Martha Wells – All Systems Red

Recently, I had the chance to grab All Systems Red from a virtual bargain bin. It’s a novella of size and for a change its a science fiction book. Actually it’s the first of The Murderbot Diaries series about a Droid that works for some exploration company as security robot.

This is actually one of the fascinating aspects of this story: the protagonist being a robot acting as first-person narrator. It gives you some awkward views upon the humans, this bot is working for. This becomes even more interesting as the bot hacked its supervising module, which gives it (or rather him) all the freedom he wants. And, of course, as this is not legal, he lives in constant fear of being detected.

It being shorter than a regular novel makes this story a quite fast but nevertheless enjoyable read. I loved sharing the fears with this droid and “seeing” him in action. In the end, this is a good paced fiction with an interesting and unusal character, and I’ll definitely follow up on his life.

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