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Autonomous
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Jennifer Ikeda
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
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Editorial reviews
Editors Select, September 2017
A debut novel about artificial intelligence and drug pirates from Annalee Newitz, the founder of io9? I was on board before I even downloaded this book - and turns out I was safe to judge it by its cover. Newitz has created a richly imagined and morally corrupt future in which both life-saving and mind-altering drugs are heavily controlled by big pharma patents, and where both humans and robots live side by side - some indentured, some having gained “autonomy”. Autonomous is as addictive as it is thought-provoking, and I can’t wait to see what comes next for Newitz. Jennifer Ikeda was also a new narrator for me, and I was impressed by her range and ability to convey characters both young and mature, human and nonhuman. —Sam, Audible Editor
Publisher's summary
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?
Critic reviews
"The uncertainty, fear, rage, despair, and, ultimately, hope that the robots experience are all perfectly voiced by Ikeda. A thrilling examination of intellectual property rights and personal identity." (AudioFile)
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- Narrated by: Emily Beresford, Tamara Marston, A.T. Chandler, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Humans beware. As the robotic revolution continues to creep into our lives, it brings with it an impending sense of doom. What horrifying scenarios might unfold if our technology were to go awry? From self-aware robotic toys to intelligent machines violently malfunctioning, this anthology brings to life the half-formed questions and fears we all have about the increasing presence of robots in our lives.
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Has some bright spots
- By ChrisM. on 10-22-15
By: Daniel H. Wilson, and others
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METAtropolis
- By: Jay Lake, Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, and others
- Narrated by: Michael Hogan, Scott Brick, Kandyse McClure, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Armed camps of eco-survivalists battle purveyors of technology in this exclusive, original production featuring five sci-fi masters and five all-star narrators.
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Not a wasted credit
- By james on 10-27-08
By: Jay Lake, and others
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Nexus
- Nexus, Book 1
- By: Ramez Naam
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the near future, the nano-drug Nexus can link mind to mind. There are some who want to improve it. There are some who want to eradicate it. And there are others who just want to exploit it. When a young scientist is caught improving Nexus, he’s thrust over his head into a world of danger and international espionage, with far more at stake than anyone realizes.
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This guy might be great one day
- By Daniel on 05-14-14
By: Ramez Naam
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Code Breakers: Prequel
- By: Colin F. Barnes
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor
- Length: 2 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Rogue hackers Petal and Gabriel are low on food and water. Their reputation precedes them and they are no longer able to hustle the crime community for supplies. With survival becoming harder, they’re left with no other choice but to accept a risky job from a dangerous individual. The two will have to negotiate with the Tinker - a woman whose reputation for psychotic behaviour is known across the nuclear-blasted Abandoned Lands; infiltrate a town overrun with killers; and recover a cache of exceptionally rare information.
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Good action and plot - terrible world building
- By J. S. Bowers on 12-08-18
By: Colin F. Barnes
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Children of the Deterrent
- Halfhero, Book 1
- By: Ian W. Sainsbury
- Narrated by: Sam Phillips, Jaimi Barbakoff
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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The new novel by the author of the best-selling The World Walker series. 'My name is Daniel Harbin, and I'm a child of The Deterrent.' What if a superhuman turned out not to be so super...or even human? Britain's superhero, The Deterrent, was unveiled to the world in 1979 and disappeared two years later. The truth about his origins has never been revealed. The rumours about his children - those that survived - and their mysterious abilities have never been confirmed. Until now....
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Everything Backstory Until Last Few Chapters
- By Sailfish on 06-30-20
By: Ian W. Sainsbury
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Camouflage
- By: Joe Haldeman
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The artifact is found seven miles below the surface of the sea and beneath 40 more feet of sand. The Navy's efforts to raise a wrecked submarine uncover it - and set in motion a scientific race to retrieve it, to discover just what it is and where it came from. Denser than any substance known to man, it has broken every drill bit they've tried on it and will not budge an inch. It resists every effort to breach it - or communicate with it.
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Loved it!
- By Nathan Caroland on 09-21-08
By: Joe Haldeman
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Immortality
- By: Kevin Bohacz
- Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins
- Length: 26 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Without warning, something has gone terribly awry. In the remote and unnoticed places of the world, small pockets of death begin occurring. As the initially isolated extinctions spread, the world's eyes focus on this unimaginable horror and chaos. Out of the ecological imbalance, something new and extraordinary is evolving and surviving to fill the voids left by these extinctions. Evolution is operating in ways no one could have expected, and environmental damage may be the catalyst.
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Good End of World Thriller
- By John S on 11-04-14
By: Kevin Bohacz
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Necropolis
- By: Michael Dempsey
- Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins
- Length: 13 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
NYPD detective Paul Donner and his wife Elise were killed in a hold-up gone wrong. Fifty years later, Donner is back: revived courtesy of the Shift. Supposedly the unintended side-effect of a botched biological terrorist attack and carried by a ubiquitous retrovirus, the Shift jump-starts dead DNA and throws the life cycle into reverse, so reborns like Donner must cope with the fact that they are not only slowly youthing toward a new childhood, but have become New York's most hated minority.
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'Necropolis' Rocked My World
- By HEIDI on 01-19-12
By: Michael Dempsey
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The Punch Escrow
- By: Tal M. Klein
- Narrated by: Matthew Mercer
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Joel Byram is an everyday 22nd century guy. He spends his days training artificial-intelligence engines to act more human, jamming out to 1980s new wave - an extremely obscure genre - and trying to salvage his deteriorating marriage. Joel is pretty much an everyday guy with everyday problems - until he's accidentally duplicated while teleporting. Now Joel must outsmart the shadowy organization that controls teleportation, outrun the religious sect out to destroy it, and find a way to get back to the woman he loves.
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Great Premise, terrible execution
- By Perfect Tommy on 09-25-17
By: Tal M. Klein
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Planetfall
- By: Emma Newman
- Narrated by: Emma Newman
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
More than 20 years have passed since Ren and the rest of the faithful braved the starry abyss and established a colony at the base of an enigmatic alien structure where Suh-Mi has since resided alone. Ren has worked hard as the colony's 3-D printer engineer, creating the tools necessary for human survival in an alien environment - and harboring a devastating secret.
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You want different? Here it is!
- By Townsend on 11-09-15
By: Emma Newman
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Altered Carbon
- By: Richard K. Morgan
- Narrated by: Todd McLaren
- Length: 17 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the 25th century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person's consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or "sleeve") making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen.
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Altered Carbon
- By Jake Williams on 09-22-07
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Accelerando
- By: Charles Stross
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 16 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Singularity. It is the era of the posthuman. Artificial intelligences have surpassed the limits of human intellect. Biotechnological beings have rendered people all but extinct. Molecular nanotechnology runs rampant, replicating and reprogramming at will. Contact with extraterrestrial life grows more imminent with each new day.
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Hardest of hard SF...
- By DLee on 11-24-14
By: Charles Stross
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The God Wave
- A Novel
- By: Patrick Hemstreet
- Narrated by: Nick Podehl
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
For decades scientists have speculated about the untapped potential of the human brain. Now, neuroscientist Chuck Brenton has made an astonishing breakthrough. He has discovered the key - the crucial combination of practice and conditioning - to access the incredible power dormant in 90 percent of our brains. Applying his methods to test subjects, he has stimulated abilities that elevate brain function to seemingly godlike levels.
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it lost its way at the end, but I liked it
- By Leo on 09-25-16
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2113
- Stories Inspired by the Music of Rush
- By: John McFetridge - editor, Kevin J. Anderson - editor
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The music of Rush, one of the most successful bands in music history, is filled with fantastic stories, evocative images, thought-provoking futures and pasts. In this anthology, notable, best-selling, and award-winning writers each chose a Rush song as the spark for a new story, drawing inspiration from the visionary trio Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart.
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I'm a RUSH fan, but ...no..not this book
- By NBP on 07-15-17
By: John McFetridge - editor, and others
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Bluescreen
- A Mirador Novel
- By: Dan Wells
- Narrated by: Roxanne Hernandez
- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From Dan Wells, author of the New York Times best-selling Partials Sequence, comes the first book in a new sci-fi-noir series. Los Angeles in 2050 is a city of open doors, as long as you have the right connections. That connection is a djinni - a smart device implanted right in a person's head. In a world where virtually everyone is online 24 hours a day, this connection is like oxygen - and a world like that presents plenty of opportunities for someone who knows how to manipulate it.
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not bad, but difficult narrator
- By Dennis Bingham on 05-02-16
By: Dan Wells
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Metrophage
- By: Richard Kadrey
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Welcome to Los Angeles - where anger, hunger and disease run rampant. Jonny is a black-market dealer in drugs that heal the body and cool the mind. All he cares about is his own survival. Until a strange new plague turns L.A. into a city of death, and Jonny is forced to put everything on the line to find the cure... if it can be found on Earth.
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This is how Cyberpunk should be done!
- By Cliff on 09-09-13
By: Richard Kadrey
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Misanthropic psychologist Dr. Grace Park is placed on the Deucalion, a survey ship headed to an icy planet in an unexplored galaxy. Her purpose is to observe the thirteen human crew members aboard the ship - all specialists in their own fields - as they assess the colonization potential of the planet, Eos. But frictions develop as Park befriends the androids of the ship, preferring their company over the baffling complexity of humans, while the rest of the crew treats them with suspicion and even outright hostility.
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Tough to review
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Danny Tozer has a problem: She just inherited the powers of Dreadnought, the world's greatest superhero. Until Dreadnought fell out of the sky and died right in front of her, Danny was trying to keep people from finding out she's transgender. But before he expired, Dreadnought passed his mantle to her, and those secondhand superpowers transformed Danny's body into what she's always thought it should be. Now there's no hiding that she's a girl.
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Beating super villains? Easy. Self-acceptance...?
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Infomocracy
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It's been 20 years and two election cycles since Information, a powerful search engine monopoly, pioneered the switch from warring nation-states to global microdemocracy. The corporate coalition party Heritage has won the last two elections. With another election on the horizon, the Supermajority is in tight contention, and everything's on the line.
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At heart, this novel is a political thriller
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Insignia
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More than anything, Tom Raines wants to be important, though his shadowy life is anything but that. For years, Tom's drifted from casino to casino with his unlucky gambler of a dad, gaming for their survival. Keeping a roof over their heads depends on a careful combination of skill, luck, con artistry, and staying invisible. Then one day, Tom stops being invisible. Someone's been watching his virtual-reality prowess, and he's offered the incredible - a place at the Pentagonal Spire, an elite military academy. There, Tom's instincts for combat will be put to the test and if he passes, he'll become a member of the Intrasolar Forces.
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YA Novel with Adult Appeal
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Far from the Light of Heaven
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The colony ship Ragtime docks in the Lagos system, having traveled light-years to bring one thousand sleeping souls to a new home among the stars. But when first mate Michelle Campion rouses, she discovers some of the sleepers will never wake. Answering Campion’s distress call, investigator Rasheed Fin is tasked with finding out who is responsible for these deaths.
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Better to Read The Physical Book Than to Listen
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Fire with Fire
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Story
2105, September: Intelligence Analyst Caine Riordan uncovers a conspiracy on Earth's Moon - a history-making clandestine project - and ends up involuntarily cryocelled for his troubles. Twelve years later, Riordan awakens to a changed world. Humanity has achieved faster-than-light travel and is pioneering nearby star systems. And now, Riordan is compelled to become an inadvertent agent of conspiracy himself. Riordan's mission: travel to a newly settled world and investigate whether a primitive local species was once sentient - enough so to have built a lost civilization.
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Misleading Cover
- By Eivind on 09-06-14
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Daemon
- By: Daniel Suarez
- Narrated by: Jeff Gurner
- Length: 15 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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When the obituary of legendary computer game architect Matthew Sobol appears online, a previously dormant daemon activates, initiating a chain of events that begins to unravel our interconnected world. This daemon reads news headlines, recruits human followers, and orders assassinations. With Sobol’s secrets buried with him, and as new layers of his daemon are unleashed, it’s up to Detective Peter Sebeck to stop a self-replicating virtual killer before it achieves its ultimate purpose - one that goes far beyond anything Sebeck could have imagined.
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Possibly The Best Techno-thriller Ever
- By Erica on 01-22-09
By: Daniel Suarez
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Hild
- A Novel
- By: Nicola Griffith
- Narrated by: Pearl Hewitt
- Length: 23 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In seventh-century Britain, small kingdoms are merging, frequently and violently. A new religion is coming ashore; the old gods are struggling, their priests worrying. Hild is the king's youngest niece, and she has a glimmering mind and a natural, noble authority. She will become a fascinating woman and one of the pivotal figures of the Middle Ages: Saint Hilda of Whitby. But now she has only the powerful curiosity of a bright child, a will of adamant, and a way of seeing the world that can seem uncanny, even supernatural, to those around her.
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I'd give it 10 stars if I could
- By David on 03-27-14
By: Nicola Griffith
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Pattern Recognition
- By: William Gibson
- Narrated by: Shelly Frasier
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Cayce Pollard is a new kind of prophet - a world-renowned "coolhunter" who predicts the hottest trends. While in London to evaluate the redesign of a famous corporate logo, she's offered a different assignment: find the creator of the obscure, enigmatic video clips being uploaded to the Internet - footage that is generating massive underground buzz worldwide.
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Only gets better with age
- By Mika LaVaque-Manty on 12-14-18
By: William Gibson
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Translation State
- By: Ann Leckie
- Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh
- Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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When Enae's grandmaman passes away, Enae inherits something unexpected: a diplomatic assignment to track down a fugitive who has been missing for over 200 years. No one actually expects Enae to succeed; it's an empty assignment meant to keep hir occupied. But Enae has never had a true purpose—no one ever expected hir to do more than care for grandmaman—so sie is determined to accomplish this task to the best of her ability.
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Single themed and not on par with the series
- By Andrew Pollack on 07-01-23
By: Ann Leckie
What listeners say about Autonomous
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- Becca Mellema
- 08-05-19
Came For The Science, Bailed For The Porn
This book really disappointed me in almost every way except the hard science. The neurobiology integrated into the drug storyline was awesome (and tickled my fancy as a scientist specializing in molecular biology)... unfortunately, that was 1% of the story. The other 99% was...a lot of sex. And I mean a LOT of sex.
[Spoiler Alert]
A science podcast that I regularly listened to ("Science for the People") had the author, a science journalist, on as a guest to talk about their book. They were so passionate talking about the amount of neurobiology research, how they had contacted so many neurobiologists to figure out what chemicals would be used in the drugs, what the effects of said chemicals were, what addiction and withdrawal would look like for each situation...After an hour of listening to her in-depth process and some of the concepts she was exploring (drug companies overtaking society, biochemistry pirates), I was sold. I got the audio book and hunkered down for what I thought would be the best biochemical Sci-Fi novel I had ever read.
What I got was the narrator whispering sex scenes in my ear, and describing robot porn. Every. Two. Minutes. And these descriptions would go on for so long. No, I don't want to know that the robot's parter had an erection from "mounting" the robot in combat mode. No, I don't want a description of the character's intimate-yet-passionless sex life every scene she is in. I get that we're supposed to have a juxtaposition between an emotionless scientist (wow. Haven't seen that one before) and a passionate, full-of-life artificial intelligence (again, very original), but it's like the author can only show this difference through everyone's sex life. There are other ways of showcasing those differences besides who and how they bang.
To clarify, I don't have a problem with sex scenes. I have a problem with the fact that if felt like I was reading porn. I wanted a dystopian novel about drug corporations and addiction. I wanted a novel with a Robin Hood character, or heck, even a Han Solo character, out witting (and/or teaming up with) a competent detective team. I didn't want to listen for three hours about how a prostitute wants to bang our main lead, or how our hero has to go through her backstory and describe having sex with her then-boyfriend while arguing about starting a revolution. Do these characters not know how to interact with their pants on or something? Had they interspersed the sex with actual story, I would have been down to continue reading. But, unfortunately, at 5 hours, and almost no story progression, I had to quit.
There was chemistry in this book, all right, but the wrong kind for me.
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47 people found this helpful
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- Platypus Man
- 10-25-17
Robots, future drugs, slavery, and patent reform
In Annalee Newitz's Autonomous, we see the future of 2144 and what happens when drug patents never run out and the concept of selling people into slavery was brought back into fashion after corporations wanted to create sentient bots without losing their investment.
On one hand you have the story of Jack Chen, a drug pirate trying to fight a disastrous epidemic caused by a pharma giant's newest productivity booster that she reverse-engineered and sold on the streets. She's joined by a runaway human slave who's been treated like a robot his whole life and an autonomous robot doctor who's been treated like a human her whole life.
And on the other hand (there are a lot of hands in this book, literally), you have a human agent of the International Property Coalition and his endentured bot partner whose mission is to find Jack and take her out at any cost. The bot is just starting its life and learns a lot about bots, humans, autonomy, sex, and gender.
Autonomous creates an interesting future world that is relatable enough to our world that you might be able to see it in the distance, while exploring a lot of things I had never seen done before. It combines multiple forms of slavery with a realistic depiction of artificial lifeforms and their integration into society. It features a future that is generally more accepting of differences, while still not getting rid of the old prejudices entirely (and inventing a few new ones for good measure). It shows future drugs that chill me just to think of. There are a lot of new concepts but all are worked together in a smooth and believable fashion; Newitz's strong background in both science fiction and technology really shines through here.
Jennifer Ikeda does a great job with the narration, not all voices are extremely different from one another, but the differences are there when you need them. Robots sound monotonous or emotional as appropriate and a few different characters have distinct accents.
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35 people found this helpful
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- William G Carrig
- 10-10-17
I was expecting greatness...
First, let me say that I made it about two or three hours into the book before I gave up on it. So this is not a review based on the entire story. The narrator was not very animated and the narration droned. Monotonic does not describe it but comes very close. The authors fetish for bio-degradation was irritating after two or three hours. It seemed like she picked up on a buzz word and had to use every chance she had. Recycling would have made more sense in the future time frame this story is in. With bio-degradation you lose the materials. With recycling you save them and can reuse them. Her tech was at times perplexing. She can sequence a molecule and reproduce it exactly, but she has to painstakingly verify the molecule by direct observation? That makes no sense. If you have equipment that can do the analysis and synthesis, it surely can make a comparison for you. They have AI that can run human form robots but it can't run lab equipment? All in all, very disappointing. Just because a story takes place in the future, that doesn't make it science fiction. I am a science fiction snob. I like my science fiction to have actual science in it. Unless it is campy science fiction movies from the mid 20th century. Those are pretty awesome all on their own. The way this book was hyped I thought it was going to stand among the likes of Bradbury, Clarke or Heinlein. It is not. Not even close.
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22 people found this helpful
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- Lowell G. Burton
- 11-15-17
A closer future than is comfortable
Newitz's vision of the future is impeccably grounded in the tech world she has lived and written about for years. She naturally extends patent law and intellectual property laws to a logical extreme, and grounds it in the relevant now of health-care and pharmaceutical politics. Her characters are inclusive and relatable across a wide spectrum of the human experience, and the overall shape of the book leaves both the protagonists and their opponents in a far more human state - the book ends in a gray area.
Like many works of Cyberpunk before it, Autonomous hits a little too close to home. I wouldn't have it any other way.
A note on Jennifer Ikeda's performance: it was overall very good, but lacked the flair necessary to make it a truly outstanding reading.
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16 people found this helpful
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- Ming
- 10-14-17
Interesting premise with a weird romantic subplot
It's unfortunate that we live in an age of hyperbole...while Autonomous is most definitely not the next Neuromancer, it is a fairly decent first attempt at science fiction.
The dystopian future setting with widespread genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and very strong patent enforcement is interesting, but I feel that Newitz doesn't quite do enough with it. I found the world-building aspects of Autonomous to be the most fun part of the book but the characters and overall plot line failed to keep me invested or engaged. I ultimately found the characters to be nearly hollow caricatures (with the exception of a particular biobot) since we aren't given enough to truly root for or despise anyone. Instead of feeling connected, I simply felt like a passive observer.
The thing that bugged me the most about this book is probably its romantic twist. While gender identity might be something that is hotly debated today, the world of Autonomous has already been set up by Newitz to be comfortable and even mildly accepting of the relationship she poses. It felt like a lot of effort was put into a plot point that lacked punch.
Overall, Autonomous is pretty interesting and moderately entertaining, and while it isn't exactly great, you could do much worse.
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13 people found this helpful
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- Austin Jayhawk
- 09-25-17
It Sure Has Been a Long Hard Climb
There was a snitch from the Class of '87 who ruined and ended a 20 year tradition of students drinking on the Latin field trip. It's litcherally why I took Latin for this field trip of In Vinum es Veritas. My punishment during my 10 day suspension was to push mow a 6 acre lot that took me three days at which point I had to start over blisters be damned. Today I started work on my new farm which took me 8 hours to mow with a tractor. I'll get my technique down though. Anyway, I've been anticipating this book for over a year and pre-ordered the day it was available. I loved it but the drug they are on reminds me of me. I sat in inertia and depression for 3 years but big ups to Power Life Yoga who got me moving again and I have not stopped since. Once I get zeroed in on a project like my organic heirloom micro-farm I can't stop. Once my fingers hit the soil or the blade touches the grass I am engrossed and usually listening to an audio book thus killing two birds with one stone. Like in the book I do not hydrate enough and do not quit until it's too dark to work. This novel was incredible and probably close to accurate with singularity. However, I do think since we weaponize every new technology that it was mayhap a little soft and less dark than it might be. Like Sam Harris said this week, "We will only get one shot with Ai and we could become extinct if we do not do it correctly." I'm sure between Putin, Rocket Man, Isis, Xi Jinping and The Dotard it will be just fine. Oh and I hear the snitch is in to pegging these days and I am sure he is someone's confidential informant after getting busted with an 8 ball and a quarter pound of pharmaceutical grade amyly nitrate, but I judge no man. I sometimes think robots could do it all better anyway. We all help slow kill the earth and all her inhabitants with Dupont and Monsanto whose products and poisons we use everyday. I sure hope Annalee keeps writing fiction. It's like Robert Zimmerman said, "Someday, everything is gonna be different, when I paint my masterpiece. " This just might be it for her?
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10 people found this helpful
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- Levi Quackenbush
- 10-02-17
Weird AI Love novel
Not my cup of tea. The description barely touches on the details of this book. I started off intrigued! After a third way through however, it became apparent this is just basically a robot porn novel. Fifty shades of metal and biotechnology.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Michael G Kurilla
- 10-15-17
Drug lord Robin Hood with robotic romance
Autonomous by Annalee Newitz starts with a simple premise, a woman with a drug manufacturing capability who produces counterfeit expensive drugs to support her passion for making other life-saving drugs for poor people. At the same time, law enforcement partners, one who happens to be a robot are tracking Ms Robin Hood who has reverse engineered a new drug that happens to have some serious side effects such as killing people.
The main story is set a bit over 100 years into the future with occasional flashbacks about 25 years earlier. The main sci-fi elements amount to sophisticated drug development and manufacturing capabilities as well as advanced robots. Unfortunately, the basic premise of intellectual property, i.e. patents as the source of the problems of the day is a bit overdone and suggest someone with little background in this area. If the world were as described, then somehow in the intervening years, patents were changed to have infinite lifetimes and somehow, the world has allowed itself to fall under a single set of patent laws.
Law enforcement is also a bit loose with official investigators murdering any and all witnesses they question and staging suicide scenes. Also, pharma companies don't need to worry about bad drugs as "rich" people who can afford their drug can also afford medical care, but why they wouldn't just sue the pants off big pharma seems ignored. Also, if a single woman in a submarine can manufacture enough drugs to save small, poor countries from health care disasters, it begs the question why poor countries can't establish their own manufacturing facilities in submarines. Another bizarre aspect to this society is that at some point, intelligent robots were emancipated or could be become "autonomous", but at the same time, in some wired way it made sense that if robots could be autonomous, then humans could also become indentured as slaves to be bought and sold. This creates situations where humans are bought and sold for cheap labor, while robots can earn PhDs. Lastly, a lack of inside knowledge on the drug development process produces a situation where the mechanism of action of a dangerous drug is studied, an antidote is fashioned, tested on one mouse, and then the formula uploaded for doctors in hospitals to use in only five days.
Between the questionable ethics of making drugs for recreational abuse to support making life-saving drugs and robots struggling with gender identity issues and romantic feelings, the tale feels like an artificial world that doesn't quite make enough sense to exist. There is no attempt to offer how this transition occurred.
The narration is reasonably good, but with barely adequate character, especially gender discrimination making following conversations difficult at times.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Daniel O.
- 08-01-18
Enjoyable story, wanted more world building!
I really enjoyed this book and the interesting tale of humans and robots.I liked that we get to observe the world from both human and robot perspectives and can see how different their perspectives are. The whole idea of the autonomy key was interesting and the whole pharmaceuticals angle the story focused on was an interesting change from what is normally seen.
I think the largest disappointment was that there were a number of interesting ideas that were just touched on as the story progresses and I would have liked to have heard more. Some characters were really interesting but we didn't get to know them as well as I would have liked (Med).
Overall, it was a great story and an enjoyable listen. Jennifer Ikeda did a superb job with narration and I felt like she gave both humans and robots their own voices.
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- Karen B. Gabriel
- 10-10-17
Boring!
Only book I really wanted to return--reader adds nothing and story is so slow, I kept losing interest
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5 people found this helpful