Annie Bot

(Paperback)

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Annie is a robot, created to be the perfect girlfriend and satisfy the emotional and physical needs of her human boyfriend Doug. She has dinner ready for him after he gets back from work. She wears the clothes he buys for her. She can even raise her libido on command and warm her body to 98.6F before sex. Yes, sometimes she forgets to clean, but shes trying to be good enough for Doug. Shes trying really hard.

But as Annie grows more self-aware she begins to chafe against the borders of her life: the empty weeks she spends unable to leave the apartment, the regimens of yoga and cycling designed to keep her part-organic body fit, the appointments with technicians on top of that to shave inches off her waistline. Worst of all are Dougs bad moods, and the ways he knows to punish her without even raising his voice.

Annie starts to wonder. What would life be like outside Dougs apartment What would life be like without Doug

ANNIE BOT is the story of a being trapped in a situation you did not choose, gaining consciousness and with it a sense of what it means to be alive. Recalling Kazuo Ishiguros novels and the film EX MACHINA, this book probes fundamental questions about intimacy, power, and abuse. It asks: is a human soul something we are born with Or is it something through love, pain, and other people we can learn

Reviews

A brilliant and enraging exploration of ownership and love, and the way our creations have of growing far beyond us. Sierra Greer raises questions as current and pressing as our present-day anxieties about AI, and as ageless and enormous as the territory of Mary Shelley, about what constitutes humanity and what we owe to each other. Annie is a glorious creation and self-creation and I will never forget her, or this sharp and astonishing book Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson

What is love without autonomy Honesty when one partner's sole desire is to please Sierra Greer's riveting debut sketches an intimate and unsettling portrait of relationship power dynamics in a near-future when humans own conscious AI companions. A timely and provocative exploration of power and romantic relationships that will stay with you long after you finish the last page, Annie Bot probes the depths of identity and intimacy and asks what it means to recognize the humanity in others and in ourselves. Sierra Greer is a fierce new voice in speculative fiction Lauren Nossett, award-winning author of The Resemblance

Haunting and achingly luminous, Annie Bot is a powerful manifesto for the radical discomfort and necessity of pleasing and living for yourself. Greer brilliantly shows us the futility of relationships when one person is deemed inferior, examines the ways men and women socialize one another, and raises questions about whether the contours of love and womanhood are actually captivity. I fell in love with Annie Bot, one of the realest women I have ever encountered Ling Ling Huang, author of Natural Beauty

Author Bio

Sierra Greer grew up in Minnesota before attending Williams College and Johns Hopkins University. A former high school English teacher, she writes about the future from her home in rural Connecticut.