(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
One of the things that daunts many readers, including this reviewer, in an age of content plenty and time paucity, is embarking on a series of books, especially a lengthy of one of say, nine books.
It’s not that the narrative arc doesn’t enthrall with its storytelling possibilities or that the idea of losing yourself in a long and involved storyline isn’t appealing; rather, with so many great standalone novels out there begging for attention and release from the TBR (in this reviewer’s case a towering one many hundreds strong) and not nearly enough time to devote to reading as you’d like, the idea of embracing, and likely being being consumed by a series often puts you off diving into them.
Which is pity pretty much all of the time, and in the case of The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Well, an absolute horror of an admission since so much would be lost were it not present in your life.
Thankfully, a gift giving partner took the decision-making out of acquiring Wells’ nine-volume novella-length series, and after a lengthy chat with the bookseller at this reviewer’s favourite bookstore in the whole world – a bold claim but a true one for a host of reasons, range and setting primarily among them; thank you Dymocks, Sydney, Australia – the first volume, All Systems Red, made its way under the tree, and likely to the dismay of the 500 or so books on my TBR, into my reading schedule.
I said, ‘The company could be bribed to conceal the existence of several hundred survey teams on the planet.’ Survey teams, whole cities, lost colonies, traveling circuses, as long as they thought they could get away with it. I just didn’t see how they could get away with making a client survey team — two client survey teams — vanish. Or why they’d want to.
The perfect book for flights where disruptions are many and the need for an enrapturing and subsuming read is great, All Systems Red is a near flawless read that does everything a great sci-fi story should do and with writing so beautifully elegant and yet emotionally accessible that you will marvel at its strength, suppleness and capacity for narrative richness.
A space opera writ large in a deceptively taut and tiny package – All Systems Red comes in a shade under 150 pages – the novella is set in a corporate-dominated future where humanity has taken to the stars but with much of the idealistic wonder and breathless anticipation of the 1960s stripped away.
Here corporations only spend the money they have to with an eye on exacting a bountiful profit, and all exploration is approved only insofar as it will bolster the bottomline.
The people who go on these expeditions are another matter of course, and the people on the team at the heart of All Systems Red are all dedicated scientists and explorers who accept that to do their visionary work they need to shackle themselves to a system that places safety well below a great many other things and which mandates a security unit, made of organic and non-organic parts, per ten people or so to keep, well not so much the people safe as far as the Company is concerned but the investment protected from anything that might damage its profit-making potential.
(courtesy The Nebula Awards)
An interesting thing has happened on a distant, tropically forested planet though where a SecUnit has acquired self-awareness by hacking the very module meant to control it, and which, with a love of soap operatic storytelling TV, of which it has downloaded a considerable quantity, is playacting the part of a security guardian as well as giving itself the name “Murderbot” which is both quite true but also deliciously and amusingly self-deprecatory.
It’s not really keen to bond with the humans on the team, led by the likeable and incredibly capable Dr Mensah (with whom Murderbot does eventually profoundly bond) despite its newly-found humanity; rather, it simply wants to do its job with minimum fuss and effort and be left alone to lose itself in the hundreds upon hundreds of stories at its disposal.
But then fate intervenes, a neighbouring much-larger team goes dark and can’t be contacted and Murderbot finds itself not just at the centre of a murderously complex conspiracy but required to, gasp, get to know people, a number of whom turn out not to be so bad after all, and who treat it as if it’s sentience is something to be valued and honoured.
It’s a thrillingly fun and intense journey, not least because Murderbot has the sort of engaging personality, despite itself, that makes you want to see what it will do and say next – it keeps trying not to act anything else than very robot-like but it’s humanity keeps leaking out to its dismay and suddenly all its armour isn’t enough to protect it from being known – and over the course of 150 richly-told pages, it does quite a lot.
I don’t know what I want. I said that at some point, I think. But it isn’t that, it’s that I don’t want anyone to tell me what I want, or to make decisions for me.
The absolute brilliance of All Systems Red is how superbly well it builds its world, introduces its characters and tell its stories which is impressively complex and yet appealingly accessible all at once.
Within mere pages of the novella getting underway, you have a sense of what the corporate landscape it inhabits is like, what Murderbot’s place within it, and how it is dealing with its newfound sentience in a society that sees robots as nothing more than tools for service.
That it introduces so much so effortlessly well is a thing of wonder and beauty, balancing a full speed ahead story of thrilling momentum with rich characterisation and the sort of existential thoughtfulness that a story this action-packed should never possess.
But All Systems Red does, and it’s glorious to behold as you’re swept, line by artfully and yet humanly-rich line, into a story that is as much about who is doing what to whom as it is why they are doing it and what the reaction of Murderbot and his team members needs to be.
It’s a rewarding exploration of what it means to be human and to be have free will in a society where the realm in which that can be expressed, especially for a SecUnit, is quite limited, and it enriches All Systems Red in so many ways that you’ll marvel at how so much is woven into such a small storytelling package.
And by story end of course there is no question at all that you will acquire the other eight entries in the series – so far; already, and I haven’t even read the remainder yet, I’m hoping there will be more added – and that All Systems Red will be just the first superlatively good entry in what is sure to be one of those sci-fi storytelling arcs that affirms the promise of just good losing yourself in reading can be.