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.
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