All Systems Red - Martha Wells

I don’t read all that much pure science fiction these days, so I doubt that I would have become aware of Martha Wells’s Murderbot Series if I had not read a blogger’s review of All Systems Red, the first book in the series. As it turns out, there are currently four novellas of approximately 150 pages each, one 350-page novel, and one short story in the series - with a fifth novella scheduled for publication in 2021. All Systems Red was published in 2017, followed quickly in 2018 by the next three books. However, it was not until May 2020 that the Murderbot Diaries novel was published, so longtime fans of the series must have been thrilled to see it resumed.

The central character of All Systems Red, and of the whole series, is a “droid” supplied to planetary explorers and scientists somewhere in the distant future for security purposes when they are on the job far from any possible support or backup originating on Earth. The bots can be programmed and reprogrammed to perform various tasks, including becoming combat soldiers, as necessary. The particular group of scientists we encounter in All Systems Red has had the good (or bad, depending on how you look at it) fortune of having rented a bot smart enough to have hacked its own “governor module,” meaning that it is now capable of making its own decisions instead of always doing exactly what its humans tell it to do. Our bot, unknown to his humans, has dubbed himself “Murderbot.”

 

So what are Murderbot’s plans now? As you can tell from the book’s opening paragraph, not all that much, really:

 

            “I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.”

 

Murderbot is perfectly content to turn into a couch potato while performing the minimum required to keep his humans safe until they can be transported home by the company. But then something funny starts to happen: Murderbot starts to develop a personal relationship with the humans around him. And he hates that thought because he does not want to feel anything even remotely resembling a human emotion. He can’t wait to get back to watching his space operas, not realizing that he is learning all about what it is to be human from those same serials.

Bottom Line: All Systems Red does turn into quite a space thriller with good humans and bad humans using their bots to maim and kill each other over the potential profits the unknown planet might generate. But that’s not the kind of thing that will necessarily make readers anxious to get hold of the next book in the series. What hooks readers here, I think, is the idea that Murderbot is in the process of figuring out all for himself the meaning of his life. By the end of the novel, he is his own man. And I, for one, can’t wait to find out what’s next for this killer with a heart.