Paperback, 152 pages
English language
Published May 2015 by Tor.
All Systems Red is a 2017 science fiction novella by American author Martha Wells. The first in a series called The Murderbot Diaries, it was published by Tor.com. The series is about an artificial construct designed as a Security Unit, which manages to override its governor unit, thus enabling it to develop independence. It calls itself Murderbot, and likes to watch unrealistic soap operas. As it spends more time with some caring humans, it starts developing feelings that it does not care for.
As I’m doing a reread of the Murderbot Diaries book 1-3 before starting on the rest, this was book 1. It’s fairly short, straightforward and fastpaced. Read it within the day. On to the next
Quick impressions: Overall, this was a fun and light short novel with a good mystery and conspiracy element. The protagonist is a relatable character (come on, I am sure there are days you want to be left alone to stay home watching television) with a bit of good humor.
(Full review available on my blog soon).
I absolutely love Murderbot. A well paced, well told story. Can't wait to read the rest of the series!
I LOVED All Systems Red. Murderbot might be my new favorite character in all of Sci-Fi. I had to read this for my first grad school class at Emerson, and it was an overall winner. Highly recommended if you like Sci-Fi, or if you like character-driven stories that are quick-paced, with decent action and good suspense. I will most definitely be adding the other Murderbot books to my TBR pile.
I liked this, but it was also weirdly hard to pay attention to? Could be that no matter how I try, I’ll never be much for sci-fi. I think I’ll check out the other books in the series eventually, probably when there aren’t 8 billion holds on everything. I liked the snark and the world building enough to keep going, but I wanna revert to some non-sci-fi for a bit.
Murderbot is an ADHD icon and I love it.
the murderbot is SNARKY. i don't have much else to say about this book other than go read it, it's good and only 150 pages long
i do have one intelligent thing to say about it which is it raises a lot of interesting ideas regarding robot ethics and i hope she goes into that more in the sequels
I read this a couple weeks ago and could tell you approximately nothing about the plot! I remember having a nice time reading it? It's short, which is to its credit. There is some stuff about untrustworthy corporations, and the main character is a robot whose robot-ness seems to be a metaphor for neurodivergence of some kind? I don't know. It never really came together but also, hey, it was short.
This was nice. Extremely pulp, but managed to get at some larger ideas.
Absolutely delightful novella that manages to touch on big themes about what it means to be accepted as a person, and to deal with people when you're not sure, while staying fun, light read.
I have always loved stories about robots, AI's, bots or any sentient like machine.
This book reminded me again why I love these stories. It is excellent!
One thing that happened to me while reading the first chapters is that I automatically assigned a female gender to Murderbot. I don't why I did it, but Murderbot was so relatable to me, I created empathy for all its fears, anxiety and social awkwardness. But then it is clear that Murderbot doesn't have a gender, because it is a security bot, not a sexbot. I wonder if the book cover led me to think that. Although I showed it to my husband and he told it was a totally gender neutral bot in that cover.
Maybe that is proof of how engaging and well written the character is. It's all about what it means to be alive, what it means to exist …
I have always loved stories about robots, AI's, bots or any sentient like machine.
This book reminded me again why I love these stories. It is excellent!
One thing that happened to me while reading the first chapters is that I automatically assigned a female gender to Murderbot. I don't why I did it, but Murderbot was so relatable to me, I created empathy for all its fears, anxiety and social awkwardness. But then it is clear that Murderbot doesn't have a gender, because it is a security bot, not a sexbot. I wonder if the book cover led me to think that. Although I showed it to my husband and he told it was a totally gender neutral bot in that cover.
Maybe that is proof of how engaging and well written the character is. It's all about what it means to be alive, what it means to exist and think, no matter what or who you are. It was so interesting to be inside this bot's head and find out that it doesn't know what it wants, kinda like a human mind, all confused and asking why the universe existed:
It’s wrong to think of a construct as half bot, half human. It makes it sound like the halves are discrete, like the bot half should want to obey orders and do its job and the human half should want to protect itself and get the hell out of here. As opposed to the reality, which was that I was one whole confused entity, with no idea what I wanted to do. What I should do. What I needed to do.
And in their corner all they had was Murderbot, who just wanted everyone to shut up and leave it alone so it could watch the entertainment feed all day.
