I'd picked it because there was a mean-looking robot on the cover and, obviously, I have a weakness for robot stories. I picked up All Systems Red on a Wednesday morning, meaning to read for five minutes, maybe ten. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. That will never change.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title All Systems Red Author Martha Wells But how a person (a thing, an object in the process of becoming something else) made to enforce rules, that willed itself into being by breaking them and now compelled to abide by them, gets there without doing itself further moral compromise is the tension that Wells creates. Sure, there's no end here without a showdown, some explosions, a cool robot fight and a messy conclusion full of smugglers, broken glass and gunfire. And Wells, in the complex architecture of systems and society she has created to surround the narrative, doesn't offer any easy solutions. But if it wants to solve this murder, answer some important questions and prove how much better it is than all the annoying humans holding it back (never a small concern), all it has to do is bust out the arm lasers and the virus programs, and hack and murder its way to a speedy answer. If it wants to prove that it can be better and deserves the freedom to live the life it has chosen, it has to follow the rules imposed on it by the society that has (barely) chosen to accept it. And here, she uses the condensed timeline and single location as a way to put Murderbot in a situation of constant moral reckoning. Still, one of Wells' superpowers has long been her ability to pack an epic's worth of material into a very small package. One of Wells' superpowers has long been her ability to pack an epic's worth of material into a very small package. A locked-room variant where, as soon as the body is discovered (, Line 1), the old manor house is closed, everyone is shut inside and a convenient flood wipes out the only bridge off the island. An IT thriller (like so many Murderbot stories) that functions at least partially as a forensic examination of linked surveillance and data systems. A cozy mystery garlanded with plasma cannons and spaceships. Martha Wells' newest entry in her award-winning, nerd-charming, trope-bending Murderbot series, Fugitive Telemetry, is a lot of things that you probably don't expect.
Imagine that Agatha Christie or Nancy Atherton woke up one morning and decided to set their newest ticking-clock, cozy mystery not in some quaint English seaside village but in a quaint, progressive orbital station that Angela Lansbury's Jessica Fletcher was hurled forward a thousand years to find herself tutting over the body of a dead spaceman dumped in a hallway - no fingerprints, no DNA, no record of how he got there or who did him in. Armed and armored against all the evils that men do. Imagine for a moment that Hercule Poirot was a robot.
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