Neuromancer? A Snow Crash? Something that will rip my skull open and expose it to blinding new ideas filtered through a fine film of wicked cool?"

I have bad news. Autonomous is not that book. I wanted it to be that book. It wanted to be that book. It's not that book.

No, really. It's... fine.

It's the year 2144 and the earth has become the nightmare you'd get if you gave a fatal dose of mood depressants to someone from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Global megacorps control everything in a vast international free-trade zone, patent control is the single greatest concern of global investigatory authorities, everything is property including indentured humans and sentient robots, corruption is rampant and the world is fucked. The African Federation has managed to become a big player on the world stage by somehow offering even less ethical oversight than everyone else, meaning that Big Pharma does all their research there.

Enter our first protagonist, Jack. Jack is biochemist. Jack is also a pirate. She breaks copyright on other people's drugs, but also has a gnarly invisible submarine. Because, in true dystopian fashion, medical patents mean the poor regularly die of treatable diseases, Jack spends a lot of time smuggling pirated medicine from labs in the African Federation to wherever they might be needed, in her aforementioned gnarly invisible submarine. In order to cover her costs she also smuggles pirated recreational stuff for sale to underworld types.

Unfortunately, Jack pirates some of the wrong drug: a wonder-drug in prerelease from one of the megacorps. Turns out, because the megacorp doesn't give a shit about ethics, the stuff is so addictive it kills people, which

I write science fiction and nonfiction. I'm the author of a brand new novel about time travel, geology, and feminism, The Future of Another Timeline. My previous novel, Autonomous, nominated for the Nebula and Locus Awards, and winner of the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, I'm a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and have a monthly column in New Scientist. I have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Popular Science, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among others. I'm the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Previously, I was the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo. You can find me on the internets here and here and here.

Proof: https://i.redd.it/tws2eeva46q31.jpg

I'm trying to do this without plot spoilers except as noted and I think I did ok

I finished it recently and am curious to hear other people's reactions to it. My personal TL;DR is that I liked it. In a bit more detail, bullet pointy rather than deep-review style:

• it's pretty much Actual Science Fiction; I definitely don't mind soft SF or hybrid styles but it's nice to read some "real SF" that's good, too

• the bots and other tech are plausible seeming to me and very awesome though I'm not totally sure about the whole Spoiler

• it manages to have an interesting plot that moves fairly briskly while still being a Sci Fi Book About Big Ideas

• some of the Big Ideas touched on include biohacking in a world of corporate ownership of knowledge (e.g. medicine), nonhuman personhood, human personhood and autonomy, and the construction of gender identity (which I'm sure will get a lot of the attention and create tension along the usual divisions, but I thought it was a fresh angle)

• prose-wise it's well above average without being showy or ornate

• it counters convention and expectations in some interesting ways without being "experimental" or hard to read. The characters are deeply flawed and don't do the things you necessarily want or expect them to. Some of the more disturbing dystopian aspects of the society are never questioned within the text, which is interesting. Other aspects of this are harder to talk about without spoilers.

There are certainly a few things I thought were less than excellent and would critique but I'll pass those over for now. Overall I definitely would recommend it to anyone interested in the subjects mentioned in my summary above.

Anyone else read it yet? Thoughts?

The Complete AMA Schedule.

Greetings humans! My name is Annalee Newitz. I'm a writer. I'm also the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction. You probably also know me as the editor-in-chief of io9, a publication that covers science, science fiction and the future. I'm excited to take your questions - so AMA!

PROOF: https://twitter.com/Annaleen/status/453581073176616960

I am especially keen to read books similar to Autonomous (if you haven't read it, it's about a pharmacy bootlegger on a submarine. Read it!)