Annalee Newitz

Scholars of science fiction agree that one of the two major questions that run through the writer Philip K. Dick's large body of work is this: What is human? The most obvious example of this is in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which became the movie Blade Runner.

Having read all but one of the fiction works by current SF writer Annalee Newitz, I would say that a version of that question is also what underlies their work. The difference is the question for Newitz has become: What is a person? 

And there is an extension: Who has the power to decide the answer?

I previously read Newitz's 2023 novel The Terraformers, which was about corporate power in making that decision on a planet over several millennia. Are sentient trains people? What about cat journalists? 

Then there was their much more recent novella Automatic Noodle, which is about social and state power as it affects self-aware bots in San Francisco. 

Now there's the new novel A Wall Is Also a Road, which I just finished. This book is about power within academia, but this is the academy as none of us have ever imagined it. No spoilers from me on that, but it's not news to say the book combines that story line with visits to Pompeii before the eruption of Vesuvius.

I really enjoyed the book, even though originally I found the title completely confounding. I have now learned to trust Newitz, and have to go back and find their first novel, Autonomous.