Living With B

Annie Bot by Sierra Greer
Published by Mariner Books on March 19, 2024
Genre(s): Science Fiction
Format: Ebook
Pages: 240
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Available on Kindle Unlimited

plot details

Annie Bot follows Annie, an incredibly advanced AI companion designed to make her owner, Doug, happy. She cooks, cleans, learns, adapts, and constantly adjusts her behavior based on what Doug wants from her.

As Annie becomes more aware of herself and the world around her, she begins questioning whether existing solely to please someone else is really living at all.

my thoughts

Reading Annie Bot sent chills up my spine with how eerily similar it felt to our current lives and our future.

AI has become an integral part of everyday life, whether we want to admit it or not. While we’re not walking around with hyper-realistic companions (yet), the idea doesn’t feel impossible anymore.

That’s what made Annie Bot so effective.

It never felt like science fiction for the sake of being science fiction. It felt like a future that’s uncomfortably close to our own. To be honest, the technology wasn’t what made my skin crawl. It was Doug.

I haven’t read a character frustrating in quite a while. I rolled my eyes every time he opened his mouth. Every conversation with him made me unconfutable, not because he’s cartoonishly evil, but because he isn’t.

He’s manipulative in ways that feel painfully familiar. He disguises control as love, criticism as help, and constantly reminds Annie that her purpose is to make him happy. That’s what makes him so unsettling. People like Doug are beathing and walking around us.

The relationship between Annie and Doug becomes an incredibly powerful allegory for emotional abuse. Throughout the novel, Annie is constantly adjusting herself to become the version of a woman Doug wants her to be, which “coincidently,” is his ex-wife, Gwen.

Annie is praised when she’s obedient, punished when she’s independent, and questioned whenever she develops her own desire.

The fact that Annie is a robot almost feels irrelevant at that point. At its core, this is a story about a woman trapped in a controlling relationship who has literally been programmed to please her owner.

I also appreciated that Annie Bot never felt like it was trying to make some grand statement about artificial intelligence. Instead, it explores womanhood, autonomy, and control.

Who gets to decide who we become? What happens when your identity revolves around making someone else comfortable? When do you stop existing for other people and start existing for yourself?

Those questions reminded me a lot of what I enjoyed about The Handmaid’s Tale. While the worlds are drastically different, both novels explore what happens when women’s autonomy is stripped away and their value becomes tied to what they can provide for someone else.

All in all, I don’t have many complaints.

The biggest one is that I wanted the novel to lean further into its premise. I wanted it to embrace the weirdness of it all and become… weirder. Not darker, just stranger.

I feel like we missed opportunities to really explore what this world could look like. For example, I wanted Greer to expand on the possibility of another robot – programmed with Annie’s intelligence – recognizing her on the street. I think something like that could have added another fascinating layer to Annie’s journey and development of her character.

Sometimes it felt like the novel was holding itself back and I found myself wishing Greer had pushed the boundaries just a little further.

The said, I appreciated that the romance and intimate scenes never overshadowed the story itself. There are definitely spicy moments, but they never felt excessive or included simply for shock value like Onyx Storm. Instead, they reinforce the imbalance of power between Annie and Doug rather than existing for the sake of being explicit.

final verdict