Book of the Month:
“Autonomous” by Annalee Newitz
Hi all,
Hope everybody enjoyed our short story collection last month. It was a bit of a mixed bag but there were a few in there that were real winners. If you haven’t had the chance and love a short story like I do, I highly recommend going back to the 2015 and 2016 volumes of “Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy”. Definitely worth your time.
Onward! Based on conversation from this weekend’s meeting and inspired by Wednesday night’s “Ex Machina” Netflix Party (https://www.meetup.com/thescifibookclub/events/270148946/), we are taking some time to look into robots. Our poll definitely had a clear winner, so this month’s book is the 2017 novel “Autonomous” by Annalee Newitz. We may revisit the other books in our poll for June or July.
Here’s a great writeup on it from Verge:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/23/16350130/autonomous-annalee-newitz-science-fiction-book-review
Hugo Award-winning author Amal El-Mohtar (The Honey Month) also wrote a glowing review for NPR in which she says, “Autonomous brims and bubbles over with ideas, tenderness and care; my experience of reading it was of wanting to discuss every paragraph I consumed.” Sounds like a great fit for TSFBC! https://www.npr.org/2017/09/20/548664924/in-a-future-ruled-by-big-pharma-a-robot-tentatively-explores-freedom-and-sex-aut
“Autonomous” appears to be an ambitious and engaging novel that about ownership, personhood/robothood (is that a word?), and what an uncertain capitalist future might look like.
