Between the stories in ‘The Hidden Girl,’ I decided to give ‘All Systems Red,’ the first book in the Murderbot Diaries series a try, and boy did it grab me. I could not put this book down. It is an action-packed little thriller with a deeply immersive narrator and a ton of juicy sci-fi elements. In other words, everything I love to see in a story. There’s not too much to this book since it is a novella, but it held my attention well enough to keep me reading straight through to the end in a single sitting.

The narrator is Murderbot, a partially organic security robot that has been rented to a team of surveyors investigating an alien planet. For a guy designed to shoot and get shot at and not much else, he has a surprising amount of heart. He became a rogue unit after hacking into the governor in his head that would usually force him to follow company protocols to the letter. This gives him a huge degree of freedom compared to his chilly counterparts. Naturally, as a guy who works a boring security job for a living, he spends a lot of his free time watching hundreds of hours worth of soap operas from the entertainment stream coming in from a company satellite whenever he has a little downtime. He’s relatable in a depressingly funny way, poking fun at the corporate robots that already exist in our society. He grows a lot over the course of the story, and provides a strong backbone for the reader to experience the plot.

When the survey team Murderbot is assigned to protect realizes that another company on the other side of the planet has gone dark, they can’t help but go investigate. An accident in the intro of the novel wherein Murderbot saves a few members of the survey team has already tipped them off that this is not your usual security bot. The prospect of being discovered terrifies him however. If they realize that he’s a rogue unit and report that back to the company, he may be decommissioned, or worse, turned into a laboratory experiment. Surprisingly, the humans don’t seem to be entirely unsympathetic to this emotional machine though. This adds a great layer of suspense that carries the plot through in the slow moments, and heightens the tension in the tense combat scenes where Murderbot has to trust his allies. And yes, as it turns out, Murderbot has to do some murdering to protect his new favorite humans from the competition. The planet has a secret that another survey team does not want getting out, and they’ll use any means necessary to keep that secret for themselves.

I thought the characters fell a little flat though. In fact, I barely remember their names. They serve a useful plot purpose in that Murderbot comes to enjoy their company and that gives him something to strive towards, but other than that, I didn’t get any sense of character progression from them at all. The antagonists are even thinner. They kinda just have a half-assed plan to take the planet for themselves, and that’s really it. The star of the show is certainly the titular character. It gets away with it because of how fun it is to be in Murderbot’s head, but I still have to call em’ like I see em’.

Thankfully, he carried my interest as hard as he carried the survey team on his back. He’s got some really cool features like his regenerating organic parts, the feed in his head that lets him connect to all kinds of different computer systems, and his integrated weapons and reconnaissance systems that pop up time and again throughout the story. His backstory is pretty cool too, and there’s a lot of room for growth in a (painfully) relatable way. He’s socially stunted, but also weirdly charming at times too. I would love to read the rest of this series sometime just to see how Murderbot progresses as he gains more and more freedom, and there’s even a new show on Apple TV that just came out this month. If you do end up enjoying this character, there is plenty of good content surrounding him.

Despite its flaws, I thought this was a fun little read with a cool and compelling protagonist. I highly recommend you give this a try at some point.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley