All Systems Red by Martha Wells: Book Review

All Systems Red by Martha Wells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's wrong to think of a construct as half-bot half-human. It makes us sound like the halves are discrete, like the bot half should want to obey orders and do its job and the human half should want to protect itself and get the hell out of here.
As opposed to the reality, which was that I was one whole confused entity, with no idea what I wanted to do, what I should do, what I needed to do.

Martha Wells has done an amazing job with making the construct Murderbot, as they call themselves in The Murderbot Diaries, completely empathizable! And this is coming from someone who doesn't like the robots-take-over-world trope. But Murderbot, doesn't care about the world, and does their job half heartedly, while devoting most of their free processing time to entertainment. Being a construct doesn't mean they are devoid of feelings or emotions however, and complex ones like social anxiety too. Working security with a team of scientists who don't just leave it alone gives space for a lot of character development.

It's tough to do inner monologues well, but it's great when done well and I really enjoyed Wells' writing. The book is a short novella with them escaping danger as the base plot, and more page space was devoted to characterization than world-building. But I didn't mind that, as the story could have been happening on any outer planet common in Sci-Fi. I'm looking forward to the rest of the series!

🌟🌟🌟🌟

[3/4 star for the premise and the whole book; One star for the characterization; Half a star for the world-building; 3/4 star for the story; One star for the writing - Four stars in total.]

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