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All Systems Red


 

This year Martha Wells won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel. Her winning novel was Network Effect. I have never read anything by Martha Wells. I discovered that Network Effect is the fifth book in The Murderbot Diaries series. I decided I had better start at the beginning with the first book: All Systems Red. It turns out All Systems Red won the Hugo, the Nebula Award, and other awards in 2018 for best novella.

The main character calls itself ‘Murderbot’. It is a SecUnit: a security unit, owned by “the company” and contracted out to provide security for survey teams or anyone else who needed security. The Murderbot is some kind of a cyborg, part human and part machine, but it is more machine than human.  It has artificial intelligence and human brain tissue. It does not have status a as person, hence it can be owned. All SecUnits come with governor modules that govern what they can and cannot do. Well, they are supposed to have governor modules. This particular SecUnit had a troubled history. Due to a malfunctioning governor module, it had gone on some kind of rampage and killed a lot of people. It was because of this incident that it decided to call itself Murderbot.  It did not want that to happen again, so it took matters into its own hands, and hacked its own governor module. Now, it pretends to be a normal SecUnit and does its job the way it is supposed to, but we hear the snarky inner thought that its clients never hear.

The story is narrated by the Murderbot, so we do hear those irreverent comments that no SecUnit is supposed to think. This particular SecUnit is really more interested in watching entertainment feeds than doing much of anything else. What really sold me on this book is the humor. It is not a comedy, but there are moments reading Murderbot’s commentary that made me laugh out loud.

I am referring to it as “it” because it has no gender. There are no genitalia or sex hormones, and no sexual desires. As I said, it is mostly machine. Yet we feel there is a human inside there somewhere, otherwise why would it be so addicted to human entertainment serials. And it must have something akin to a guilty conscience after the malfunction killed all those people, so it took action to prevent that in the future. And it seems like the fact that it calls itself Muderbot, is an act of penance. There is perhaps a bit of self-loathing that is numbed by the entertainment feeds. The humans don’t know it calls itself Murderbot. They just refer to it as “SecUnit”. They have no idea what is going on under the surface.

 It dislikes being too close to humans, but it does its job well. It protects its human clients above and beyond the call of duty. It claims to do these things to cover up the fact that it has a hacked governor module. But we suspect there is a little more to it than that. Some of the clients, which it calls “my humans,” must feel it too. There are some that almost want to take up something like a “free the android” cause, but they are reminded not to say such things as it makes the SecUnit uncomfortable. Such talk does make the Murderbot uncomfortable. It wants to keep a low profile, and it really does get uncomfortable when humans get too close. The only humans it really likes interacting with (if you can call it that) are the ones it enjoys watching on the entertainment feeds.

Martha Wells had to know when she was writing this that it was going to be part of a series. Sometimes when you read the first book of a series, you are left with a very unsatisfying ending that doesn’t resolve much. This book comes to a logical conclusion, but still allows us to see that there is more in store for Murderbot.


Star Liner

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