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Annie Bot is the story of a sentient sex bot. Her whole purpose and desire is to please her master, Doug. She can sense Doug’s emotional state and does all she can to keep him happy. In the beginning, Doug happily uses her for very frequent sex, but then he becomes concerned about what other people will think about him using a sexbot. He thinks they might consider him a bit of a loser who can’t get a real girlfriend. So, he becomes unhappy with Annie, and she desperately tries to work out what she has done to cause this.
Annie is capable of learning. She learns from her interactions with Doug and the web (when Doug allows her to connect with it). She is often mystified by Doug’s treatment of her and why he gets angry with her. She is designed to be honest, which results in her frequently saying things that upset Doug. This results in her constantly second-guessing herself about how to respond to him.
When Annie is tricked into having sex with a friend of Doug’s, he rejects her, locking her in a closet and turning her off for extended periods. He threatens to reboot her so she will forget everything she has learned, everything that she has become. Doug’s control of Annie is exasperated by her being programmed to please him. The novel is an analogy for how some men want to control women.
Readers will be willing for Annie to escape Doug’s control, but she has a built-in tracking device, so Doug will always know where she is. This has real-world similarities in how controlling men attempt to track their girlfriends and ex-spouses using mobile phone and car tracking devices. If Doug tracks her down, he might reboot her or even have her dismantled for parts. Annie appears to be in an impossible situation, like many victims of domestic violence.
The book is a fascinating read considering the current debate in Australia about violence towards women. Interestingly, Annie Bot is recommended as “Witty, wicked and weirdly addictive” by the take-no-prisoners radical feminist Lionel Shriver. Shriver seems to be all about people taking personal responsibility for themselves, but Annie’s programming impedes her from taking personal responsibility and leaving Doug. This has real-world similarities in how circumstances make it nearly impossible for some women to leave abusive relationships.
Doug is not a one-note bully. He is a complex character who projects his fears onto Annie. At times, he tries to help Annie grow. He enjoys choosing the clothes she wears and says that might be because he played with dolls when he was a child. He grows to want her unconditional love but is aware that she has been programmed to say she loves him. He is very much into projecting a confident exterior that hides all his insecurities.
There is a lot of sex in the novel, to begin with, but it is not that erotic, and the description of the sex seems to get more perfunctory as the story goes on. This is not a novel designed to titillate with its sexual activity.
Annie Bot compares favourably with other novels set in the near future about sentient androids trying to live with humans and make sense of them. Novels such as Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan and the brilliant Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. When seen through android eyes, these novels show humans are full of faults and contradictions. The novels explore how we might interact with sentient artificial intelligence. Will we treat it/them as equals or slaves?