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In the future, space travel is common, and various types of exploring teams visit different planets for scientific study. For safety purposes, teams have to be accompanied by generic security androids. These androids are made with some organic material and have faces but no gender-identifying parts. They are supplied with armor and usually wear their helmets with face shields down. And they are trained simply to protect and kill. They have governing modules that ensure they follow the rules and stay in line. But one SecUnit, the narrator of this story, has managed to hack its governor module and become self-aware. It knows it still has to follow the rules so it won’t get found out and the module fixed, but it is figuring out who it is and what it wants, the latter of which is fairly simple: the freedom to be left alone so it can watch TV.
In this first book of a series, this SecUnit that calls itself (but doesn’t pass along to humans) “Murderbot” is aiding a group of scientists who seem to this droid to be pretty decent. Things are going fine and Murderbot is getting a fair amount of time to be entertained until another nearby mission on the planet goes dark. The scientists have to figure out the truth of what’s going on, what kind of danger they’re in, and how to get out of it, all with the help of Murderbot.
All Systems Red is a novella, so it’s only about 150 pages long, but it’s entertaining and clever. This recently self-aware and independent droid comes across like a curmudgeonly professor who doesn’t want students showing up during office hours. It is appalled when the humans find out it is not a typical bot and start to treat it more like a person, with kindness and respect, but by the end of the mission and the story, it has to begrudgingly admit it respects this good group of humans after the way they handle the difficulties they face (and, mind you, haven’t been trained to deal with, like Murderbot has been). This bot is dry and acerbic and its observations made me chuckle. I don’t think I ever would have found this book on my own, since even as I do enjoy fantasy and science fiction, I don’t usually dive deeply into the genre. Several authors I follow cite this series/character as one of their favorites, so I gave it a try, and I’m glad I did. I’ll definitely read some more.
Rated: Moderate. There are three instances of strong profanity and around 10 uses of milder language. There’s little in the way of sexual content except for a reference that bots for sex work exist and that this bot skips over any sexual material in entertainment it watches. Violence is fairly mild, with some injuries, dead bodies but no gory detail, and fighting between bots.
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