Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Annalee Newitz author of her first novel Autonomous published September 19th by Tor (tomorrow). Annalee’s career started 15 years back in San Francisco at the Guardian. Later she worked at Wired and then founded the super cool io9 at Gawker. She edited io9 for 7 years then became the editor in chief at Gizmodo. Since last year she has been an editor at Ars Technica. She’s ben published in the New Yorker, The Washington Post The Times The Atlantic and many other publications.

She also writes about movies, TV and books in the sci-fi fantasy genre. Which ties in nicely wit this her first venture into novel writing with Autonomous.

Autonomous is about free will, love, corporate greed and deceit and loyalty. It follows the path of Jack (Judith) Chen, a modern day pirate who reverse engineers drugs and supplies them to the market in spite of the inherent but ill-gotten rights of major drug companies with semi-familiar names.

Hot on Jack’s trail are two corporate cops, one human and one robotic, Eliasz (Elias) and Palladin. Who have their own unusual and unique relationship with each other.

Jack seeks help along the way and finds it from some likely and unlikely sources.

But the high concept that runs through the book is this concept of autonomy and what it means. And we can talk about that a little today.