All Systems Red

In continuing my reading of short books, I picked up All Systems Red, the first of The Murderbot Diaries. It's about 90 pages long, and I highly enjoyed it. I want to continue the series right away, which rarely happens for me. Usually I want a break so I don't get tired of a series and its characters. I know many people can binge things – such as television – but I can only take things in chunks. (Usually.)

The story is from the point-of-view of a “murderbot,” a type of rented android on a mission with some humans in order to protect them. Since the story is so short and things about the murderbot are revealed, I don't want to say too much. But what happens in the beginning is unexpected, and our murderbot has to work with the humans in ways it didn't think it would. It's an unusual situation.

All Systems Red really throws you into its sci-fi world and I did find it a little difficult to orient myself. It wasn't until maybe a third or even halfway through the book until I started to understand the “feed” system. I still don't know how it really works. Somehow humans and murderbots all have some neurological link to a feed. They are able to access information and even talk to each other through it. I don't know how it works. Additionally, it became clearer what exactly a SecUnit/murderbot is as the story progressed, but it wasn't spelled out.

I can't say I dislike that. I like stories that don't just lay everything out in exposition. In my opinion, it's better to let the reader see how the characters live their lives, and then the reader can make their own conclusions. Perhaps it could have been a little cleaner, though. I wasn't sure if there were typos, unclear editing, or just poor sentence structure, but sometimes I was a little confused on what was happening.

The action of the story really kept it moving and I could hardly put the book down, which is impressive to me since so few things hold my attention these days. I love the ending of the book, and like I said up top, can't wait to continue the series.

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