If you’ve read All Systems Red (and if you haven’t, stop everything and go do that), you know that our favorite emotionally constipated construct, SecUnit “Murderbot,” ended the story with a terrifying new possession: freedom. No company contract. No humans to babysit. Just a paranoid, anxious, action-movie-obsessed robot with a broken governor module and a lot of trauma.
Artificial Condition by Martha Wells: When Your Road Trip Buddy is a Genocidal Transport Ship Artificial Condition- The Murderbot Diaries
If you’ve ever felt like you don’t fit in, like you’ve done things you can’t forgive yourself for, or like you’d rather watch TV than talk to people—you will see yourself in Murderbot. If you’ve read All Systems Red (and if
Drops post and retreats to watch media feed. Just a paranoid, anxious, action-movie-obsessed robot with a
The dynamic between these two is pure gold. It’s the oddest couple in sci-fi: a traumatized security bot who hates emotions and a god-tier research ship who pretends to be above it all but is secretly a worried parent. Their banter is the emotional core of the book.
Murderbot hitches a ride on a massive, sentient university research vessel that it initially thinks is just a dumb bot. Spoiler: It is not. ART is a hyper-intelligent, deeply sarcastic, and surprisingly fussy AI that controls an entire ship. ART has opinions. ART has feelings. And ART absolutely refuses to let Murderbot watch its media in peace without making snarky comments.
Murderbot wants answers. Specifically, it wants to know what happened during its “rogue” incident—the moment it supposedly hacked its governor module and killed 57 miners. The problem? It can’t remember. So, it ditches its comfortable (if annoying) human clients, hijacks a transport ship, and heads back to the scene of the crime: RaviHyral.