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All Systems Red, by Martha Wells, is the first of four “The Murderbot Diaries” novellas feathering the SecUnit who calls itself Murderbot. It won the 2018 Nebula and Hugo Awards for best novella.
I
don’t read a lot of contemporary science fiction, or indeed the
science fiction of any era these days. Except for a few authors I
know and like, I may sample just a book or two a year. So, given my
limited exposure to modern science fiction, and as writer myself,
what do I think of All Systems Red?
It
was okay.
Damned
by faint praise?
What may be more
damning, in my view, is all the novellas that didn’t win. All
Systems Red does not, in my opinion, set a high bar of
excellence. So what does that say about the rest? Maybe there were not a lot to choose from, so the best of the lot didn’t have to be
brilliant. I can't say.
Or it may be just
me. I like novels, so a cut down novel, or an extended short story
doesn’t fit my preferred style of story. That said, it was okay
enough for me to read it to the end. I don’t read bad books to the
end.
Since this is a
famous four year old story, most science fiction fans have already
read it, so I’ll skip the story summery, and just share my thoughts
on the story.
The story opens with
giant worm breaking out of a crater to threaten a survey team. The
team’s hired security bot, “Muderbot” acts swiftly to save
several members of the survey team from the jaws of this worm. It reads like an
opening action scene straight out of lesson one of How to Write a
Thrilling Story 101. In short, while it gets the job done of
introducing the character, it is pretty standard, unoriginal fare.
And speaking of
unoriginal fare, a planetary survey team facing danger on a planet is
one of the most well worn tropes in the first three or four decades
of science fiction, to the point were it is almost a cliché. No
points for originality so far.
There is no real sense of place in the story. The planet is so generic that there are episodes of the original Star Trek with more convincing locales.
As for the story
that follows… Well, Jason Sheehan says in his review for NPR, “The
story itself is simple to the point of nonexistence.” It is
certainly rudimentary. A series of unexplained computer system
failures leads to finding another survey team on the planet
massacred, which sends our team fleeing the unknown killers. The
mystery of why the killers were acting this way, and how they were
saved seems to have been pulled, more or less, out of the hat. Not that
it matters. None of this stuff matters.
All this doesn’t
matter because the story is a character study of the first
(non)person narrator, Murderbot, a half mechanical, half
biological “SecUnit.” It is sort of an introvert Bender –
snarky, indifferent, haunted by its past, or rather what it can
remember of its past, but, unlike Bender, very shy and uncomfortable
around humans. Why a security bot is part machine, and part organic
is not clear. It seems a weakness, not a strength, as there are pure sentient machines in the stories as well. I assume it is
because Wells wanted to explore what a person is. Is this half
machine a person?
Murderbot is,
however, a special SecUnit because it had, somehow, managed to hack its control unit, its “governor,” giving it free will. It can no longer be controlled. I find it hard to
imagine how it even knew how to disable its interior control governor
without giving a hint to all the systems that monitored it, or how it reached it to alter it. And if it
knew how, you’d think every other SecUnit, would know as well and be able to do it too. Just what makes Murderbot so extraordinary, and
apparently unusual is not
explained. Murderbot also seems to be able to hack any, or almost
any, computer system. Not only is one is left wondering how it
learned how to do so with relative
ease, but you’d have to wonder why these systems wouldn’t be more
secure than they apparently are. However, in a world where everything
is connected and surveillance omnipresent, I suppose that being able to hack these
systems to defeat them is a necessary skill for the stories in the series to
work.
The story, as told
by the SecUnit, Murderbot is largely concerned with the various
procedures it implements to protect the humans in its charge from
danger. During the story, Murderbot finds itself caring for its human
charges, and they show concern for it – which makes it very
uncomfortable. It prefers being treated as a machine rather than as a
person, and finds it unnerving when they treat it like a person, and
especially when they see it without its armor as basically a human.
Jason Sheehan, whose review is actually very positive, sees the story
as a “coming out” story – of a constructed entity finding its
personhood, with the awkwardness and fear such a step entails for a
very “shy” SecUnit.
Be that as it may,
you still have to put up with the trite setup, almost nonexistent
story line, the generic setting, and all the techno-procedural
mumbo-jumbo that makes up the bulk of the story. I did, hence my “It’s
okay” rating.
However.
Martha Wells is an
experienced writer, so you should probably assume that she knows just
what she’s doing. And in that case…
I also write first
person narratives. My approach is that the narrator tells the story
from his point of view. (All my stories use male narrators, hence the
“his.”) A number of reviews have said that my stories need an
editor – presumably to eliminate nonessential wordage. I would
reply that it is the characters in the story who are telling the story and they are not professional writers. These characters may include details
that are unnecessary for the story’s plot, from a professional
writer’s point of view, but are, nevertheless, significant to the
character. I think that these non-essential details make the story
feel more authentic. I believe that Martha Wells is doing the same
thing. Since she has the SecUnit Murderbot tell the story, it would,
naturally, tell the story from its point of view. It may well be
blind to the beauties of the planet. It may well view the human
characters as flat, two dimensional more or less standard humans. And
main focus of its story would be its techno-procedural actions that it used to protect the humans in its charge. Seen from this point of
view, the limitations of the story that I outlined above, are simply
the limitations and priorities of the story’s narrator, Murderbot.
Which is clever.
Still. It took me
four days to finish the story. And so it is still just okay.
And yet.
I have some
additional thoughts after reading the three subsequent novellas in
the Muderbot Diaries series, Artificial Condition, Rouge
Protocol, and Exit Strategy. Since
the series focuses on, and comes back around to the events of in All
Systems Red, I can’t help but
wonder if Wells and her publisher decided to take what would
have been an episodic novel and divide it up and sell it as four
novellas.
In any event, the
three novellas that follow, are, in my opinion, much better stories.
Murderbot becomes a more interesting character at as it continues to
explore is personhood and its relationship with humans and other
constructed entities. Not wanting to be a pet of the humans it saved in All Systems Red, it runs away to find its own life. In these stories Wells
casts Murderbot as a Philip Marlowe type of hardboiled private eye, since now, without its armor, it can pass itself off as an augmented human.
In Artificial Condition it hires itself to a group of people
looking to hire a security consultant to ride shotgun on an iffy
rendezvous with a dubious and dangerous person. And if Murderbot is
now Phillip Marlowe in this story, it has acquired a new sidekick, a
sentient ship who acts like a Nero Wolf type of character who can
pull techno-strings and provide support in the background. All of which
makes this story a much more compelling read. In Rouge Protocol,
Murderbot is searching for evidence to help the people it saved in
All Conditions Red, in
their continuing fight against the evil corporation that tried to
murder them. In doing so, it ends up saving another group of people from
this evil corporation which is trying to protect its illegal activities. And in
Exit Strategy, we find Murderbot once again saving the leader of the first group, who had been kidnapped by the evil corporation.
In all of these
stories there is a ton of techno-procedural mambo-jumbo – hacking
this system and controlling those drones or that machine. They are
thriller/military sf stories set in a high-tech dragon and dungeons
maze within large space stations. In many cases I didn’t get a
clear picture of the locales, but I guess that doesn’t matter in
the end. The stories are about Murderbot, and if you like the
character, you’ll enjoy the stories. I like character focused stories and so I enjoyed these stories,
especially the last three. I’d give the series an almost four star rating as
a whole, the opening story giving the series the "almost."
