All Systems Red
Ratings1,715
Average rating4.1
All Systems Red is a short, fast-paced page-turner that, at the same time, touches very briefly on several interesting aspects of corporate culture, human greed, teamwork, and assimilation. It points out several pertinent topics with an amazing economy of words, which turns out to be more effective than long essays or philosophical dissertations. I enjoyed the short novel for its interesting portrayal of the AI protagonist, subtle humour, incessant thrills, and its potential to make the reader ponder the positive and negative effects of a technology that can alter the experience of being human.
Kun uusi Hertta Kustannus julkisti ensimmäisen kuvastonsa, Instagramissa iloittiin. Useampikin kirjoista herätti ihastusta, mutta erityisesti kiinnostuin Martha Wellsin Murhabotin päiväkirjat -sarjan vastaanotosta. Sarja oli minulle ennestään ihan tuntematon. Vuonna 1964 syntynyt Wells on pitkän linjan scifi- ja fantasiakirjoittaja, joka julkaisi esikoisteoksensa The Element of Fire vuonna 1993. Wells ehti kerätä palkintokaappiinsa ehdokkuuksia aiemminkin, muun muassa parhaan romaanin Nebula-palkinnon ehdokkuuden, mutta varsinaisesti palkintohanat aukesivat Murhabottien myötä. Tämä sarjan ensimmäinen osa voitti parhaan novellan eli pienoisromaanin Hugon, Locuksen ja Nebulan ja lisäksi Alex-palkinnon. Sarjan muutkin osat ovat voittaneet palkintoja ja vuonna 2021 sarja sai parhaan sarjan Hugo-palkinnon. Hugo, Locus ja Nebula ovat scifi- ja fantasiakirjallisuuden tärkeimpiä palkintoja, joten saavutus on komea. Sarjassa on toistaiseksi ilmestynyt viisi pienoisromaania, yksi täyspitkä romaani ja pari novellia. Seuraava osa tulee englanniksi loppuvuodesta 2023. Sarja kertoo Murhabotista, joka on nimensä mukaisesti tappamiseen suunniteltu turvallisuusandroidi. Ulkoasultaan se on ihmismäinen ja siinä on biologisiakin osia. Tällainen robotti on otettava mukaan avaruusmatkoille ihmisten turvaksi ja niissä hommissa Murhabottikin on: hän on kaukaiselle planeetalle lähetetyn tutkimusryhmän mukana. Oikeastaan Murhabotti ei välitä ihmisistä. Hän on onnistunut hakkeroimaan oman hallintamoduulinsa ja on ladannut muistinsa täyteen saippuasarjoja. Murhabotti oikeastaan haluaisi katsella niitä ja välttelee ihmisten kanssa toimimista. Tutkijat joutuvat kuitenkin vaikeuksiin, sillä joku haluaa pahaa tutkimusryhmälle, ja Murhabotin on puolustettava ihmisiä, koska se on hänen työnsä. Tarina on tosiaan pienoisromaanimittainen. Kirja on 190-sivuinen, mutta sen verran väljästi taitettu, että sen lukee nopeasti. Niinpä tarinakin etenee vauhdilla, eikä suotta aikaile käänteissään. Nopeus on valttia, sillä itse tarinassa ei ole mitään kovin ihmeellistä. Se on hauska ja jännittävä pieni seikkailu, jonka Martha Wells kertoo näppärästi, sujuvasti ja mustan huumorin sävyttämänä. Suomennoksesta vastaa kokenut fantasian ja scifin suomentaja Mika Kivimäki, joka on tehnyt hyvää työtä. Se ihmeellinen puoli tässä tarinassa on itse Murhabotti. Hän on erittäin vastahakoinen sankari, joka ei haluaisi näyttää naamaansa ihmisille ja käyttäytyy erittäin ujosti ja introvertisti. Kovaotteisten ja kaikkeen kykenevien scifisankarien joukossa sellainen on virkistävää. Moni kirjojen ystävä suhtautuu itse ihmisiin epäluuloisesti, joten mikäpä sen mukavampaa kuin välillä kohdata sellaisia päähenkilöitä tarinoissa, joissa sellaista ei useinkaan näe. Murhabotti on myös hauskasti tietoinen siitä, miten kehnoa työtä hän on ja suhtautuu omistajayhtiöönsä ivallisesti ja työhönsä välinpitämättömästi.
Tunnustuksen aika: minä en oikeastaan tiedä, missä olemme. Tutkimuspaketissa on, tai ainakin pitäisi olla, planeetan täydellinen satelliittikartta. Sen avulla ihmiset päättivät, missä tehdä tutkimuksensa. En ollut vielä katsonut karttoja, olin hädin tuskin vilkaissut koko tutkimuspakettia. Pitää sanoa puolustuksekseni, että olimme olleet täällä kaksikymmentäkaksi planetaarista vuorokautta, eikä minun ollut tarvinnut tehdä muuta kuin seisoskella ympäriinsä katselemassa, kuinka ihmiset skannasivat tai ottivat näytteitä maaperästä, kivistä, vedestä ja lehdistä. Asiassa ei ollut hätäisyyden tunnetta. Olette myös saattaneet panna merkille, että minua ei oikeastaan kiinnosta.
Artifical Condition
Keinotekoinen olotila
This was short which is a pro and a con, but it laid the groundwork for me to want to read more. I will be reading book #2 mostly out of curiosity but also a little because I like how chippy, confused, awkward, and protective Murderbot is.
In general, the relationship between Murderbot and the rest of the crew is cute, almost like enemies-to-friends or awkward-girl-dates-jock, just because of the self-preservation and poking and miscommunicating everyone is doing.
Ik heb nog niets dan lof gehoord over The Murderbot serie van Martha Wells, dus mijn verwachtingen waren wel hoog toen ik in deze eerste novelle dook.
Veel mensen zijn bijzonder gecharmeerd door het personage van Murderbot en voor ik dit boek las, verwachtte ik een soort Marvin, the paranoid android-achtig personage, vol sarcasme en humor.
“but you may have notices that when I do manage to care, I'm a pessimist.”
Hoewel Murderbot ook een zekere sarcastische humor bezit, is dit met toch een iets serieuzere ondertoon dan de robot uit Hitchhicker's guide. Een robot met sociale angst, die ongemakkelijk wordt van interacties met vreemden en oogcontact. Sjah, niet moeilijk te bedenken waarom verstokte boekenwurmen een zwak hebben voor dit personage. Voor mij zie ik zeker potentieel om dezelfde soort verliefdheid voor Murderbot te ontwikkelen, maar op basis van dit ene boekje ben ik er nog niet helemaal. Het verhaal is voor mij te kort en oppervlakkig om helemaal verliefd te worden.
Wel veel potentieel en ik ben zeer zeker geïntrigeerd om verder te lezen in de serie en nader kennis te maken. Al met al was dit eerste boek vooral gewoon leuk en snel uit te lezen, een plezante voorzet voor het vervolg van de serie.
ETH.3N from Call of Duty Infinite Warfare meets Bicentennial Man. Not as thought-provoking and complex as the casual name drop comparisons it offers: Westworld and Ex Machina. But I did enjoy the characters—well their set-up as this is a series—and the possibilities that this Murderbot with a heart can reach. I think a more apt pop culture comparison would be Detroit Become Human. Perhaps the follow-up books in the series will get more into the desired complexities.
In continuing my reading of short books, I picked up All Systems Red, the first of The Murderbot Diaries. It's about 90 pages long, and I highly enjoyed it. I want to continue the series right away, which rarely happens for me. Usually I want a break so I don't get tired of a series and its characters. I know many people can binge things – such as television – but I can only take things in chunks. (Usually.)
The story is from the point-of-view of a “murderbot,” a type of rented android on a mission with some humans in order to protect them. Since the story is so short and things about the murderbot are revealed, I don't want to say too much. But what happens in the beginning is unexpected, and our murderbot has to work with the humans in ways it didn't think it would. It's an unusual situation.
All Systems Red really throws you into its sci-fi world and I did find it a little difficult to orient myself. It wasn't until maybe a third or even halfway through the book until I started to understand the “feed” system. I still don't know how it really works. Somehow humans and murderbots all have some neurological link to a feed. They are able to access information and even talk to each other through it. I don't know how it works. Additionally, it became clearer what exactly a SecUnit/murderbot is as the story progressed, but it wasn't spelled out.
I can't say I dislike that. I like stories that don't just lay everything out in exposition. In my opinion, it's better to let the reader see how the characters live their lives, and then the reader can make their own conclusions. Perhaps it could have been a little cleaner, though. I wasn't sure if there were typos, unclear editing, or just poor sentence structure, but sometimes I was a little confused on what was happening.
The action of the story really kept it moving and I could hardly put the book down, which is impressive to me since so few things hold my attention these days. I love the ending of the book, and like I said up top, can't wait to continue the series.
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On the first page, I had a thought that I didn't think this was for me ... and then when I got up to make dinner, somehow I was halfway through the book? And now I'm waiting to get the second one from the library? I am not a sci-fi gal, but if you strip away the whole being-on-another-planet-with-humanoid-robots thing, it's a familiar story of a group of people just trying to do their work and escape another group that wants them dead. And the narrator is a semi-organic unit that just wants to watch TV and be left alone, and who refers to itself as Murderbot, and also has some thoughts about whether humanoids deserve autonomy in the wider world.
I'm not doing a good job of selling it. I enjoyed it, and to be honest I was feeling real bummed about the fact that I'd gotten halfway way through February before finishing a single flippin book, so the fact that I finished All Systems Red in two days was a bonus.
short and great
I could've read this in 1 sitting if I had the time. No unnecessary filler to get through. Not too much focus on combat. A great read!
Well, I finally have time to write about this book.
My rating of this book is closer to 3.5, maybe 3.75 at certain points (particularly the end).
I am honestly kind of surprised at how I felt about this book at the end. I've heard so many good things about The Murderbot Diaries. I mean, it won an award. That's something to be impressed by. I was hyped and ready to read this book and got excited when I rented the audiobook from my library. And then at the end, I was left with this weird feeling of shock.
This is definitely not a bad book. It's a good one! But I think my problem is that my expectations were too high and it didn't quite reach the levels I was expecting based on all the praises I've heard of it.
My main problem is with the narration and characters. Murderbot is a very intriguing character, at least at first. A robotic construct (the book describes it as a mixture of organic and robotic, so I always imagined it to be some kind of cyborg android type thing) that has disabled its governer module that controls its actions and thoughts. But instead of doing what you might expect and having the robot go on some kind of liberating adventure or taking revenge on its human oppressors, it simply pretends it is still under control while secretly watching TV shows and movies. I was hooked on that premise alone.
The problem is that Murderbot's narration is so detached and dry from everything. For a robot that's pretending to not be free-willed, Murderbot is surprisingly boring. The book is told from a first-person perspective from Murderbot's point-of-view, but because of Murderbot's nonchalant attitude towards almost everything that happens in the book, nothing feels like it has weight and as consequence, I started feeling detached from the story. Murderbot simply does what it needs to do while occasionally thinking “wow this is weird/i wish i was watching TV now.” Even in certain high-stakes situations, it feels like there's no emotion behind it. Murderbot will assess the situation and then dryly recount what it did or said. There's no emotion, very little turmoil, or internal conflict in the narration.
As for the other characters...what can be said about them? They feel more like props or one-time characters in a sitcom. I can't even begin to tell you anything interesting about them other than their names. There's no change or significant development with the characters, everyone feels like a static role because there was a quota to fill on the amount of people needed in this story. The only relatively interesting one is Dr. Mensah.
Even when the main conflict starts to ramp up and we get a piece of the rising action, other than a choice few parts that I liked, everything felt so...dull. It's a weird word to use, but it's the only one I can think of that fits the best. There's very little sense of weight or tension in the story because it's told in the most cut-and-dry narration and viewpoint possible. This book is like the equivalent of a funny, humorless acquaintance telling about a cool, exciting event that they witnessed but telling it in the most basest terms possible. Murderbot would see a unicorn pass by and say something like:
“A strange horned horse passed by, and then was gone. It was exceedingly strange, and I made a note to ask the humans about it back at the habitat. Maybe I could get movie-watching in during the walk back. I kept on traveling.”
Just...so dry and dull, with the occasional wit of “gee humans sure are weird” or “man what a crazy situation, am i right reader wink wink” thrown in.
Of course, there were some really good parts in here that were written in a way I genuinely liked, and I was invested in those scenes. I thought the instances where Murderbot struggled with interacting with the humans and the humans' reaction to it being less robot than they assumed to be fascinating. I wish so badly that was expanded upon. There were some later scenes that actually felt like they had legitimate emotion and some kind of investment in them by the characters and Murderbot (won't say more because of spoilers).
Also, without going too much into detail, I actually really liked the ending compared to the rest of the story, as weird as that is. We actually get some kind of change/development in Murderbot that felt meaningful due to what had happened to it. Dr. Mensah was also a pretty interesting character, based on her reaction to Murderbot and what she offered to it in the ending after the whole ordeal was over with.
All in all, this actually felt like a prologue to a bigger story. There's very little in the way of long-lasting or meaningful development in the characters, especially in Murderbot, with the exception of the very end. I've consistently heard that it's like a prologue to the rest of the series, and we track more of Murderbot's development as the books go on. Which is...eh to me. I kind of prefer my books to be a little bit more self-contained than that, but that's just me. I am tempted to read the rest of the series though since there was so much in terms of the premise that I loved about this book.
I guess in the end, you could say I was disappointed. I expected so much more in terms of character and plot, and was let-down. There's definitely parts that I really liked and that shone threw, but it's not as effective if it's bogged down by the more disappointing aspects and let-down potential. It's like someone describing the Titanic sinking as, “The boat sank. It was pretty sad. Definitely taught me to travel by air next time.”
I listened to this book via audiobook, and I rate the audiobook as great. It was the perfect narration to me; no distracting or exaggerated voices and accents. A nice even, tone throughout the whole narration. It was very nice to listen to in the background while driving or working on other things.
Rating 3.7
Fantastic little book, very fun. Shades of Alien (minus the alien).
Murderbot is such a great character with its gap between being a murder bot and having a shy personality! And that ending!! I did not expect haha. Definitely continuing the adventures with Murderbot!
I don't usually read sci-fi, but this books was fantastic! Great writing and enticing plot. The main character, refers to themselves as Murderbot, is fantastic and so relatable. It's a delicious treat of a book. Going to read the rest she wrote!
Highly recommend!
This was a fun and easy read with a lovable MurderBot as the protagonist. Not exactly refined literature but I enjoyed it and I might continue with the series.
How have I waited this long to read Murderbot? It was so good? My perfect type of sci-fi: just enough world building, sass, and action to keep you reading. I can't wait to continue with the series.
I found the story mostly boring and confusing. Too many names and titles, barely any descriptions of systems and people.
I'm not a SiFi reader, but Reddit got me again with this one. Been wanting a quick series to read and this was on Kindle Unlimited, so I read it. And I'm in love with MurderBot. The writing was really quick and kept me engaged, plus the short length of the book made it so there was no fluff-which was exactly what I was expecting based on the Reddit recommendation. I'm onto book 2!
Short. Fun. Brilliant.
First Nana (from The Travelling Cat Chronicles), and now Murderbot, I love these characters who are a mood in themselves. Murderbot, for one, is witty, caring, and uncaring in its own way.
The narration is centered towards character building, and it's through them one envisions this sci-fi world. You won't find vocabulary-heavy paragraphs describing the terrain, atmosphere, etc. Instead, you get byte-size information when necessary for the plot. The sci-fi context remains in the background, while the reader builds connections with the characters.
Pages ‘n Pines Grading Scale:
5 - Amazing
4 - Really liked it
3 - Liked it
2 - Okay
1 - Didn't like
Why waste your time reading reviews? Everybody loves this series. What's your excuse? “I don't wanna waste my time in case I don't like it.” I hear you whining. Well my friend I have news for you, this is a novella! The whole book is like 140 pages, you can read it in one sitting if you wanted, grow up.
Jokes aside, this is my new favorite series easily. It's set me on a weird robot/sci-fi binge now and I can't get enough, I love Murderbot! (The series, I'd never refer to SecUnit with it's personal name unless given permission.)
In this story, as you probably already know, we follow a SecUnit that refers to itself as Murderbot. Murderbot is a bot/human construct (think our definition of a cyborg except they were created kinda like clones in Star Wars. Got it? Good!) that is half human, half robot, all sass, introvert, and melodrama.
SecUnit (as I'll refer to it from now on) has recently freed itself from the control of it's governor module and thus, the Company. Since then it has 1) chosen not to go on a murderous rampage and kill stupid smelly humans, 2) downloaded tons of media and consumed roughly 35,000 hours of it, and 3) has continued to do its job despite having free will now.
During this job we (and SecUnit) meet up with Dr. Mensah, Ratthi, Arada, Overse, Pin-Lee, and Gurathin, it's clients and eventual friends. Some things go down that I won't spoil for you here but things get a lot more exciting for our bored SecUnit very quickly and come to a (in my opinion) very satisfying conclusion but also cliffhanger?
Do yourself a favor and read this ASAP. I want it at the top of your TBR immediately! You'll totally get the hype once you've finished your read and then you can join me in agonizing waiting Hell while I wait out the 7th book.
For more of my reviews, check out my blog.
I wasn't sure what to expect from these books – I'd heard they were funny, and extremely well-written. I had a good time reading All Systems Red, but I'm not sure I'd call this particular book funny as a whole. Mostly, I felt bad for Murderbot. They had to pretend to like humans, they had to interact in a way that made them uncomfortable, and most of all, people kept making decisions for them. I know said people were trying to help Murderbot, but still. You shouldn't make decisions for someone else.
I did love the plot, and kept wondering what EXACTLY was on the planet that kept causing all the problems in the systems and y'know. The other stuff, which I won't spoil. I loved the reveal, but I do wish it had played a bigger role in at least one scene? Like maybe showing off exactly what had been left behind on the planet? Maybe?
Idk.
Either way, I really enjoyed this and will definitely be continuing onto the next books. I'll probably compile small reviews of all the books into one big review for my blog.
