Book Release Day: Among Friends (stand-alone novelette)

 

In pre-Civil War Delaware, farmer Thomas Covington is part of a network of Quakers who help escaping slaves headed north. When he shelters a runaway, a slave-catcher comes calling…only it’s not human. The hunter is an automaton, relentless and incapable of mercy. Dealing with the automaton will test Thomas’s Quaker belief that there is “that of God in every person,” and force him to consider whether the mechanical intelligence may be enslaved by its programming, leading to unexpected questions for the Abolitionist movement.

One of my favorite pieces of short fiction in recent years, first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, reprinted in The Shadow Conspiracy III. Here I read from the beginning, to give you a taste.

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Short Book Reviews: Freedom and Autonomy in a Robotic World

Autonomous, by Annalee Newitz (Tor)

My quick take on this book is “feminist anarchist new-wave cyberpunk,” but that doesn’t do it justice by a long shot. In a world dominated by pharmaceutical companies, illegally reverse-engineered drugs offer the only hope to the poor. But when her attention-focusing drug creates lethal obsession, rogue scientist Jack desperately tries to get her pirated version off the streets. That’s half the story and I was already hooked (scientist heroes, check; women scientist heroes, double-check). The second half of the story centers around the private military team (human Eliasz and robot-with-human-brain Paladin) dispatched to apprehend Jack. That’s where things get really interesting, because in this dystopic world, robots are chattel and sometimes so are people. Both can earn their freedom, but what does that really mean?

Once bots gained human rights, a wave of legislation swept through many governments … became known as the Human Rights Indenture Laws. They established the rights of indentured robots, and, after a decade of court battles established the rights of humans to become indentured, too. After all, if human-equivalent beings could be indentured, why not humans themselves?

“For bots, industry always precedes autonomy,” explained a final string of text.

Legal autonomy, emotional independence, freedom from obsession and pharmaceutical control of mood, thought, and desire? Newitz deftly blends the themes and resonances into a dramatic story that feels refreshingly current and yet fits easily within the genre. I look forward to her next work.

The usual disclaimer: I received a complimentary review copy of this book through NetGalley, and nobody paid me to hold my own opinions about it.

Short Book Reviews: AI and Woman Explore Common Humanity

A Closed and Common Orbit, by Becky Chambers (Harper Voyager, 2017). Despite being a sequel to A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, this story stands beautifully on its own. Through alternating flashback and present points of view, two characters embark upon very different journeys with the same question: what does it mean to be a person? 

Sidra was once Lovelace, an AI controlling a space ship. Now she finds herself in an artificial body that in most ways mimics that of a human woman. She’s cut off from the multiple audio and visual inputs that have defined her world, besieged by physical sensations and social expectations, and at risk of exposure. 

Her guide and companion, Pepper, has a troubled and traumatic past as a cloned child-slave. Chance and luck freed her, then ten years old, from a factory where she sorted and repaired trashed equipment, then led her to a buried spaceship, whose AI provided her with the only loving parenting she had known. Pepper’s past struggles beautifully mirror and inform Sidra’s present quest. 

Sympathetic characters, fascinating alien cultures, nicely paced action, and understated depth mark this as a book to savor and re-read.