All Systems Red (Murderbot Diaries #1) - spoiler-free review

One line review: Murderbot is an antisocial, depressed security robot who hates its job and wants nothing more than to watch TV shows, but unfortunately it is contractually obliged to save its humans.

All Systems Red is funny, interesting and fun to read the whole way through. It’s a story about a security robot named Murderbot who hacked its own operating system and is now a free agent. It doesn’t tell anyone this and instead uses its newfound privileges to download thousands of hours of TV shows. It is rented out to a team of researchers who are exploring a new planet, and it pretty quickly turns out that the team is in danger. Unfortunately for Murderbot that means it has to stop watching TV shows and save its humans.

The story itself is pretty bland, especially if you’re expecting an intricately plotted space opera, but that doesn’t detract much from the enjoyment because the point of the story is to get us invested in the plight of this robot who has freedom and now has to figure out what to do with that freedom. The world building is pretty sparse, aside from some good descriptions of the planet. This too makes sense. After all, Murderbot doesn’t care about what the place looks like, and we’re seeing and hearing everything from its perspective. Same goes for the humans in the story. Murderbot didn’t care much whether they lived or died for at least the beginning of the book, so why would it try to make you care very much or even be able to tell the characters apart?

The sentence fragments and otherwise informal writing style took me a while to get used to, but it fits Murderbot’s character so I can just assume the style was intentional. This book is a funny and unique sci-fi novella from a robot’s perspective. There’s nothing not to like. I’m super excited to get into the rest of the series.

Four stars.

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