All Systems Red

Book Rating: 5 of 5

All Systems Red is the first book in Martha Wells Murderbot Diaries serial ScyFy novels.

In length All Systems Red is somewhere between the length of a Novella and Novel. Its about 160 pages in average type face. For me the novel read longer then its 160 pages, it did not feel rushed.

I really enjoyed the book. The main character - the Murderbot is engaging and entertaining and what he thinks about the humans around him is entertaining.

Whats interesting about All Systems Red is how despite being asexual and inorganic the Murderbot is made to feel human. It doesn’t know what it wants in life. It clearly wants to do a “good job” but the Murderbot clearly doesn’t want to work that hard at it. In a way the story is a caricature of adult life that’s very relatable. The Murderbot just wants to get back to watching its TV Shows.

The story of the All Systems Red is well tread path. Humans are on a planet exploring it. Murderbot protects them. Story heats up when some of the humans end up dead. Add in an amoral greedy corporation with a touch of faster then light travel and AI and its probably a story you’ve read before. However I think Martha Wells puts together something a little more interesting by telling the story from the perspective of the Murderbot so well. Its both funny and relatable.

The critique of All Systems Red is that the book is short and its world isn’t that realistic to me. If we’re traveling faster then light through the galaxy but we still need to prospect planets for raw resources by humans walking around rather then sophisticated AI imaging from space. That just seems to be an unlikely to me. However I don’t think ScyFy needs to be realistic to be good. So I’m ok with this this deficiency in the book.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to rate the book 5/5 because I try to reserve a perfect score for only the greatest books but I just didn’t fell like 4/5 was fair to All Systems Read so while I don’t think the book is an all time classic its still a really good book, so I went easy on All Systems Red and Gave it 5/5. I enjoyed the story too much. There’s at least seven sequels and I’m planning on reading at least a few.