AutoNoMoUs Part Three - Origins: Mara's Memories is hopepunk speculative fiction set in August 2019 on a remote High Sierra trail, twenty years before autonomous Abitats reshaped California.
THE SERIES
AutoNoMoUs is hopepunk sci-fi: a broken world, a barn in the California hills, and two people who refused to stop building. The future they made is more complicated than they planned.
THE BOOK
Marta Zynn, 22, hikes alone with no phone or money, having just learned she is also Mara Strong - heir to a a technology company she interned for without knowing she owned it. She is deciding whether to come back from the hike at all.
Perry Wilson Lee, 25, carries a hundred pounds of gear including a home-built espresso machine, his late father's tequila, and satellite hacking equipment. A Stanford dropout with three UC Irvine degrees, living in his father's Santa Ana machine shop, he sees emergent intelligence in networks others miss.
She passes him on the trail. Minutes later, she turns and follows.
What follows is hopepunk science fiction told through Mara's memoir - written on paper starting in April 2037 after a near-death, locked in a family safe because Perry was losing his memory and she feared losing hers. She burned some pages. What survived explains how two people who disagreed about nearly everything built, in a North Tustin barn, the compact data center that achieved human-level AI through emergent intelligence, the architecture of the AM Game, the Abitat system and its Abbies, and the animated minimalism guru Min Strong.
It traces how they raised a son in the house above the farm, how the Pacific plane crash of 2037 - which Mara was meant to be on - was no accident, and what she did next. The story ends on the same morning Part One begins, with Mara stepping out of the house and leaving a note that she doesn't know if she'll come back.
She didn't set out to build the future. She set out to decide if she wanted to live in it.
Review :
"Part three answers so many questions I wondered about from the prior books, both in terms of where these characters came from and how the central technology of the series could develop from the world we now have. Great sci-fi works with the possible as much as possible, breaking as few laws of our known physical reality as needed, and AutoNoMoUs succeeds at this in spades. Really fun and a satisfying addition to the AutoNoMoUs world." - Max Krasnow, Harvard University
"Autonomous Part 3 serves as an engaging, informative, and thoughtful prequel to Parts 1 and 2. We learn backstories of people, science, social systems, events, relationships, etc. from the point of view of one pivotal character. I loved learning more ... and found myself hoping that Christopher Truxaw would follow with more books that explore the lives of other characters, along with exploring the societal and scientific issues that are addressed. I found myself thinking of Asimov's Foundation series - books that built from each other - looking forward and backward and from different perspectives. I highly recommend the Autonomous series and hope for more." - Mary Truxaw, University of Connecticut
