•   Publisher:    Tordotcom; First Edition (January 22, 2019)
•   Language:   English
•   Pages:         176
•    ISBN-10:   1250214718
•    ISBN-13:    978-1250214713
•    Author:       Martha Wells

All Systems Red (Murderbot Diaries #1)  by Martha Wells is a great little story.  When I first heard about a character called  ‘Murderbot’, I did not think I had any desire to read such a story, but now I’ve read almost everything in the series.

Murderbot is a humanoid-ish,partially mechanical, partially organic security unit (SecUnit) who has been rented out and assigned to protect a group of scientific researchers doing a survey of a new planet. Murderbot has hacked its governor module which gives it free will and would allow it to murder everyone if it decided to.  This has happened with other SecUnits in the past, but this SecUnit is basically a slacker doing the minimum it can get away with and preferring to spend its time isolated and watching entertainment channels, in effect soap operas. As things begin to go wrong, it is not clear whether it is some sort of sabotage or if it is just the normal shoddy prep work and set up from the ‘company’ that rents out the SecUnit and other supplies and systems for the survey.

While there is a lot of action and suspense and intrigue, the heart of this story is the internal dialogue of murderbot.  You can’t help but love this snarky socially anxious character who tries to pretend it really doesn’t care, but can’t help but develop feelings for the humans who are too ignorant to know it is just a SecUnit.

There are some underlying concepts in the book:  What does it mean to be human?  How much free will do we have?  What are some of our differences that make us stronger overall? And others that you might think about after you’ve finished, but mostly this is just a whole lot of fun. It is something altogether unexpected and delightful

This is a great little book.  I love the murderbot. I’ve read most of the rest of the “Murderbot Diaries” and I’ll likely include some reviews of the others in the future, but this first adventure with it is still my favorite.

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And if you like science fiction, check out my book.  

Plastiphobia – aka Plastivore by Matt Truxaw