Warning, this review will necessarily spoil the ending of All Systems Red.
Synopsis: Artificial Condition picks up where left off. Having slipped away from the well-intentioned but stifling care of Dr. Mensah, Murderbot is now hitchhiking across the galaxy, bribing space ship AI to ignore a stowaway, and trying to discover the truth about a half-remembered tragedy and the reason it originally went rogue. Most of the AI aren’t that bright, the ones that can’t be bribed can be outsmarted, and things are going great until Murderbot runs into the ship it dubs ART: the Asshole Research Transport. ART isn’t like the other transports Murderbot has interacted with, smart enough to assist a research science team, it has the processing power to run rings around Murderbot, the detachment to see the flaws in Murderbot’s plan, the wherewithal to help, and the boredom as well as altruism to want to do so despite Murderbot’s refusal.
Tags: Science Fiction, AI/Robot Protagonist, Loner Protagonist, Novella, Comfort Read.
Trigger Warnings: None.
Review: I started this book just as fast as it took my to close the previous installment, find the file, and open this one. I needed more Murderbot. I wasn’t disappointed. Artificial Condition gave me more of the same adorably awkward Murderbot I’d come to know and love in the first entry, now with a more robust supporting cast in the form of the delightful ART! ART’s perspective as an AI that is respected for its intelligence plays off well against Murderbot’s bitter cynicism towards the majority of humanity and forms the basis of character development for our hero. The other newly introduced characters are less robust, and act more foolishly than All System’s Red human cast did, but in doing so they allow Murderbot to continue to grow as an individual and show us more facets to its personality, so their immaturity doesn’t detract from the story the way characters who are stupid for the sake of the plot usually do. The key difference is that although the humans around him are acting stupid, Murderbot is making bad choices knowingly, in order to pull their chestnuts out of the fire, and that just makes him all the more endearing.
The initial impetus for the journey is a bit of detour compared to the real meat and potatoes of the story. Murderbot is on a journey to break into a mining facility it was rented to years ago. It’s goal: to discover the truth behind a massacre it perpetrated. A massacre imperfectly wiped from its memory banks. A question has been burning in the back of its mind for years: did it hack itself and go rogue so it would never be forced to watch helpless while its programming forced it to kill those it was meant to protect again, or did it kill because it had gone rogue.
While that all sounds important to the plot, and Murderbot’s growth as a character, it really takes a backseat to what happens when Murderbot encounters a group of three young people who have just been shafted by their Corporation and want to hire Murderbot to work as their protection while they try to retrieve an experimental computer program that their employer stole from them. This detour is the real story in my opinion, as heart-warming and philisophical as the story of All Systems Red. Murderbot is best not when he’s trying to learn about himself directly, but when he’s discovering his humanity by begrudgingly acting altruistically.
In summary, I gave Artificial Condition another 5 out of 5 stars and rushed to start the sequel.
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