All Systems Red by Martha Wells

All Systems Red by Martha Wells is the first in a six-book (novella?) series called The Murderbot Diaries.  I'm just going to start right now by saying that this "review" is going to be a rave and I will brook no disagreement.  I'm perfectly aware that many people may not have the same tastes in reading material that I do, so I wouldn't just go around recommending all of my beloved books to just anyone, but I can't think of a single adult I know who wouldn't love this book.

Our unnamed main character is a Murderbot with a broken regulator. It refers to itself as Murderbot, has no sex organs, and doesn't really care much about humans or its job guarding the humans, but really just wants to watch entertainment shows and figure out how to get out of its role as a security drone for the Company. Murderbot is on a mission with a team of scientists, but pretty soon we learn that there is someone trying to sabotage the missions.  Hilarity and adventure ensue.

Murderbot is an amazing character. It's sarcastic, hilarious, incredibly awkward in all social interactions with humans, kind of lazy and apathetic, and really unsure about its own future. it's also absurdly protective of the humans it claims not to care about. I honestly think Murderbot is one of the most relatable characters I've read in recent years.  It's so reflective of its own shortcomings and shockingly honest about them. I love it. Consider:

"Confession time: I don't actually know where we are. We have, or are supposed to have, a complete satellite map of the planet in the survey package. That was how the humans decided where to do their assessments. I hadn't looked at the maps yet and I'd barely looked at the survey package. In my defense, we'd been here twenty-two planetary days and I hadn't had to do anything but stand around watching humans make scans or take samples of dirt, rocks, water, and leaves. The sense of urgency just wasn't there. Also, you may have noticed, I don't care." (page 35)

"I've got four perfectly good humans here and I didn't want them to get killed by whatever took out DeltFall. It's not like I cared about them personally, but it would look bad on my record, and my record was already pretty terrible." (page 60)

"It was starting to occur to me that Dr. Mensah might actually be an intrepid galactic explorer, even if she didn't look like the ones on the entertainment feed." (page 73)

"She was trying to make eye contact but I couldn't do it right now." (page 85)

"I tried to decide whether or believe it or not, or whether it mattered, when I was hit by a wave of I don't care." (page 86)

I will accept the criticism that this is a novella, not a full-length novel, and because of that, there isn't a ton of character building outside of Muderbot. The team leader, Dr. Mensah, is competent and fair and Gurathin is deeply antagonist towards our friend Murderbot, but the other humans are just generic space scientists and adventurers.  I imagine this changes in future entries in the series, but I honestly don't care because Murderbot is so great.

The world building is also relatively minimal. We sort of understand that this group is trying to see if this place is inhabitable for human life and that the group is required to have a security bot, and the Company who is in charge of providing all the materials doesn't actually spend a lot of money, so everything is sort of not quite working right.  But, again, this is just a short novella and I'm going to assume that more of this gets fleshed out in the future.

This is an undeniably fun character study. If you want escapism right now (and who doesn't?), I highly recommend this. Brilliantly told and a completely entrancing story. The writing is fun, it's short so it's not a huge time commitment, and I immediately put the next book on hold on the library.