Clare L. Deming

For my upcoming book reviews I’m going to try to post one recent read and one older read each week. That brings me to a book series I started in 2025 but never reviewed here – Murderbot!

I started this series for a book club discussion around the time that the Apple TV show aired. You can see the trailer for it below. A second season is expected to air in 2027, although a release date has not been announced.

The first book in The Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells is titled All Systems Red (Amazon / Bookshop.org) and is relatively short, at 144 pages. The series currently stretches across eight books, with some of the later installments being longer. I have currently read through the fourth one, Exit Strategy (Amazon / Bookshop.org).

If you’d like to pick up any of the books mentioned in my posts and support my blog at the same time you can click on the highlighted links. You can also find my list of recommended reads (in different categories) over at Bookshop.org.

Here is the blurb:

“As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure.”

In a corporate-dominated space-faring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. For their own safety, exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern.

On a distant planet, a team of scientists is conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid–a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, Murderbot wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is, but when a neighboring mission goes dark, it’s up to the scientists and Murderbot to get to the truth.

One of the best aspects of this book is how the story is told in first person point-of-view, from the perspective of the sarcastic not-really-murderous SecUnit. I’m going to use male pronouns because I can’t help but see the SecUnit as Alexander Skarsgard from the show, even though Murderbot is genderless in the novella. He spends a lot of time in his own head, and while he does have some responsibility for the humans he is hired to protect, he is bored by them and prefers to watch a variety of adventure shows that he streams on his internal systems.

Despite these distractions, Murderbot has to pretend that he is a normal SecUnit so that no one discovers he hacked his governor module. He knows that rogue SecUnits will be captured and destroyed. The heart of the story revolves around Murderbot’s relationship with the crew of scientists who are from a free world outside the Company-controlled colonies. Dr. Mensah and her researchers treat Murderbot more like a person than a robot, and he turns out to be very socially awkward.

The novella contains plenty of dry humor and anti-corporate themes. I don’t want to spoil anything so I’m not going to say more about the plot. Overall this was a fun and quick story to read that served as an introduction to Murderbot more than anything. I’ll be reviewing the next few installments in The Murderbot Diaries soon.

Have you read any of the Murderbot novellas? Do you prefer this series or one of the author’s other books? Let me know in the comments!

You can find more of my reviews here.