Artificial Condition

I'm not familiar with scifi and usually don't gravitate towards it as a genre. I also read the first book in this series a pretty long time ago. Therefore it took me a lot by surprise that I slipped back into Murderbot mode so quickly and easily when I started on this one. The world, the setting, the characters all came rushing back to me almost as soon as I got started, which is a great sign.

Most AIs in fiction tend to have a Type: deadpan humour, making digs at humans for being slow, inconsistent, illogical, and quirky, and also speaking in an oddly detached way that hammers in the fact that they are robots.

Murderbot, though, doesn't quite align with that. The whole novella is told from his (? a gender or pronoun is never specified so this is an assumption on my part) perspective after all, so we are the most privy to his thoughts. Murderbot feels a bit like an extremely introverted human quite often, despite being literally a killing machine. All he wants to do is just curl up with his entertainment media and watch dramas all day long, and the way he shared that hobby with ART in this one was pretty damn precious.

In this installment, Murderbot makes a bit of a pilgrimage to a particular site that holds deep significance to him but which has been erased from his memory data. While I don't think we learn a whole ton of information in this book, I'm enjoying these bite-sized novellas in the way I enjoy a TV series with shorter but self-contained episodes that contribute to an overarching plot.

I'd always recommend Murderbot to anyone who enjoys sci-fi, and even to people who don't but who enjoys a quietly snarky and subtly humorous character study.