Autonomous by Chris Howard

Autonomous is a thriller about wild-ass technology, the future of intelligence, floating cities in the middle of the ocean, murder, and autonomous underwater vehicles. It's a stand-alone story, loosely connected to my book Salvage (Masque, 2013). If you've read Salvage then you've already met a few of the characters, but if you haven't, what's the worst than can happen? Right, but besides that?

If a story can have a shape, then I think Autonomous is funnel-shaped. It begins sort of loose, with a wide spread of characters who appear to be moving in different directions, and as we progress, the funnel walls impose on the narrative. They close in—metaphorically—and most of the characters and their stories slip into the more concentrated flow with other characters and their stories until we have a richer, deeper, more complex story that carries everyone through to the end. (Almost everyone).

Then again, maybe that's every story ever told?

Scratch all that. Autonomous is a murder mystery at its core, but it's also about many different people, and groups of people, taking sides to solve a serious problem. And by serious I mean civilization-ending, or deadly on a global scale. Not all of these people end up on the same side. Some of these people do not survive. Some of these people are inside one person—the principal character, Nathan Isenart, is made up of three very different aspects of the same person, sharing the same name, sharing the same physical form, but not much after that. Autonomous is also about three fairly-secret military programs with rival visions for the world's future.

There, I think that covers some of it. If that sounds daunting or just weird, don't forget that Autonomous is really about wild-ass technology, the future of intelligence, floating cities in the middle of the ocean, and autonomous underwater vehicles.

—Chris Howard, 2014, Somewhere near the Atlantic