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The Murderbot Diaries: All Systems Red (2017)

I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.

I was also still doing my job, on a new contract, and hoping Dr. Volescu and Dr. Bharadwaj finished their survey soon so we could get back to the habitat and I could watch episode 397 of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

I admit I was distracted. It was a boring contract so far and I was thinking about backburnering the status alert channel and trying to access music on the entertainment feed without HubSystem logging the extra activity. It was trickier to do it in the field than it was in the habitat.

Martha Wells has received numerous awards for this series, which started life as a set of four novellas that have made for ideal listening while walking the dog. They remind me of nothing so much as the very best of pulp fiction–Doc Savage, Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, etc.--or classic westerns–Shane, The Searchers… The titular Murderbot is a bionic security unit that has hacked its own hardware to liberate it from its programming after an incident where it murdered numerous humans. Now it just wants to spend its time watching space serials and staying under the radar. But it is still deploying on jobs and, as we open, is assisting a human team that is surveying a planet. Things start to go wrong when they are attacked by a creature that is not listed in their database and get worse as they realize that, not only have the records been tampered with, but that the corporation responsible for doing so has no intention of letting them get off-world safely. Subsequent stories deepen the mystery about what is being hidden and why while corporate competition provides tension. There’s plenty of action and a healthy dose of hard science. It’s a perfect prescription for escapist fun.

But…the key to the series is the chatty humorous first-”person” narration by Murderbot himself and there things get kind of confusing. It is more than a little distracting that this bionic entity, that was programmed for certain inhuman purposes, is somehow sardonic, sarcastic, and droll virtually from the moment of his liberation, nevermind the question of why he was capable of defying his programming in the first place. After all, it seems he was driven by emotion–regret about what he’d done–and he tries to keep his distance from the humans he works with because he’s uncomfortable about having feelings for them. And if that isn’t unsettling enough, in subsequent episodes we get a pure computer persona that demonstrates a similar capacity for feelings and a full-fledged combat robot that gets annoyed when it is attacked. Your Zoomba doesn’t vacuum angry when it bumps into a chair leg, does it? Ultimately, these machines/hybrids are so pivotal to the story-telling that giving them personality makes dramatic sense, but it doesn’t really make scientific sense. And I couldn’t help noticing every time they deviated from what their programming would obviously dictate. It’s not a fatal flaw, but it is bothersome.

(Reviewed:11-Jan-25)

Grade: (B+)

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The Murderbot Diaries: All Systems Red (2017)

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