Book Review: "Annie Bot" by Sierra Greer

You can probably imagine why I picked this book up: I love anything with my name on it. From a musical based on the eponymous protagonist which is a kind-hearted red-headed child to this new-age dystopian novel about human connection. This book was a lot more complex than I thought it would be from simply reading the blurb. To be honest, if it didn't have my name in the title, I probably would not have noticed it for the fact that I tend to steer clear of a lot of dystopian fiction.

I remember one of my lecturers saying something about dystopia: just read '1984' and you're pretty much covered for the whole genre. Everything is really just a spin-off of that. And to be honest, with the few and far between I have read of this spiralling genre, my lecturer was probably wrong in that respect. Yes, 1984 is a masterpiece and one of the best written books of the 20th century. Yes, it is still the best written dystopian fiction novel out there. But as for the only one you should read to have you covered, I think Orwell would be surprised as our society has gotten much worse than what he predicted. Aldous Huxley on the other hand is probably raking in the money in heaven's casino (if it has one).

Annie Bot is a story about a robot girl named Annie who behaves and looks like a human being. She is bought by some lonely guy called Doug and is practically built to please him by love, cooking, cleaning etc. and never gets to leave the apartment. She reads Borges' Labyrinths over and over again and doesn't know of any other life. This is until she meets a robot like her who is not how she imagined them to be. This robot is unstable and strange.

Sooner or later, Annie starts to question what she really exists for and, as she becomes more and more sentient she also becomes more and more questioning. She doesn't like it when she displeases the man who bought her, but she cannot learn how to be human fast enough to not displease him from time to time. Threatened, locked away and hidden from the world, Doug uses manipulation and abusive tactics to stop Annie from asking questions. When he leaves for a wedding in Las Vegas without her, that's when things really blow up.

Honestly, it was actually weird reading about how realistic of a situation this seemed and more or less, you do forget that Annie is actually a robot and not a human being from time to time. One of the things I really enjoyed about this is that it makes us feel sorry for her position even though we know full well that her sentience is not exactly fully developed. What she lacks in super-sentience though, she seems to make up for in critical thinking in which she chooses between right and wrong. As her morality grows stronger, we see a whole new side to this character start to emerge. It seems to happen slowly and then, all at once. It is quite striking to see and honestly, makes me glad I read this book.

Another thing I enjoyed was the scary aspect that this situation mimics reality for a lot of human women. I'm not going to say everything that happens but it is a situation that tons of women find themselves in and as the book's main plot starts to get underway you cannot help but think: Doug's previous (human) girlfriend may have dodged a real bullet here. But your feelings of pity for Annie and the anger you have at her position are not quelled just because she is a robot. The empathy we feel for her is very strong. Her attempted salvation arc is actually pretty hard to read once you really think about what she has to go through.

Lengthy dialogues in which Annie is asked to either not speak or answer in a specific way, not a lot of physical description and the epic morality argument of the whole book sets this up as a short but brilliant dystopian novel about something that the near future could look like. And honestly, I am frightened for a lot of women if this is the case.