enne📚 reviewed All Systems Red by Martha Wells (The Murderbot Diaries, #1)
"As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure."
In a corporate-dominated spacefaring …
All Systems Red
4 stars
I've been watching the recent tv show and thought I'd give the books a reread so I could ground myself in the text again. Also brains have been bad, and Murderbot is such short grippy comfort fiction. I think what makes me come back to this (personally) is my empathy for Murderbot's exhaustion and horror around being asked to be a person.
Murderbot also epitomizes the mortifying ordeal of being known (but simultaneously the even more mortifying ordeal of being loved). There's so much joy for me in the grumpiness of the internal monologue. If I had to come up with a one sentence emotional arc for each book, this one would be Murderbot moving past apathy and learning that it does in fact want to protect (some) humans.
Confession time: I don’t actually know where we are
On a reread, I had also forgotten …
I've been watching the recent tv show and thought I'd give the books a reread so I could ground myself in the text again. Also brains have been bad, and Murderbot is such short grippy comfort fiction. I think what makes me come back to this (personally) is my empathy for Murderbot's exhaustion and horror around being asked to be a person.
Murderbot also epitomizes the mortifying ordeal of being known (but simultaneously the even more mortifying ordeal of being loved). There's so much joy for me in the grumpiness of the internal monologue. If I had to come up with a one sentence emotional arc for each book, this one would be Murderbot moving past apathy and learning that it does in fact want to protect (some) humans.
Confession time: I don’t actually know where we are
On a reread, I had also forgotten the level of indifference that Murderbot has, in terms of not even knowing what planet they're on. It's an aspect that comes through so much stronger in the original text.
