All Systems Red by Martha Wells
Rating: 3/5, average
I really loved the concept of this, but I wasn’t crazy about the execution.
All Systems Red is about a nonbinary asexual robot who went berserk in their last job and killed a bunch of their employers, so in their head they call themselves “murderbot” (thus the name of the series, The Murderbot Diaries). They’ve been refurbished by the company and set out on another assignment, this time as a security bot for a team of scientists who are scouting a planet to see if it has enough resources to be worth buying stock in.
Murderbot goes on a data-gathering run with two of the scientists, but they get attacked by some of the local fauna. There wasn’t anything in the reports they got about the insectoid hostile, so they go back through the paperwork and find out that certain things are missing and the reports appear to have been sabotaged or hacked. The rest of the book is them trying to find out why there is missing information in the documents and missing parts of their map.
All Systems Red is written in very spare prose and it’s easy to miss things. I had re-read sentences a lot because there was so much information packed into them. The plot made sense but it wasn’t very exciting; this is a somewhat bureaucratic scifi story. There was some fighting, but the main character mostly tried to avoid it because they’re a security bot and not a military bot and they don’t have a lot of combat training (though they’re very capable!).
The end made me feel like it ended before it should have. This is the first in a series, so they want you to buy the next books, but I felt like I had invested time in getting to know the characters and I’m not sure how many of them will be in the rest of the series.
The series is composed of short novels of 150 pages each, except for the final book 5, which is full-length. However, they’re all full price (about $10) for the Kindle books, which would run you $50 for the whole series. That’s not exorbitantly expensive, but it’s twice market price, so it feels really expensive, and if you look at the Amazon reviews most of them are complaining about the price.
It’s a good series and I really want to continue with it, but full price for half-size novels feels like a lot. I think it would have made more sense if they sold 1+2 and 3+4 together and then 5, and at $10 each, then the pricing scheme would feel more regular, but oh well. It’s a strange decision, but I can’t fault Tor for trying to make a little extra money on a popular series to cover the risk on lesser known books.
Back to the actual content, though, the thing I liked most about this book was the protagonist. Murderbot (they don’t have an official name and they don’t get a new one in this volume) is socially anxious and just wants to be left alone to watch her shows. This gives them a lot of opportunities to be funny, and they join the likes of Marvin from Hitchhiker’s Guide and K-2SO from Rogue One as a memorable snarky android.
“So, I’m awkward with actual humans. It’s not paranoia about my hacked governor module, and it’s not them; it’s me. I know I’m a horrifying murderbot, and they know it, and it makes both of us nervous, which makes me even more nervous. Also, if I’m not in the armor then it’s because I’m wounded and one of my organic parts may fall off and plop on the floor and no one wants to see that.”
Another funny section:
Then she added, “You know, you can stay here in the crew area if you want. Would you like that?”
They all looked at me, most of them smiling. One disadvantage in wearing the armor is that I get used to opaquing the faceplate. I’m out of practice at controlling my expression. Right now I’m pretty sure it was somewhere in the region of stunned horror, or maybe appalled horror.
Mensah sat up, startled. She said hurriedly, “Or not, you know, whatever you like.”
I said, “I need to check the perimeter,” and managed to turn and leave the crew area in a totally normal way and not like I was fleeing from a bunch of giant hostiles.
As much as Murderbot is funny and relatable and I like them, I’m not sure if I quite buy that an android could go a step beyond self-awareness to self-consciousness. They are part mechanical and part organic, but is the brain organic? I believe they usually have at least some part of their memories wiped after each assignment, so I wonder how many memories they have and how they developed so much self and social awareness. What were their programmers thinking when they made them? I think if the later books go into the utility of their mindset it could be really interesting.
I don’t know if I’ll continue with the rest of the series or not. I really like the main character, but I’m not sure if it’s going to be enough to carry the series, especially since the plot and the prose in this volume were kind of meh. If you’re a big scifi fan and you’re looking for something to get you through quarantine, I would check out the first volume though. The ebook is only $4 on Amazon, but keep in mind you could get hooked and the later volumes are pretty expensive. 😛
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