eBook, 149 pages
English language
Published Jan. 1, 2018 by Tor Books.
It has a dark past—one in which a number of humans were killed. A past that caused it to christen itself “Murderbot”. But it has only vague memories of the massacre that spawned that title, and it wants to know more.
Teaming up with a Research Transport vessel named ART (you don’t want to know what the “A” stands for), Murderbot heads to the mining facility where it went rogue.
What it discovers will forever change the way it thinks…
I enjoyed this one quite a bit. The addition of ART (the asshole research transport) gave this one a completely new angle as our murderbot and the ship solve this next "case" together. I am looking forward to more stories and please keep ART.
I snatched this up the minute it came out, and devoured it. It may actually manage to be even better than the first novella!
This is a book you will love if you love Murderbot, which I assume you do, because otherwise why are you reading book two? Murderbot goes places, meets people (both human and construct) and does stuff, but my questions is, what is it about? Because I feel like it is about something, but what? What's the theme?
Maybe the theme is about extending trust against the possibility of betrayal. At one point, Murderbot points out to another construct that they can never really be friends, since a human could always order either of them to betray the other. Then there is the title, Artificial Conditions, which is directly referenced in the book: A character says "fear [is] an artificial condition. It’s imposed from the outside. So it’s possible to fight it. " (In the context spoken, Murderbot thinks, reasonably, that this is terrible advice.)
So perhaps this is …
This is a book you will love if you love Murderbot, which I assume you do, because otherwise why are you reading book two? Murderbot goes places, meets people (both human and construct) and does stuff, but my questions is, what is it about? Because I feel like it is about something, but what? What's the theme?
Maybe the theme is about extending trust against the possibility of betrayal. At one point, Murderbot points out to another construct that they can never really be friends, since a human could always order either of them to betray the other. Then there is the title, Artificial Conditions, which is directly referenced in the book: A character says "fear [is] an artificial condition. It’s imposed from the outside. So it’s possible to fight it. " (In the context spoken, Murderbot thinks, reasonably, that this is terrible advice.)
So perhaps this is about Murderbot confronting fears; fears of its past, fears of letting someone get close, fears of being responsible for humans' safety again. Then again, maybe this title was selected by the editor and means nothing.
Unrelated (I think?) there's also a great moment where Murderbot gets past its contempt for other constructs, ComfortUnits/sexbots. It's not called out in text, but Murderbot goes from referring to them exclusively as sexbots, to referring to them as ComfortUnits, which although I have no real idea how they think of themselves, but it seems like the sort of minimal effort to be polite one puts into interacting with peers.
Murderbot continues to be equal parts snarky and charming, with a great deal of fun adventure thrown in. Whatever is a newly-free cyborg supposed to do with itself? Figure out why its memory is so spotty, obviously.
