All Systems Red

After getting a friend to read Murderbot, I decided I needed to read it again immediately. Good news, it holds up.

All Systems Red is the first installment of the Murderbot diaries, a humorous SF (mostly) novella series by Martha Wells. Its reluctant protagonist is Murderbot, a security robot contract worker made to accompany clients on different missions so they don't get themselves killed.

Despite being designed for expressly this, Murderbot is far more interested in watching TV. It's like the assassin version of an office worker who lets calls ring out while they listen to podcasts and play 2048. And perhaps in the future, after the current onslaught of terrible generative AI, this is where we'll end up: humans don't want to work, so they build robots to work for them so they can watch TV. But the robots end up not wanting to work either, so they can watch TV.

Murderbot does not dream of labor, does not like eye contact, fast forwards through sex scenes, and more than anything wants to be left alone. Wells' representation of queerness and neurodiversity (really, anyone who feels alienated or exhausted by the world) in this character is endearing and multifaceted.

Murderbot puts up a front of being detached and lazy, but it cannot help but turn it on in a crisis. It may not be great at its job, but it is great at what it does. And, it cares deeply — far more than is convenient or comfortable — about its humans and protecting innocent, kind people from coming to harm. It has tugged out the altruistic threads of its being and replaced the rest with special interests. It is me working at the public library, but if I could do a push-up.

2018 review: This was a fun and funny novella. A socially awkward nevertheless endearing genderless robot protagonist is...a lot of things. But somehow it worked! It's not a heavy read, but Wells touches on deeper themes about how empathy and autonomy relate to one's identity. I have a soft spot for not-so-human characters unfamiliar with societal expectations looking to pop culture for solace and understanding—the only other examples of this I can come up with off the cuff are Stranger Things and Lilo & Stitch. There's something so delightful about finding an entity especially capable of if not outright designed for destruction so enraptured by books and movies and music.I'd recommend All Systems Red to those in search of some light quick sci-fi fun. Spend a rainy afternoon with a cyborg more scared of prolonged eye contact than stampeding into bloodshed. Because at the end of the day (literally), sometimes more than anything, we all just want to watch our shows and be left alone.