Artificial Condition

Artificial Condition is the second in Martha Wells' "The Murderbot Diaries" series; it won a Hugo award in 2019. It continues the first-person account of a now-rogue human-robot construct which used to be an armed security agent but is now free(ish) to pursue its own interests --- but notably still constrained by the weird hodgepodge of spacefaring human societies and their various legal and social restrictions, the most relevant of which is that Murderbot is not considered a full, independent person and is regarded as something closer to property or a slave.

This book continued the tone and themes of the previous one, central among them the Murderbot's increasing self-awareness of things like emotional state, body language, facial expression, and social relationships. But in an extremely sardonic and analytical tone, of course --- this leads to some delightful things like "pouting" by powering down or the classic description of the murderbot development cycle: "But you can't put something as dumb as a hauler bot in charge of security... So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects." (chapter 2, 9%) It also hit some poignant storytelling beats that land particularly hard given the narrator: in discussing TV dramas, it says, "But there weren't any depictions of [murderbots] in books, either. I guess you can't tell a story from the point of view of something that you don't think has a point of view." (chapter 2, 17%)

In addition to casting aspersions on all humans for their idiotic/bigoted attitudes towards non-humans, the book does a fair amount of oblique emotional growth for Murderbot --- for example "I shouldn't have asked myself that question. I felt a wave of non-caring about to come over me, and I knew I couldn't let it." (chapter 3, 19%) Murderbot's one true passion is watching teledramas, which often get referenced "in an effort to figure out what the hell was going on with humans. It hadn't helped." (chapter 7, 73%) Nevertheless Murderbot has some self-realizations like "And now I knew why I hadn't wanted to do this. It would make it harder for me to pretend not to be a person." (chapter 4, 32%, delightfully reversing many decades of "robots want to pass as human" tropes in fiction!) and the final portion of the book, which included a lot of introspection like "I wish being a construct made me less irrational than the average human but you may have noticed this is not the case." (chapter 7, 78%)

I liked this book --- it was again very quick and enjoyable. I am curious what future adventures Murderbot can get up to, since book 1 was "liberation" and book 2 was "uncovering past secrets" so the future can only hold new wrinkles. We readers got a taste of what is going on in the broader human civilization and it seems like an omnishambles. Given the extremely high number of times that bots/constructs casually edit security logs, footage, and human databases, my estimate of this human civilization is that its documents are swiss cheese and completely unreliable, and it only limps along because all of the non-human intelligences basically tolerate the humans because life would be boring without them --- but the humans have no idea! I'm curious if this will be explored more.

This post's theme word is Gallionic (adj), "indifferent or uncaring." The intelligences running ships are neither rule-bound nor Gallionic regarding their human passengers.

All Systems Red

All Systems Red is the first in Martha Wells' "The Murderbot Diaries" series; it won a Hugo award in 2018. It is a first-person account of a human-robot construct which is tasked with corporate security on an exploration mission to a new planet. It's quick and short, and the fun parts are:

• the story is told in the first person from a point of view which includes interfacing with drone cameras and so is much broader and more comprehensive than a usual human, BUT which also occasionally glitches or shuts down
• the internal monologue voice is dry and a little sarcastic, but the vocalized speech is all pretty straightforward --- this contrast was very satisfying
• on the second read, I noticed that the narration was impeccable about the Murderbot both not having a name and not having a gender; this was done so smoothly that on first read I had mentally pictured Murderbot as a woman (I guess because it was first person and that's how I perceive myself)

There's a ton of delight to be had in closely examining the story in retrospect --- it is essentially an entire narrative centered on the narrator's feelings, emotional state, expression of sentiment, and social cues like body language, but in a "doth protest too much, methinks" way, the narrator's main focus is persistently to avoid feeling or engaging with any emotion. (Multiple scenes include the lowering of an opaque visor or the narrator moving to stand facing the corner mid-conversation.) It's very well-crafted, to be a sneaky story about feelings which constantly mentions how feelings aren't there and shouldn't be acknowledged and could we please just focus on not all getting killed?

I picked it up again as a palate cleanser and enjoyed it; there are many more in this series, all queued up in my library.

This post's theme word is pensum (n), "a task, especially given as punishment." The ability to self-edit and control administrative privileges removes the threat of pensums.