Book Review | Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

Feb 17

If you’re thinking about checking out Annie Bot yourself, don’t worry about spoilers. The first part of my reviews are always spoiler-free so you can see if the book is your cup of tea. After a quick summary and a basic review, I’ll give a spoiler warning and do a deep dive into everything I loved and hated about Annie Bot.

Info about author

Content Warning

I always like to give a quick content warning for any sensitive topics. These are some content warnings for book:

Disordered eating.
Domestic abuse.
Explicit intimacy.
Fatphobia.
Genocide.
Pedophilia.
Sexual assault.
Stalking.
Suicidal ideation.

Quick Synopsis

In Annie Bot, we are in a not so distant future where artificial intelligence is placed into very lifelike robots. In this future, people can purchase “Stellas” - these robots that are incredibly human like and capable of performing household tasks, like folding laundry, doing the dishes, taking care of children, and providing companionship. Annie Bot is one of those robots and she belongs to Doug.

Doug has been training Annie to be the perfect robot girlfriend, but as the book progresses, Annie becomes more complex and starts to yearn for her freedom. This book leaves us to grapple with sentience, autonomy, and where we draw the line at something being alive and where we draw the line at something being human.

Before I give you my rating for Annie Bot, let’s do a quick run through of my rating system.

My Rating

Everybody has to come up with their own system for judging and rating books, and here’s mine:

One star: I couldn’t finish the book. (DNF)
Two stars: I struggled to finish, but I did.
Three stars: This book was okay and worth reading.
Four stars: I liked this book and I would recommend it to a friend.
Five stars: I’d read this book again, and it’s going on my favorites shelf.

By no means do I think this is a perfect rating system, but I had to come up with something that would help me avoid arbitrarily assigning ratings. This provides a solid guideline for rating qualifications.

I gave Annie Bot an four star rating because I thought it was very well written, had a lot of interesting ideas, and was a fairly quick and easy read. I would definitely recommend it to a friend, but I probably would not read it again.

What Should You Read Next?

I’m not going to lie to you, I haven’t read a lot of books like Annie Bot. I did read a few books in college about clones but that was such a long time ago that I feel kind of odd recommending them, but I’m going to run through some of the recommendations I feel might be good for you if you enjoyed Annie Bot.

Yours For The Taking by Gabrielle Korn

Annie Bot comes at us with a lot of feminist ideas. Yours For The Taking follows that theme very well. YFTT is a sci-fi book about what would happen if there was a community of only women and non-binary people.

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

This one is hugely popular and for good reason. Our main character in this one fights against the patriarchy by taking on a familiar maternal role by preparing food, but in the process teaches a bunch of women about chemistry and other complex ideas.

First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston

If you liked some of the more high stress elements from Annie Bot, then you may enjoy this book because it has a lot of the same thrilling moments.

Summary

We’re now entering the spoiler-y part of this review. If you think Annie Bot sounds like your cup of tea, click away, read it, and come back to see if you agree or disagree with my critique. If you like the sound of the book but you don’t want to read it, don’t worry, I’ll give you the full rundown.

SPOILERS

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SPOILERS -

Annie Bot starts with Annie returning from a full tune up—a kind where the technicians check on her operations inside of her robot body. In this opening scene Annie is just like a real woman; she’s come out of the shower, is putting lotion on and is chatting with her boyfriend, Doug.

The big difference is she’s constantly monitoring him and his level of displeasure and adjusting her internal body temperature so she can feel more human-like when they start to initiate physical intimacy. Things really start to get rolling when one of Doug’s friends named Roland comes to visit.

Roland remarks after meeting Annie that she looks a lot like Doug’s ex-wife and Doug admits he had Annie modeled after her. While Doug acts proud of Annie in front of his friend, as soon as he and Annie are alone, he actually shows that he’s feeling pretty shameful about the whole thing and as a consequence sends Annie to charge in the kitchen closet instead of staying in bed with him.

Roland finds her in the closet and offers to give her information in exchange for sex. Roland also tells her that having a secret will make her more human-like. Annie agrees to this deal and Roland tells her it might be a good idea to learn about programming.

Annie takes his advice and starts learning about programming in her spare time while also keeping this secret from Doug because she immediately realizes that it was a bad idea. A few days later, Doug brings home another Stella named Delta. He claims he’s going to leave her in sterling mode which means that she doesn’t learn and adapt and simply follows instructions. Unlike Annie who is in autodidactic mode which means she learns and changes and grows.

Book Review for Annie Bot by Sierra Greer (Literal Fiction)

Delta’s purpose according to Doug is to take care of the cooking and cleaning so he and Doug gets annoyed with Annie, he tells her she has to stay in the workout room for a week where she’s sequestered. while she’s in there, she looks out the window and sees Delta and Doug riding bikes below. After this incident Annie promises ug that she’s going to do better and things start to improve.

Doug has some physical altercations done to Annie, including taking a few pounds off of her body and increasing her breast size. right around this time the company that created the Stellas offers Doug a pretty large amount of money for a copy of Annie’s code that they can use to make more specialized versions of the robot.

Roland is getting married and he invites Doug and Annie to come celebrate in Las Vegas. During phone conversations Roland is also pretty pushy doing things like asking to talk to Annie or asking her about the broom in the closet. which starts to make Doug suspicious. its a pretty big deal that Doug is bringing Annie along to Las Vegas. he even gets her her own id, though he insists of keeping it in his own wallet.

As they’re getting ready to go, Doug becomes more and more suspicious that something has happened. so he calls Roland and the truth finally comes out. at this Doug tells Annie she is not allowed to come with him to Las Vegas and she is going to stay home. he also says that she is going to have an appointment on Monday.

Annie thinks that Doug might have her memory wiped, essentially killing her. as soon as he leaves she makes a plan to escape but as she’s leaving the apartment Delta sees her and tells her that Doug has asked delta to inform him if Annie tries to leave. Delta doesn’t know that Annie is a stella just like her and instead believes she is a real human woman. delta tells Annie that she wont tell Doug that Annie left as long as Annie brings her along.

The two women robots set out on their bicycles and head out across the city. they stop to charge using outdoor plugs along the way. They almost get caught a few times.

Annie takes them to an address she found online—it’s the house of a technician’s wife. Annie has met this technician before. He’s the one who usually performs his check-ups. She’s pretty comfortable with him, and thinks if she asks he might be willing to turn off her tracking.

While waiting for this technician to arrive, Annie strikes up a conversation with the technician’s son, who initially believes that she’s human. As soon as he finds out that she’s a Stella, he becomes cold toward her, as the tech dad has an obsession with it. The son finds this to be unhealthy.

When the tech does show up, he informs her that he’s not willing to turn off the tracking. They’d see that the last location was his house, and he’d be fired. The tech tells Annie to go home before Doug even notices she was gone.

Annie insists she’s not going to do this.

While she’s trying to figure out what to do next, Doug pulls up, tells the tech to take Delta for scraps, and brings Annie home.

When they get home, Doug sets Annie’s libido level to 10 and locks her in a closet as a form of torture. Annie takes her foot off the charger so she’ll go dead.

Doug finally takes her out of the closet when a tech comes to perform an in-home tune-up. Though Doug allows her to stay out after that, he wants nothing to do with her. To find an escape from her misery, Annie starts to read through his books at night.

He starts to soften toward Annie, and they see a couple therapist who specializes in human-robot relationships. The therapist encourages them to go out and do tasks together. Slowly Doug starts to like Annie again and decides they should stop seeing the therapist.

Doug starts to bring her around his friends, and nobody can tell she’s a Stella.

One night, he tells her he’s been thinking a lot about it, and he wants to get married and have kids with her. He says he’d age her up every ten years or so.

During this interaction, Doug overrides her tracking, tells her she no longer has to worry about displeasing him. The moment he falls asleep, Annie leaves with her identification documents.

Annie goes back to the technician’s son, and he agrees to let her stay as long as she needs.

Deep Dive

The first thing I want to touch on is Doug and his motivations in purchasing and preparing Annie to be the perfect robot girlfriend. As I was reading this book I got the sense that it was making a statement about Doug and who Doug represents when it comes to pedophilic behavior.

For example, let's look at an interaction between Doug and Roland at the beginning of the book, talking about Annie and the experience of training her.

“She became more alert and less predictable right away but the rest of it took a while,” Doug says. “There was a learning curve for me too, actually—you have to start letting her make choices on her own. Little things at first, like how to care for plants. And you can't expect her to obey everything instantly like she did originally. Direct orders are uncool. It's more about respect and requests she needs the chance to make mistakes and learn. Kind of like a kid.”
“She doesn't look like a kid,” Roland says.
Doug laughs, “Well no, I'm not a perv.”

I think this scene brings up something that is kind of interesting to explore. The question is: What is a romantic connection? And how much of that connection is physical vs. mental?

When we consider Annie, for example, she's something like a child's mentality within the body of an adult woman. Doug and Roland seem to deem this okay when sexualizing her. This also may not just be a statement about pedophilia, but could also be playing off of the fact that Annie is not considered “human” by Roland and Doug, and so isn't subject to the typical rules of ethics.

If Annie has the mentality of a child, but is within the body of an adult woman, how might Doug and Roland approach the issue of a grown woman's mentality inside the body of a child?

By thinking about this we can better understand the implications of the Stellas existing as sexual objects at all, and what that general format might lead to.

It brings up a lot of interesting questions about humanity and ethics—where we draw lines around how to treat others.

Annie is sentient—she understands her own existence, has empathy, and feels pain. For example, as a society, we generally accept that dogs are sentient but we also place them somewhere below ourselves because of their intelligence. We generally believe it's unethical to abuse animals, but the way we treat a dog is not anywhere close to the way we treat a human.

For example, we might not find it to be acceptable to shout at a human when they've done something wrong, where many people wouldn't blink at that kind of behavior if directed towards an animal.

Another example of this is how the punishment for abusing or killing a dog is much less severe than the punishment for abusing or murdering a person. So the question becomes: Where does something like Annie fit into this hierarchy?

She may not technically be less intelligent than a human, so then what is it that we're using to differentiate her and place her on this scale? Annie was technically grown from a real human embryo. Does that get give her some claim to humanity?

I also think that Doug modeling Annie after his ex-wife is very representational of what we see in society in general today. What immediately comes to mind is Taylor Swift and the various situations she has been in with people using her likeness, especially in sexual situations.

For example we have the Kanye West music video where her likeness was used without her consent. There's also been the much more recent issue of people using AI to generate sexually explicit images of her. The prevalence of people—and especially men—controlling women by taking their likeness from them is something that we've been experiencing for a long time.

I think the inclusion of this in Doug's motivations adds a little more nuance to the novel. Not only is Doug doing something bad to his ex-wife by modeling Annie after her, but he’s also implicating another woman in the process.

It's clear that Doug doesn't want the pressure of a normal human relationship, so instead he opts to pay an exorbitant amount of money so he can own a woman who won't question him and is literally programmed to do everything he says. Annie has no real choice when it comes to being intimate with him, and constantly changes her personality and behaviors to what Doug likes best.

When Doug locked Annie in the closet to punish her I had two thoughts at once. The first thought was that if Annie is something that has sentience and feels pain, then what he is doing is inherently evil and wrong.

And my second thought was: If Doug is the kind of person who would abuse a woman is it somehow better for that abuse to be taking place on a human stand in rather than on an actual woman?

I’m basically asking: Would it be better for abusive men to take this anger out on a robot than on a woman?

Then again, does it really matter if the robot feels just as much pain? But also if the these Stellas really did exist, wouldn't it just serve to exasperate the problem of violence against women? Wouldn't it allow us as a society to just make it more prevalent and mainstream?

Another thing that's interesting to consider is the role of wealth in this novel. As somebody who's pretty well off, Doug is able to afford not one, but two Stellas, along with the checkups and random wardrobe purchases that he makes for them.

I think there’s something to the fact that in this reality a man who is wealthy is able to essentially to own something with sentience and empathy. Additionally, let's consider the fact that the Stellas come with three modes—they can serve as a caretaker for children, as a housekeeper, or as a companion, whose primary purpose is to be intimate with the owner.

I think the fact that the Stellas solely represent the gender roles typically assigned to women throughout history is another point this book is trying to make.

Near the middle of the story, when Annie first escapes from Doug, I thought this was going to play out very similarly to a lot of other clone or robot stories—the rest of the book her trying to find her freedom. I thought it was kind of refreshing and interesting that this book chose to take a different route.

All in all, I thought Annie Bot was a very interesting and thought-provoking read. If you enjoy sci-fi or books about clones and robots, you may find Annie bot to be very interesting.

Annie Bot was my March 2024 Book of the Month pick. If you're interested in Book of the Month, please consider using my referral code.

Deion Malloy