Back

reviewed All Systems Red by Martha Wells (The Murderbot Diaries, #1)

Martha Wells: All Systems Red (EBook, 2017, Tor.com) 4 stars

"As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure."

In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, …

Review of 'All Systems Red' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

This was a quick read, and I spent most of it struggling to decide how I felt about a narrator that sounds so HUMAN, yet seemed so disinterested in the notion of being owned -- that is, until I realized that hacking the governor and avoiding humans was very much an act of autonomy, and that much of the struggle for Murderbot isn't "Do I want to be free?", it's "What kind of 'free' could I attain, and which of my options is least repulsive?", at least at the end.

All in all, not bad, but I didn't really find myself caring about the characters or their fates, and that was a big detractor.