All Systems Red by Martha Wells

[lightreads]

All Systems Red

3/5. That novella everyone is so in love with about the security robot who hacked its control module and calls itself “Murderbot.”

I am not in love with it. I suspected that going in, since the theme in everyone’s adoration has been “Murderbot! So relatable!” And I was always like, “okay, I believe you, but doesn’t that miss the entire point of AI?” And I was right. Contrasting the robot POV in this novella with that in Newitz’s Autonomous is revealing: the Newitz book is uncomfy and thorny and weird as hell, and the Wells is . . . comfy isn’t quite the right word, but let’s put it this way. The reason everyone finds Murderbot so identifiable? Yeah, that would be because the book spends roughly a third of its volume working really hard to manipulate the reader into feeling that way. I mean, making Murderbot an introverted media fanatic? That’s right up there with making Harry Dresden a DND playing pulp fantasy fan.

So, it was trying too hard, which got on my nerves, but more interestingly, I don’t want to identify with robots like that? I want to struggle across a great void of cognitive distance to grasp after robot POV. I want it to alienate and confuse. Newitz’s book is all about that, and how to messily, imperfectly bridge it. Wells’s book is sort of trying to be about bridging it, but there’s no mess there. Just feel-good manipulations.

IDK, I’ll read the next one, because I did enjoy this and I do think it’s doing a thing. It’s just not a robot thing I care about.

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

I read it as doing a different thing: Murderbot is relatable because Murderbot is a person, and Murderbot's personhood is the point, or more precisely, the way that people get designated persons or not persons is the point. Which does not have to be a thing you're interested in, either, mind!

Now I'm trying to think of alienating robot POV and not coming up with any -- the servitors in _Ninefox Gambit_, which I FINALLY just finished, aren't particulary -- which makes me wonder if I should squeeze in _Autonomous_ before Arisia when I am going to be on a panel about artifically-created persons . . . in a week . . . Hmm.

[lightreads]

Yeah, I have a complicated relationship with 'who gets to be a person' books. It usually goes like this:

Book: But does x get to be a person? Me: Yes. Moving on. Book: But do they? Me: ...We just did this. It's not hard. Book: But do they? Me: Okay, the fact you have to think this hard about it is pretty gross....

One of the things I actually liked about this book is that Murderbot seemed pretty uninterested in the question. Other people were, but Murderbot didn't really want to engage about that. I appreciated that.

[kate_nepveu]

Right, and to my reading, I don't think the book was asking the question either, it just wanted to point out how other people reacted to the question.

(In other news I have bought _Autonomous_ and then occupied today's reading time by bouncing like a rubber ball off _All the Birds in the Sky_. Oops?)