On Annie Bot by Sierra Greer
Disclaimer: I will not be detailing everything that happens in this book for you. I don’t have the mental fortitude to write that much and idk if many people want to read that anyway. I’m just going to be bitching about it. Enjoy.
On a previous post I talked about how I was prompted by social media to stop being sad and write about things I love instead (I honestly would recommend. It felt silly and wonderful and I was distracted for like an hour or so). One of the things I listed there was my love for the library.
”I love the library!!! I’m so lucky to have a vast library system at my disposal. Their digital catalogue goes from Libby and Hoopla to Kanopy and Pressreader. The amount of media I’m able to access is overwhelming. There are even some wild physical things I can rent if I wanted to. A leaf blower? They got it. A karaoke machine? They got three! The only thing missing is video games, but they hold classes so it’s okay.”
I thought I wanted to dive deeper into each of those mini love letters and get the hang of writing for this blog that way. I, of course, fell into my own mental trap and made things too difficult to sustain. I told myself I would write linearly about the last three books I had borrowed. Unfortuntely for me, the stories I forced myself to work with weren’t all that astounding (except for Wilder Girls by Rory Power. That novel had some really interesting world building and ideas, but I came away from it with issues enjoying the characters vs the world around them), so I quickly grew tired of LARPING as a book critic.
As I tried to pretend that writing the reviews hadn’t become a chore, my mind kept going back to something I read a while ago. Annie Bot by Sierra Greer.
Time and time again I found myself sitting back and smiling to myself, “Man, I hated that fucking book.”
It was as if miss Sierra kept whispering in my ear, even though I don’t think I have many good things to say about it lol. Either way, I did finish the book so there had to have been something carrying me through it. I believe it was the writing. It had to be the writing because I was in a state of confusion and anger through at least half of this novel.
Admittedly, I believe half of my disappointment was that I went into it expecting a certain kind of story. I read two reviews Libby had slapped on the synopsis and ran with some wild assumptions. I expected some form of AI bot revolution and maybe some intense suspense because the book was about the strained romantic? relationship between a guy and a bot.
”Provocative… a Frankenstein for the digital age… a rich text about power, autonomy, and what happens when our creations outgrow us.” — Esquire
”Unexpected and subtle… delicious and thought-provoking.” — New Scientist
I only give myself half fault for my letdown because these reviews had me truly thinking she was going to kill this dude. But no, the entire novel is miss Annie getting emotionally abused by her rich owner/boyfriend and then… the novel ends. There are some cool ideas thrown around throughout the story, like the fact that in this world robot nannies are a pretty widespread commodity (so long as you have enough money, of course). The robots aren’t a secret and seem to be accepted by society, except in situations where the creepy, rich owners switch their default settings from ‘cleaning mode’ to ‘sentient sex doll mode.’ So, that happens. Annie’s owner-boyfriend built her to look like his ex, whom he is very hung up on, and tries to mold her into a submissive, sex kitten that he can boss around at home.
The biggest potential this book had imo was the sub-plot where Annie gets told she can learn how to code by accessing the internet. She learns that she can basically google how to work on other robots, maybe even herself. This is damaging to her “health” by how much energy studying consumes or whatever, and she is threatened by the maintenance team that if she keeps studying they will wipe her memory and revert her to an earlier version of herself that didn’t know about coding. Despite that, Annie still wants to study, so that’s where I was thinking she’s going to start a robot revolution and she’s gonna mod herself into a super-robot and she’s going to kill her creepy owner. Instead, she agrees to stop studying and goes back to being the emotionally abused, sex kitten her owner/boyfriend commands her to be.
Now, here’s the thing. I realized about halfway through the book that this was a battered woman story, not a robot revolution story. Annie’s experiences directly mirror the experiences many women face. Emotional, physical, sexual abuse. Her dipshit, creepy owner/boyfriend treats and speaks to her in the same way real-life, dipshit, creepy abusers treat and speak to their girlfriends.
There’s lots of, “You do things the way I want you to do things.”
“You dress the way I want you to dress.”
“You will not speak badly about me.”
And I agree that we need stories that mirror real life. We need to talk about the patriarchy, and about how women are still seen as property. I will not pooh-pooh stories that intentionally and explicitly show the realities we are all living in, whether fictional or not. The only real difference between Annie’s treatment and the treatment of billions of women is that the dipshit specifies that she is his property because she is a robot. That’s where my biggest issue with the story (the actual story, not the story I hoped to find) stems from. Any time I started to feel for Annie as she was being berated or assaulted or tortured, I would remember that she was not a human being. I felt real disgust towards the behavior the humans displayed, and I hated them all the same throughout, but I kept running into, “Girl, you’re a robot.” BECAUSE SHE WAS A ROBOT. We go through many scenes where her entire physical body is completely changed in the span of a few hours. For fuck’s sake, her owner sells her emotional data to the mass robot market. Her literal intellectual property is sold off and they make hundreds of brain clones of her because she’s just so smart. After giving up on the I, Robot vision I had, I still had issues with taking the story seriously because of that one fact. She was a robot.
After Annie gets thoroughly brainwashed (can she even be brainwashed? she’s a robot. Groomed is a better word for the treatment she’s going through, I suppose, but… she isn’t a human…) the book drones on with scenes of Annie being the perfect trophy wife and all the sex they have and how big of a loser her owner/boyfriend actually is. Then, miss Sierra circles back to the fact Annie’s brain data was cloned and that now there are hundreds of semi-self-aware robots roaming the streets, looking for salvation or whatever. That’s when I assumed the coding sub-plot was going to make a come back and Annie was going to gather her data children, leave her weird owner (maybe kill him), and run off to create a new robot colony. Of course that doesn’t happen. We just ignore the fact that there’s a ton of robots that want to experience more than what they were built to experience and we move on.
By the end of the book Sierra was taking us through another montage of Annie and weirdo’s life where, again, it seemed that Annie had submitted fully and become the perfect trophy wife. They were literally talking about getting married and having children when Annie convinces dipshit to basically turn off the security feature in her robot brain that kept her from running from home. Immediately after he does that she runs away lol. Good for her, honestly, except for the fact that he absolutely knows where she went to, she ends the story by saying that now she can start studying coding again. She’s sure that her army of brain babies will wake up like she did, and they will also run away to where she did. She alludes to maybe being able to turn off their security features as well or something. And then the book ends.
Oh, and she ran away to the arms of another man. He’s presumably not abusive and much nicer than her owner, but I have a hard time believing their relationship is going to be platonic for the rest of his life. What kind of female empowerment is that when she goes from one owner to another (context: this new guy knows how to maintain robots and will have to take care of her and keep her “alive” because of how much energy she’s going to consume by living her new truth)?
Oh, and also, all of the robots the rich and powerful were buying were created using the orphaned embryos of real humans. SORRY???? Yup! She was human all along! Sort of, I guess.
That pissed me off. If you wanted to make a story about a young, lower class girl losing her humanity under the structures of patriarchy and capitalism and finding it later in life after enduring abuse then don’t add the reveal that she was human so late in the story. Don’t piss me off.
I left this book feeling like I was part of the problem because I kept seeing her as a robot. SHE’S A ROBOT. I’m not going to feel bad about not being able to take her emotional rebirth super seriously because she was a robot that entire time. I suspended my disbelief like any good reader would, and in the end I was glad she got some form of happy ending (??? re: the last parenthetical) but I think the fact she was powered by AI, and literally had the world wide web inside of her brain, was not used to it’s full potential to create an interesting sci-fi novel. And that’s what I wanted, personally.
Thank you for coming to my ted talk.