All Systems Red by Martha Wells

It's impossible to read everything. Even worse. it's often impossible to keep reading the new books by all of the writers you've liked in the past -- unless you're incredibly demanding and picky, I suppose. Things pile up, and then you realize it's been close to a decade since you read a book by that writer you still think of as a favorite.

And that brings me to Martha Wells. I read her first four novels as they came out, and bought several of them for the SFBC. Then she dove into a trilogy, and I was putting them on a shelf to read, all together, for what I hoped would be a SFBC omnibus. I don't know if anyone else ever did that omnibus, but the door slammed shut behind me before I had the chance. I still wanted to read the trilogy, but maybe not right then -- it would remind me too much of what didn't happen. Then Wells jumped into another series, about winged folks in a different, less Earth-based fantasy world -- it sounded interesting, and more of a stretch for her writing, which is all good, but...I just never picked up one of those books (despite even going to see Wells read from one of them at the Reno Worldcon).

What did it take to get me back? Well, Wells tried SF for what I think is the first time. And she wrote a short book -- probably a novella -- which length I find very appealing these busy days. And, probably most importantly, it was a story told in the first person by a semi-human mechanical that calls itself "Murderbot," and that triggered my old John Sladek Tik-Tok tropism.

And, yes, that book was called All Systems Red. It looks to be the beginning of a new series: I hope it is.

Murderbot is our narrator, and it has a wonderful voice. Murderbot should not have free will -- its kind are designed not to -- but its kind are also made as cheaply as possible to maximize their corporate owner's profitability, so glitches do happen. And so Murderbot does have free will, which it could use to kill people. But it doesn't really want to kill people; it mostly wants to spend as much time as possible consuming media products and not worrying about its own life.

(In Murderbot, Wells has created the first slacker killer-robot, which I deeply love.)

There is a reason why Murderbot calls itself that, and the reader will learn that reason before the end of All Systems Red. But it's a good reason, and Wells sets it up perfectly, so I won't tell you here.

Anyway, the job of a SecUnit -- what Murderbot is, officially -- is to protect and defend exploratory teams on new worlds, as they figure out if it's worthwhile for their parent organizations to bid on colonizing/mining/exploiting that particular world. Murderbot is with a small team, of just five humans, and is the only SecUnit assigned to them. There's one larger team far away on the same planet, but that's it -- it should be a fairly easy job, protecting them from dangerous fauna.

But it turns out their info-packet on this planet has some very large and glaring holes in it, such as a very nasty tunneling predator and entire regions of the map. And the other, much better equipped team suddenly goes radio-silent. Murderbot is not happy with having to work harder, but it wants to protect this team, even if it isn't forced to do so. It turns out that Murderbot likes them.

But will that be enough?

All Systems Red is short and zippy, moving along at pace and driven by the grumpy voice of Murderbot. From the series title, I have my fingers crossed that we will get more adventures of Murderbot in this medium-future ultra-capitalist universe -- sooner rather than later, I hope.