Autonomous

I read a few chapters of this as an ARC and I am HOOKED. I'm so excited to finish reading this book, I love robots and pirates and lady protagonists and did I mention robots?

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Now that I've finished reading the whole book, I have some different ideas about it. I still love the robots and pirates and lady protagonists, but not as into some of the weird homophobic stuff. What got me was some of the background feeling stuff - the themes of autonomy and consent, what does it mean to be in a relationship with you're an indentured human, or an indentured bot, what does it mean/what is it like to be an autonomous bot, the really fascinating legislative changes that happened after bots were given personhood under the law (since people were unwilling to give up on indenturing bots, and bots were now considered people, the only way to consolidate that was to legalize indenturing humans too), the gendered ideas that humans have about bots that look certain ways, the ways that humans tend to anthropomorphize, bot-human relationships, etc. But something that I always at least hope about the future is that queer relationships will be more accepted rather than less - and there were some queer relationships depicted in this book that seemed totally fine but then one that just didn't sit right with me, and didn't feel right in the context of the book. Maybe if more time had been spent world building societal mores but as it was, it seemed weird.
Also the end of the book felt a little rushed and nicely tied up to me.