All Systems Red

What is going on over here? Three reviews in a row? And two of them are for books??? Yes dear reader, yes indeed, I have to catch up after all on my goal to read 15 books in a year that I arbitrarily set for myself even though games like The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy and now Hollow Knight: Silksong were coming out this year. What a fantastic idea I must say.

Anyway. All Systems Red is the first book of The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells.

I bought the whole series (and a couple extra books) from the recent Humble Bundle—which will last for another week at the time of writing—and decided to give it a proper try, as I’ve heard good things about it for a while.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that most of the books are rather short novellas, that can easily be read in under 4 hours, there is a proper novel down the line though, which I’m interested in checking out at some point.

All Systems Red follows Murderbot, a SecUnit tasked with protecting a group of humans surveying an undocumented planet.

SecUnits are constructs built from human and mechanical parts, made to kill and follow orders. They are owned by some nameless mega-corporation to be sold as slaves for a variety of contracts.

This Murderbot character in particular managed to hack its governor module, making it capable of disobeying orders if desired. However, instead of becoming a mass murderer or looking for freedom, it just wants to be left alone and watch its favorite TV shows downloaded from the company’s archives, while still acting as a SecUnit is expected to act.

The plot is a simple “someone is trying to kill us so we got to escape from the planet,” however, what makes this story great is how everything is told from Murderbot’s perspective.

This character is pretty relatable! It’s uncomfortable around humans, it doesn’t want to talk about it, it wants to do its job and go back to its room and watch some shows and just get it over with. Just like me!

The rest of the cast is rather forgettable, they are not the focus of the story at all, but they work and act like actually smart human scientists, which is nice to see. Especially after I watched all of the Alien movies where pretty much everyone but the protagonist dies for dumb reasons.

Overall, this works as an introduction to what this character is about and I am looking forward to seeing more of Murderbot in this interesting universe. There’s some worldbuilding but a lot of things are still left unexplored.

This is the first book I read on my phone in a while, but I’ll continue the series on my Kobo because I like all my stats in one place.

By the way, Kev read the book too!, so check his own thoughts if you want to know a different perspective—although he liked it quite a bit too.

Looking forward to the rest of the series!