New Books In Science Fiction

Jack Chen is a drug pirate, illegally fabricating patented pharmaceuticals in an underground lab. But when she discovers a deadly flaw in Big Pharma’s new productivity pill, corporate bosses hire a team of assassins to silence her. Annalee Newitz’s novel Autonomous (Tor, 2017) isn’t only a fast-paced cat-and-mouse story. It’s also an exploration of the rapaciousness of capitalism and its ability to turn everything, even freedom, into a commodity. Her first novel, Autonomous has been widely acclaimed, receiving Nebula and Lambda Literary award nominations. “I’ve written a lot about patents and how they affect innovation and how companies use patents to screw customers over,” Newitz, a journalist and founder of io9, says in her New Books interview with Rob Wolf. In Autonomous, she highlights how “something dry and wonky like patent law has a life or death hold over us.” Newitz also turns the idea of robot rebellion on its head. “I wanted to tweak this idea that is such a big cliché in science fiction about a so