Reviews with content warning for Suicide attempt - All Systems Red

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All Systems Red by Martha Wells

47 reviews

lowercasenospaces's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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beefthedwarf's review against another edition

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adventurous funny tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.25

4.18 — can’t wait to read more!

I’ll preface this by saying I was in a reading slump while reading this book and put it down for long stretches of time. This isn’t really great for a novella, so I’ll keep my criticisms light. I definitely didn’t enjoy this book the way it was meant to be enjoyed.

The Murderbot Diaries: All Systems Red was a very fresh and fun story. Murderbot itself was everything I love in a character — sarcastic, depressed, and full of love (to its chagrin). I really enjoyed its humorous internal dialogue and the small hints to a larger story sprinkled throughout the book. There was a lot packed into such a small story, and not all of it was needless exposition. I love worldbuilding that speaks for itself!

However, I will say I struggled to connect to the human characters and found myself a bit lost on some of the plot beats close to the end of the book. However, I will chalk that up (for now) as reading the book too sparsely. I’ll revisit this someday if I ever reread!

Exhaustive Review (spoilers):

World/System/Premise
Engagement: 4
Worldbuilding: 4

The worldbuilding was very easy to absorb. It didn’t feel a need to overexplain itself. It relies a bit on the reader being familiar with some corporate cyberfuture tropes, but I doubt ASR would be the average person’s first foray into the genre.

Some parts of the world also seem to be poly-normative and queer-normative. I’m glad to see this spring up in sci-fi after enjoying it so much in The Elemental Logic series.

There are a few pieces of world building that don’t entirely make sense, though. One, I find it hard to believe some humans didn’t get attached enough to a SecUnit to buy its contract before Murderbot. Humans pack bond easily, even to agents of corporatocracy (see: Amazon Alexa, Roombas, etc). Two, the book seemed to oscillate between “SecUnits are disposable bullet shields” and “SecUnits are too expensive to throw away”. This made it unclear exactly how high the stakes were for Murderbot.

Writing Style / Prose
Spelling / grammar / formatting: 5
Vocabulary and Sentence Structure: 5
Internal / External Dialogue: 4
Emotional Impact: 3

I liked the short, sweet, simple prose. It set the tone of the book very well and matched Murderbot’s “I’d rather be watching my shows” attitude to everything.

However, I struggled with some of the emotional impact of everything. I never really got to know the characters, and didn’t know who was who half the time. That’s partially my fault for putting the book down too often (I had a lot going on!). However, I feel like we could have learned more about the humans outside of Murderbot’s exposition.

Plot Flow
Pacing: 5
Scene Structure: 4
Plot vs. Character Impact: 4
Approach to Climax: 4

ASR is a short book, and it gets right to the point. Excitement springs up pretty much immediately, and the plot thickens from there. However, I found myself a bit lost about what exactly was happening toward the end. The part with the beacon confused me — was it an assassination attempt? An accident? It seemed to come out of nowhere.

The Ending
Satisfaction: 4
Resolution of loose ends: 5

The ending was very poignant and also left a lot of room for subsequent books. I liked the idea of “everything turned out great and Murderbot was invited to live in a paradise under the guardianship of humans” being turned on its head. It says a lot about its character that it didn’t want a peaceful happy ending if that meant losing its autonomy.

Characterization
Personality, Goals, and Motivations: 4
Interpersonal Relationships: 3

Murderbot cared deeply about its humans, but I didn’t really. Again, I put the book down a lot. It took me like 2 months to finish it, for no fault of its own. But the cast just felt like that, a cast, with only Gurathin and Mensah having any personality.

I wish there had been more interactions, or Murderbot’s recollections of interactions, to help us care more about the crew as people.

~Vibes~
Connection To Readers: 5
Originality: 4
The Itch™: 4

I connected to the book because Murderbot reminded me a lot of Gideon Nav, and that immediately gave me a lot of feels. I also like that Murderbot is never given a gender to signify its personhood. It doesn’t even really want personhood, either. This is very refreshing after a lifetime of sci fi media insisting that a robot needs to be a girlbot or a boybot to be “alive”.

Average Score: 4.18

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pacing_pages's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

The ending felt a bit weaker somehow but the story gripped me quite well...goes to show that best stories don't need be 500+ pages long. Lolz
Murderbot is somewhat one of us, seen through the lens of a "construct" character, with some glitchy (metal health) limitations like social anxiety, past trauma, lingering connections, social introvert but media extrovert...come on now, at least for me, relatability was off the roofs! Lol
It's clever and smart with its world building and teamwork aesthetics but above all that, it's a masterpiece into exploring strong empathetic characters in such short tale! Ofc somethings felt a bit hindered by the shortness of the text but maybe that's just my bias to know Murderbot better...guess further books will be consumed with the same inspiration! Thanks for the brilliant story Wells 🤗🙏💙

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luxxltyd's review against another edition

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adventurous reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

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clynns's review

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adventurous funny lighthearted fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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wildflowersnwhiskey's review against another edition

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adventurous funny reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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rickireadss's review against another edition

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4.5

WOW I LOVED THIS! one of my goals this year is to venture outside of my comfort in the romance genre and only reading books that have a romance plot/subplot, and this was my first of the year. this series came highly recommended by two of my online friends, and they did not miss!! i truly loved this and immediately went and put the rest of the series on hold at my library. the narrator did such a great job & i really like being in murderbot's head. i'm looking forward to continuing this series & seeing where murderbot goes from here.

content warnings: violence, gun violence, death, slavery, injury/injury detail, murder, gore, body horror, blood, suicide attempt, confinement, medical trauma, medical content, war, mass/school shootings, self harm, trafficking

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cryosphinx's review

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emotional funny mysterious reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

Being a novella, it's hard to really get a good beginning, middle, end and make the story cohesive. All Systems Red aaaalmost does it but right at the climax, everything gets quickly resolved "off screen." It does set up the next one one though so it's good knowing there will be more. I didn't really get too attached or cared about of the other characters. This is about Murderbot after all but not a big deal but they seem mostly to serve as the shoulder devil vs. shoulder angel in regards for self awareness and how to treat Murderbot.

I love Murderbot character, but maybe because I relate as I too need to shut down and recharge after dealing with humans too much. I like the exploration of the humans including Murderbot and treating him with more humanity and him being absolutely baffled but it teaching him what it means to be self aware outside of "I hacked myself so I could watch soap operas" into "Hey, I might actually give a damn." Looking forward to continuing the series.

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moonchild_cos's review against another edition

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adventurous funny mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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fox_at_the_circus's review

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adventurous funny mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

A truely enjoyable quick read.
Murderbot was an extremely relatable main character, I also would like to spend my whole day watching my favourite shows and don't like people looking at me. The other characters were also good, it's always nice to read about competent characters. And I loved how diverse they were and things like polyamorous marriages were just mentioned in a short sentence, really shows how common they are in this world.
Even though this short novella didn't focus all to much on the wider world building, there were enough mentions of politics and technology and such to show it really is a fully fledged out setting and I'm looking forward to reading the other books in this series and learning more about it.

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