Science Fiction Book Review

All Systems Red

All Systems Red gets a thumbs up from me. I finished it in a single evening.

SecUnit
Our hero is a SecUnit, a hybrid of machine and cloned human bits, assigned by the Company to protect a small survey team on a remote planet. Unbeknownst to the survey team—or to the Company—our hero has hacked and disabled his governor module. He's got free will, baby! He's careful to keep this on the downlow and continue obeying commands given to him. If he's discovered, he might be reprogrammed, and then he wouldn't be able to fill every moment of his spare time watching clandestinely-downloaded episodes of Sanctuary Moon. It's the small pleasures that make life bearable.

He?
The SecUnit isn't given a name or a gender. It's not necessary for the role, which is combat or security duty. The Company is notoriously cheap, so none of the SecUnits have anything that isn't completely necessary for the job. That means that although the core of a SecUnit is a cloned bit of human, the SecUnits have no "gender or sex-related parts", aren't given names, and aren't referred to by gender. "It" seems to be the operative pronoun. That works OK (mostly) for a story told in first person, but that's not how the English language works once we've established that our SecUnit is a person and not a thing. So I'll go with male. SecUnits do a lot of fighting and combat is a traditionally masculine activity, so that makes sense. Maybe I'll find out from a later book that I've guessed wrong, but I'm sure the murderbot will forgive me.

Murderbot?
Oh yes, our hero calls himself a murderbot. At first I thought that was a common slang term for SecUnits, but no, it was coined by this particular SecUnit. Why? That's revealed later in the book. (He murdered a bunch of people!)

Danger on Planet X
Things go wrong. A hostile alien monster attacks Dr. Bharadwaj, and our murderbot saves her. The problem is, the survey packet for this planet didn't mention any hostile predators. A closer inspection of the survey packet shows that it's been tampered with. Information has been removed, entire subreports deleted, sections of the map are missing.

A mystery
So now the mystery is: who tampered with the survey packet, and why? Soon, that mystery turns into: who is trying to murder the survey team, and why? I wasn't completely satisfied with the final solution to that mystery but it was a wild ride getting there. And there are a few carefully placed nuggets of information that hint at a larger conspiracy, or at least some more worldbuilding. I'm looking forward to reading the sequels.

Novella
All Systems Red won a Hugo and a Nebula for Best Novella (well deserved) so I guess it's less than 40,000 words. I'm still reviewing it as a short novel though.

Key words
Characters: Murderbot, Bharadwaj, Mensah, Overse, Ratthi, Pin-Lee, Arada, Volescu, Gurathin
Other: SecSystem, HubSystem, MedSystem, SecUnits, DeltFall, PreservationAux, Preservation Alliance, GrayCris, Company, combat-override module, remnants, Sanctuary Moon

---

Archive | Search