After my hip surgery last month, I was prescribed a number of medications. Oxycodone and aspirin (as a blood thinner) and an anti-nausea med I don't remember the name of. The oxy, like all opiates I've ever taken, only barely dealt with the surgical pain, and also made me violently nauseous, which I kind of expected. The anti-nausea med, unfortunately, didn't help. In fact, I'm pretty sure, based on the timing of when I took the pills and when I started vomiting, that it made things worse. My biology is weird, I guess, but this time I got lucky: I quit taking the oxycodone after the first day, and my pain levels were fine and so was my stomach, more or less.
Bodies are strange. Which is why it was so hard for me to believe in the world of AUTONOMOUS. The idea of bio-based tech is cool and interesting and very cyberpunky the way Newitz writes it, but I just wasn't quite able to suspend my disbelief enough to get immersed in a world where biological organisms, from single-celled bacteria to human brains, are programmable. Biology is unpredictable in a way that computers aren't!
That said, this book was fun, punchy, vivid, adventurous. For fans of Cory Doctorow and Margaret Killjoy.