this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
95 points (96.1% liked)

Science Fiction

13136 readers
3 users here now

Welcome to /c/ScienceFiction

December book club canceled. Short stories instead!

We are a community for discussing all things Science Fiction. We want this to be a place for members to discuss and share everything they love about Science Fiction, whether that be books, movies, TV shows and more. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow.

  1. Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
  2. Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
  3. Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
  4. Put (Spoilers) in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers.
  5. Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread.

Lemmy World Rules

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Tenthrow
Thekingoflorda
95
What I felt after reading "All Systems Red" by Martha Wells (literature.cafe)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/sciencefiction
25 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

What an enjoyable cozy scifi adventure! The story centers around a security bot with a self-hacked governor module, who refers to itself privately as "Murderbot" and likes to watch serials and movies surreptitiously in it's free time. The socially awkward bot repeatedly assures us that it definitely does not care about humans. When the team of scientists which have hired Murderbot are confronted by life threatening situations, it goes out of it's way to save their lives if only just so it is not labelled as an incompetent. Over the course of the story we observe how it's relationship with the humans in the group develops and changes. Murderbot's at times hilarious internal monologues concerning "her humans" were my favourite parts of the book. So those of you who have read the book, how did you like it? How are the rest of the books in the series?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] JoeClu 8 points 9 months ago (11 children)

Ive read the first few so far. The next book on my list looks to be a full length novel.

I find your reference of "her humans" is interesting. I never thought of muderbot as a her. Perhaps I missed an important line somewhere in the story?

I think your review is right on. You captured exactly what it's like. I look forward to reading the next book.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (3 children)

I think Martha Wells really tried to make SecUnit genderless, but because the books are written in the first person by a female author, SecUnit ends up sounding pretty female to me.

[–] AFKBRBChocolate 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I think this is it. Murderbot seems to talk about itself in actively gender neutral terms (it doesn't even have genitals!), and "it" is the most used pronoun, but like you said, it's a female author writing for a non-gendered character - not surprising it sometimes seems female.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

@AFKBRBChocolate @klemptor I've never imagined Murderbot as female. To me, it's always seemed closer to male.

[–] AFKBRBChocolate 3 points 9 months ago

I was a couple books in before I started thinking maybe it's female, or maybe truly genderless. I even found myself going back and looking at the covers to see if there were clues. I'm still thinking actively genderless.

load more comments (7 replies)