Asking the Wrong Questions

If nothing else, points for truth in advertising. Newitz's third and most ambitious novel is, as its title lets on right from the start, an entry in the subgenre that is perhaps most closely associated with Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. The tale of transforming a world, full to the bursting with ideas, stretching into deep time, peopled by nerdy scientists and engineers earnestly debating the best way to turn an inhospitable landscape into a place where humans can live and thrive. Fittingly for a novel coming to us from well into the twenty-first  century, however, Newitz adds a wrinkle to this plot that Robinson and others have tended to leave out: the impact of capitalism, and corporatism, on how new worlds are shaped, and who gets to live in them. The setting is the year 59,000, in a post-human society bound together by the Great Bargain—the uplifting of various animal species, including moose, cows, cats and many others, alongside the creation of sentient AIs and ...

My review of Annalee Newitz's The Future of Another Timeline is up today at Strange Horizons .  It's a fun novel that carries forward what feels, to me, like a mini-trend in recent SF, of stories that ask how to be achieve change in a fundamentally broken world.  In her second novel, The Future of Another Timeline , Annalee Newitz approaches those questions head-on, following a working group of time-traveling scholars who seek to improve history, specifically for women. As in her previous novel, Autonomous (2017), Newitz uses her central McGuffin as a powerful, versatile metaphor for real social currents. In Timeline , this is the realization that history is not—as the children of well-meaning, privileged liberals are often taught at school—an inevitable progression towards greater equality, but a constant back-and-forth between those who wish to expand freedom, and those who wish to suppress it. In the world of the novel, the fifteenth amendment to the US constitution gu...

The first proper installment of my Political History of the Future series is up at Lawyers, Guns & Money.  The topic this time is Annalee Newitz's first novel Autonomous , about a corporatist future in which humans and sentient machines alike are subject to a system of indenture in which freedom is a thing to be purchased. The title of Autonomous is a pun, and a thesis statement. “Autonomous”, in our understanding and in the current common usage, refers to machines that can function without human interference–autonomous cars, most commonly. Despite its connotations of freedom, it’s a designation that denotes inhumanity. It isn’t necessary, after all, to specify that a human being is autonomous. In the world of Autonomous , this is no longer the case. Its citizens–human and machine–are distinguished as either autonomous or indentured. So a word that connotes freedom becomes a reminder of how it can cease to be taken for granted, and a usage that connotes inhumanity is transfo...