Autonomous: A Novel

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Tor Publishing Group, Sep 19, 2017 - Fiction - 272 pages

"Autonomous is to biotech and AI what Neuromancer was to the Internet."—Neal Stephenson

"Something genuinely and thrillingly new in the naturalistic, subjective, paradoxically humanistic but non-anthropomorphic depiction of bot-POV—and all in the service of vivid, solid storytelling."—William Gibson

When anything can be owned, how can we be free?

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?

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
6
Section 2
7
Section 3
11
Section 4
19
Section 5
27
Section 6
32
Section 7
49
Section 8
69
Section 14
145
Section 15
165
Section 16
180
Section 17
200
Section 18
217
Section 19
240
Section 20
245
Section 21
259

Section 9
82
Section 10
95
Section 11
105
Section 12
120
Section 13
133
Section 22
265
Section 23
277
Section 24
287
Section 25
295
Copyright

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About the author (2017)

ANNALEE NEWITZ is an American journalist, editor, and author of fiction and nonfiction. They are the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from MIT, and has written for Popular Science, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post. They founded the science fiction website io9 and served as Editor-in-Chief from 2008–2015, and subsequently was Editor-in-Chief at Gizmodo and Tech Culture Editor at Ars Technica. Their book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction was nominated for the LA Times Book Prize in science. Their first novel, Autonomous, won a Lambda award, and their second was The Future of Another Timeline.

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