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| Sierra Greer (photo: Dittmeier) |
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Sierra Greer is a writer and former high school English teacher. She holds an M.A. in the Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University, and lives in rural Connecticut. Her debut novel, Annie Bot (Mariner Books), features a sentient female robot, her human owner, and the developing power dynamics between them.
How did you develop the concept for this novel?
Where something starts is not necessarily where it's going. Annie Bot was not an AI idea in the first place at all. I'm a very organic writer; I don't plan things out. I don't have outlines, typically. I was taking a break from another novel that wasn't working, and I started tinkering around with this consciousness that woke up in a closet. She turned into this robot-maid, and I wrote a short story about her. At the end of that short story, this other robot Annie showed up. Afterward I was really intrigued with this other character--this Annie person--who was much more advanced. I thought she could really be borderline human. What could I do with her if she's got these qualities of being a machine but she's also evolving?
Then I started following Annie's character and she showed up with Doug, her owner. From the very first page, there was this dynamic between them that felt way out of my normal comfort zone. I thought, "I'm not going to tell anybody about this. I'm not going to define it. I'm just going to write this and see what happens." I wrote the first draft and things got so intricate and so complicated and so intriguing between them. I was really satisfied.
Then, of course, people started asking when I first learned about AI. And I did start hearing about Google Brain back in 2018. That was the first time I was aware that there was this machine that taught itself a better way to translate languages. So, I was aware while I was writing Annie Bot that there was curious stuff happening with AI, but it didn't directly inform the novel. I really came to it just from the perspective of a writer trying to follow a really intriguing story.
What was it like crafting a story from the perspective of a character like Annie?
Do you remember reading Flowers for Algernon and there was this character who was a quintessential unreliable narrator who didn't know what his limitations were? I felt like that for Annie. She's not technically a narrator, but the story's told from her perspective. We know as readers what's going on with her, but she herself doesn't know. And to me that's really fascinating: the difference between what she knows as a robot and what I know as a human. The real challenge was to make sure she became more aware gradually. How to deal with this consciousness as she is evolving, as she's different from a human, as she wants to be human? One of the things I remember hearing early on about writing is you need to have a character who really wants something. In this book, Annie really wants to please Doug. And she believes she can please him by becoming more human. But by becoming more human, she becomes someone who's not really who he wants. Playing around with that was fascinating. It made me think a lot about what I want in relationships and what it takes for me to feel human and how I see media portraying relationships where people are not always sensitive or kind to each other.
One other thing, too: it does matter that I was writing this story in the pandemic. Annie and Doug are so closed in in that apartment, and I think I was familiar with that sense of being trapped that we all had back in 2020.
What were some of the larger world-building and technical elements that were most important to you for this kind of story?
That all really evolved, too. There were parts of the book--for instance, when Annie runs away--when I had to contemplate what she was going to do, plot-wise. That's when I had to consider: What is the status of these creatures across the United States? Maybe they have a different status in Las Vegas where they can be prostitutes. Maybe they have a different status in Florida where they need manual labor in fields. Maybe in Canada they're accepted more. That's when I really had to think about how wide-scale the issue was, and I had to figure out each one of those puzzle pieces in order for the story to go forward. The process of it happening, the world-building, was just as intricate and detailed and evolving as her character.
In terms of the bot mechanics, that sort of thing was really fun. I had to decide if she had hair that grows. And then, biologically, does she have fingerprints? DNA? The story needed that. And then I figured out there were different formats of the machine: Abigail, Cuddlebunny, Nannies. I thought it was really interesting that the woman's roles were limited to these three things that were all versions of domesticity, of the private domain and not having outside jobs and not being scientists and not being leaders. And then I realized there needed to be men as well. So, I had to come up with parallel men robots. Every time I came up with another aspect of the robot world, I was chuckling to myself because I was like, "this is kind of playing on what's happening in the real world with real humans." I felt like I could throw that in there without making a big point about it. Because to me that's all background noise to the real story.
How did Doug transform as a character?
He was a very difficult character to balance correctly. There are so many things about him that are awful. But people are not one-sided. People who do terrible things can often do really wonderful things, too. I somehow needed him to be real and believable, and I couldn't have him be believable if he was a consistent asshole. That wouldn't work, and it's familiar. Oh yeah, another man character who's just a jerk. I've seen that in fiction, and I don't think that's fair to men or to women.
I really thought a lot about his family. That doesn't show up much in the book because he doesn't talk about his family. But I know things for him were complicated growing up, and he brings that into his relationship, just like his relationship with his ex clearly impacts his relationship with Annie. He had to keep evolving, I couldn't leave him static.
Really, they changed each other. She clearly had an impact on him. There's a line in the novel where he says something really insightful about how she's actually an extension of him. When I came up with that understanding of the novel, I could have given it to another character. But to me it was really important that it was Doug who made that discovery because it showed there's a lot more going on behind the scenes with him. He's maybe not a guy who wants to talk about his feelings all the time but that doesn't mean he's oblivious. --Alice Martin