All Systems Red
by Martha Wells
Author's Description:
“‘As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure.’
In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety.
But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern.
On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid — a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is.
But when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and their Murderbot to get to the truth.”
In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety.
But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern.
On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid — a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is.
But when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and their Murderbot to get to the truth.”
My Review - Rating - 7.5/10
All Systems Red, and the entire Murderbot Diaries series, are interesting books with an original premise. In addition to the mystery/action plot, I was interested in Murderbot’s attempts to find his place in the world, and increasing emotional ties to the humans he works for or helps. The series has good writing, which effectively conveys the plot, and adds to the story, but isn’t exceptional, and the one great main character (Murderbot) and a couple of good side characters (who don’t come into play in the first book, so no spoilers) aside, most of the characters are one-dimensional, and you don’t really care if they live or die. This doesn’t take away from the book - Murderbot is pretty cynical and detached, and so by not making the other characters too interesting or likable, this makes the reader share Murderbot’s feelings and not regard him as an amoral monster. I didn’t have any criticisms of the books themselves - they’re all good reads, but unfortunately, the pricing on them is insane. The books are all around two hundred pages, and an average reader could probably get through one of them in about three to four hours. This isn’t too crazy on its own, but even the kindle version of the books is over ten dollars! I went through the first two books on a four-hour train ride, and then stopped because paying over five dollars per hour is far too expensive for books of good, and only good, quality. Just because of the price, I wouldn’t recommend reading this series, as no single book has a super satisfying ending, and reading through the entire series would cost over sixty dollars for just eleven hundred pages of writing.
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