This book appeared in an ad on
Facebook and the cover caught my attention. Then I read the blurb and was
further intrigued, so I borrowed it from Kindle Unlimited.
All Systems Red is a sci-fi
novella by Martha Wells. It is about the musings of a manufactured cybernetic
organism that refers to itself as a Murderbot because of an incident it was
involved in at a time before this story takes place. The being is actually a
mobile security system charged with making sure a small group of scientists on
a distant planet are safe.
I'll say at the outset that I
am a little cold on this story. I liked the idea and was hoping it would be
better than it is. Unfortunately, there didn't really seem to be a point to the
story, and it left me with a lot of questions. There are five more stories in
the series and would be willing to read the rest of them, but not at the price
the entire series costs. Each book is about 150 pages and the sell for $10.
Sorry, but I don't think I am going to pay that much to read the books not on
Unlimited.
I will also add that, as far as
reviews are concerned, I find myself in the minority of readers who absolutely
love this book and the rest of the series. Amazon shows an average rating of
4.5 out of five with 13,411 rating/reviews and Goodreads reports a 4.16 out of
five with a whopping 129,148 rating/reviews.
Perhaps I missed something or
just don't get it. I don't know. But I wasn't impressed enough to invest in the
rest of the series.
An androgynous cybernetic
organism who is charged with protecting a small group of scientists is having
problems. It has a broken control chip and has more or less gone rogue, but it
cannot override its own programming to set aside its mission. So, it avoids any
contact with the people it’s supposed to protect and prefers to spend its time
alone watching downloaded vids of television shows. When it is called into
service to perform is programmed duty, it does so very well, but when the
members of the scientific team reach out to it to make it part of the team, it
rejects all attempts and sulks in its compartment, feeling sorry for itself.
The Murderbot is an antisocial
machine/human organism that spends a lot of time hating its job and the people
it is programmed to serve. It is supposed to be androgynous, but I didn't see
it that way. From the very first page of the book, the prose screams that the
being is more female oriented as opposed to neutral.
I've racked my brain trying to
find a favorite plot point to talk about, but I cannot find one. This is just a
sad story about a sad artificial intelligent being with consciousness.
I really wanted to love this
story, but I neither loved it nor hated it. It's just kind of there. As I said
before, I might have missed the point and your milage may vary. If I try to
come up with a theme, the entire time I read this book I thought about Douglas
Adams' Hitchhiker’s Guide character, Marvin the Paranoid Android. But Adams did
it better.
This book didn't inspire me to
read on in the series and the cost of the rest of the books put me off even
more.
All Systems Red has enjoyed a
lot of acclaim along with the high ratings, winning a bunch of prestigious
awards. I find myself somewhat baffled by this because while it isn't trash; I
have read many far better stories.
It is well written and easy to
follow, but there just isn't much there for me.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Well, there it is...
Qapla!
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