All Systems Red

Comfort food for a rainy day. This is a short novella and a quick read. Murderbot is the security semi organic robot that guards a survey team on a distant planet.Things start to go wrong and Murderbot ultimately fixes things, almost. There are a couple of crisis points where he's (she) is damaged and starts shutting down, but those moments are saved by one or more of the humans. The story is a nice romp of "Who is trying to kill us and why?" with a very satisfying ending that subverts reader expectations and sets us up for further adventures.

A few points.

Murderbot is the name it gives itself after incidents that happen long before this story. What he really wants for himself is to sit quietly in a corner and watch TV shows on his inner digital feed. To that end he's disabled some of the control systems built into his central module and is semi-autonomous.

He/she/it is genderless but, like dogs are always boys and cats are always girls, I see it as a male figure. The others in the story struggle to relate to both his robot element and his organic human element.

The characters is this story are not fleshed out at all. They are two dimensional in most cases. This is probably because the narrator is a robot and does not understand depth of personality or human inner conflict etc.

There is humour here but only of the robot being innocent of the motivations of humans and indifferent to their feelings. He mostly operates in his own little bubble of ironic observation. The story ends with that humour turned on himself as he becomes more human than he would have imagined at the beginning of the book.