Elle (ellexamines on TT & Substack)'s Reviews > All Systems Red

“I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don't know, a little under 35,00 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.”

These novellas are a story of what it means to be human, and a story of the human tendency to create a group that is less than human. Featuring a sarcastic and antisocial protagonist, an intriguing world, and all the morality issues I needed.

[This review will function as a full review for the series.]

This novella seriess dabbles really explicitly with the idea of being human and trying not to be human. Murderbot lives in a world where it cannot be considered fully human, and as a result, it shuts itself off from other humans and tries to avoid group dynamics altogether. And as a result, I love the character of Murderbot so much and I’m going to rant about this.

Something I like about this series is that Murderbot is written as a powerful killing machine and actually... is. Murderbot is really competent at what they do, but not in an unrealistic way? I feel like a lot of lies I read in fiction are so obviously lies that anyone could guess it, but Murderbot just genuinely is talented at making lies sound real and knowing when to drop info and when to stay quiet. I love realistic badassery.

But Murderbot also has this compulsory need to be above human attachment and act as if it does not have feeings. It totally does.

The worldbuilding of this series is really fantastic especially as the series goes on! I talked about this more in my review for book two. But this series does definitely have very interesting worldbuilding, with a wide scope and heavy lens of environmentalism.

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