All Systems Red: BooK 1: Murderbot Diaries – Book

All System Red: Book 1 of The Murderbot Diariesby Martha Wells is an instant hit with me. It is a fine addition to the science fiction and artificial intelligence genres. There is a picture of our particular murderbot on the cover of the book but even the term for this class of robots is designed to instill fear. Encountering one could make you start looking back over your life in case you might be a target. Murderbots are big, they are a combination of organic and mechanical elements, which seems like a poor design for a bot that constantly encounters violence and woeful bodily injuries, injuries which can only be repaired with the help of human or tech systems. Many a murderbot ends up on a scrap heap.

But our murderbot is not happy with his assigned role in society. He (it seems like a he) has figured out how to escape the control of HubSystems by overriding his governor module. If a regular murderbot is scary, a rogue murderbot could turn your hair white if it decided that it liked killing and went on a campaign of mass murdering. But our bot discovers 35,000 entertainment modules buried in the  hub system which it can now download at will. He starts binging on series created for human entertainment and he begins to resent any time that he is asked to do the work he was designed to do.

In this first adventure Murderbot finds himself assigned by the company to a group of scientists doing research on an unnamed planet. Mysterious things begin to happen and his humans (horror of horrors) seem to want to befriend him. Martha Wells, you did a good thing, writing The Murderbot Diaries for us to enjoy. I have already moved on to Book 2. These are not long books, sort of a small tray of four tasty amuse bouche. Martha Wells won a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award for best novella All Systems Red.

Photo Credit: From a Google Image Search – Tor.com

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