 Greetings. Welcome to 30 Second Sci-Fi. My name is Keith. This week I'm going to recommend Autonomous by Anna Lee Nevitz. I read the first few chapters of this book a few years ago, and then only recently acquired the rest of the book, and it's good. I recommend it. It takes place in the not too distant future. It's about a young woman who is engaging in pharmaceutical piracy. She is making illegal drugs and something goes wrong with one of the things that she has concocted, and the other side of the story we follow a government agent and his robot assistant who are attempting to hunt her down. The book ends up being more about robots and the nature of artificial intelligence and autonomy, and one of the things that I appreciated most about this book was that Nevitz explored this whole idea of robot independence without ever once using the word consciousness. Here, this will give you an indication of the kind of approach that the author took here. There's one conversation that takes place between two robots in which one of them is an assistant to a researcher, a scientific researcher who has just been killed, so the robot is now legally free, and another robot asks it, well, what do you want to do with the rest of your life? And it says, I want to continue my research. And the other one says, is that what you really want or is that what you were programmed to want? And the robot says, what's the difference? I think that conversation right there gets to the kernel of the author's approach to the subject, which I found really refreshing in its simplicity and its lack of agonizing over the idea of consciousness. Anyway, there was one particular subplot that I found very distasteful, and I didn't even want to read those parts, but I understand why the author included them. I don't even want to talk about what it was. I think if you were to read it, I think you would know exactly what I'm getting at. Anyway, I recommend it. Bye.