RogerBW's Blog

2024 science fiction. Annie is a companion bot: getting dinner ready each night, cleaning the flat, and of course sex. But something seems to be going amiss.

Of course some of us are readier than others to concede that a constructed intelligence might be deserving of human rights; everyone here, even the more sympathetic characters, consider it would be entirely reasonable casually to roll back Annie's memory to an earlier backup.

So if we've read the Murderbot series, or even thought about the subject a bit, a central tension is pretty clear; after all, Annie is the narrator, so we can be pretty sure she has a life of the mind. But there is rather more to it than that; for example, is it even possible to have a consensual relationship with someone who can have you restored from backup and face no legal or emotional consequences for doing so?

Doug is somewhat messed up by a previous relationship, but clearly doesn't realise it. And since Annie was set up according to his preferences, she doesn't either. Really Annie's status as a bot isn't the most important thing here; many of the events could happen in a similar way if she were a naïve woman in a relationship with a controlling man. Yeah, Doug signed up for a girlfriend whose first priority would always be to please him. Is that even a thing it should be possible to do?

It's quite light SF, just the one impossibility in a fairly contemporary-looking world, and some of the technical details don't make much sense; I suspect it'll find its true audience among the lit-fic and feminist-fic crowd—and it certainly fits there. But I enjoyed it as SF too; maybe I've met the concepts before, but they're well-expressed and thought through.