Book Review – Artificial Condition

06 Nov 2026 2 Comments

by Clare in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

This week I’m moving on to the second book in The Murderbot Diaries – Artificial Condition – by Martha Wells. There will be some unavoidable spoilers for the previous book. You can read my review of that first book at the link below:

  • All Systems Red (Murderbot #1) – review here / purchase here
Book cover of 'Artificial Condition' by Martha Wells, featuring a robotic figure in a futuristic environment with a spacecraft in the background.
I read the e-book edition.

Here is the blurb:

It has a dark past – one in which a number of humans were killed. A past that caused it to christen itself “Murderbot.” But it has only vague memories of the massacre that spawned that title, and it wants to know more.

Teaming up with a Research Transport vessel named ART (you don’t want to know what the “A” stands for), Murderbot heads to the mining facility where it went rogue.

What it discovers will forever change the way it thinks.

The blurb for this one doesn’t do a good job of explaining what this book is about so I’ll start this review with more of a plot summary than I usually do.

After Murderbot leaves the PresAux team at the end of All Systems Red, he ventures out on his own to try to discover more about his past. He remembers enough to know that he killed many humans at a place named Ganaka Pit. As he travels there, posing as an augmented human, he meets ART – a sentient transport that is curious about him. After some salty interactions, ART (short for Asshole Research Transport) helps Murderbot make some changes to better disguise himself. Even after this, Murderbot fears being discovered by humans who are familiar with SecUnits or by other SecUnits. In order to have a reason to be near Ganaka Pit, Murderbot is hired by a group of young researchers who have been victimized by their corrupt corporate employer. They need protection while they try to get their stolen data back. The rest of the story follows Murderbot’s mission to find out what happened at Ganaka Pit while also protecting the humans who have hired him.

In this book we get to see how Murderbot acts now that he is more free to make his own choices. Despite this new freedom, he still ends up as a protector to humans. Was this a result of some inherent programming that he cannot escape or just a reasonable choice to stick with what he knows how to do? This book lets us watch Murderbot explore his choices as he decides how human he wants to be. I also love how Murderbot takes inspiration from the shows he watches, sometimes taking on a name or other parts of the story from Sanctuary Moon.

The worldbuilding in Artificial Condition also expands to show the reader a larger part of this world and more types of bots, with ART as well as ComfortUnits. Like the previous book, this one includes an anti-corporate theme. Overall I enjoyed the book – it was a quick read that wraps up with action and a satisfying conclusion.

What other books about robots and androids have you enjoyed? Let me know in the comments.

You can find more of my book reviews here.

Book Review – All Systems Red

28 Oct 2026 2 Comments

by Clare in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , ,

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.

Cover of 'All Systems Red' by Martha Wells featuring a robotic figure in a futuristic landscape.
I read the e-book edition.

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.

Book Review – How High We Go In the Dark

17 Apr 2024 Leave a comment

by Clare in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , ,

I don’t remember where I came across this book, but it ended up being a selection for one of my book clubs last year. How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu is a novel told through interconnected short stories (paid link). Read on below to see what I thought.

I read this as an e-book.

Here is the blurb:

A debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters over hundreds of years as humanity struggles to rebuild itself in the aftermath of a climate plague.

Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work of his recently deceased daughter at the Batagaika crater, where researchers are studying long-buried secrets now revealed in melting permafrost, including the perfectly preserved remains of a girl who appears to have died of an ancient virus.

Once unleashed, the Arctic Plague will reshape life on earth for generations to come, quickly traversing the globe, forcing humanity to devise a myriad of moving and inventive ways to embrace possibility in the face of tragedy. In a theme park designed for terminally ill children, a cynical employee falls in love with a mother desperate to hold on to her infected son. A heartbroken scientist searching for a cure finds a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects—a pig—develops the capacity for human speech. A widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter embark on a cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.

From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead to interstellar starships, Sequoia Nagamatsu takes readers on a journey spanning continents, centuries, and even celestial bodies to tell a story about the resiliency of the human spirit, our infinite capacity to dream, and the connective threads that tie us all together in the universe.

This book drew fairly polarized responses from the book club. I did enjoy it, but I could see how it is not for everyone. This book starts out at the beginning of a pandemic and ultimately is about how we deal with death.

Being someone who deals with life and death situations and humane euthanasia every day as a veterinarian, I found that the situations in this book took a thoughtful look at death and grief, but in ways that went beyond our current cultural norms. My favorite example of this is an amusement park for terminally ill children. Their parents bring them to the park to enjoy all the thrills and excitement, and then for the last ride of the day, they embark on a rollercoaster that breaks their necks to end their suffering. The parents know the purpose of the park, but the children don’t.

The disease that results from the pandemic was also fascinating to me. It caused the organs of those afflicted with it to slowly change to a different organ. At one point it only affected children, then later on it spreads to everyone. This book isn’t about the science behind the virus or the epidemiology of the pandemic, but rather follows how society changes as a result.

This is also a science fiction tale that takes some odd tangents into a possible afterlife and interstellar travel, although those aren’t exactly the main plot. Overall, I thought that How High We Go in the Dark brought a unique perspective to how we think about preparations for and rituals about the end of life.

Have you read any of Sequoia Nagamatsu’s short stories? Let me know in the comments (above).

Find more of my reviews here.

Book Review – The Terraformers

17 Feb 2024 1 Comment

by Clare in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , ,

The Terraformers is a stand-alone science fiction novel by Annalee Newitz. This is a book that I read last year. I have previously read and enjoyed one of this author’s other books, The Future of Another Timeline, but did not review it here (paid links). Read on below to see what I thought.

I read the e-book edition of this book.

Here is the blurb:

Destry is a top network analyst with the Environmental Rescue Team, an ancient organization devoted to preventing ecosystem collapse. On the planet Sask-E, her mission is to terraform an Earthlike world, with the help of her taciturn moose, Whistle. But then she discovers a city that isn’t supposed to exist, hidden inside a massive volcano. Torn between loyalty to the ERT and the truth of the planet’s history, Destry makes a decision that echoes down the generations.

Centuries later, Destry’s protege, Misha, is building a planetwide transit system when his worldview is turned upside-down by Sulfur, a brilliant engineer from the volcano city. Together, they uncover a dark secret about the real estate company that’s buying up huge swaths of the planet―a secret that could destroy the lives of everyone who isn’t Homo sapiens. Working with a team of robots, naked mole rats, and a very angry cyborg cow, they quietly sow seeds of subversion. But when they’re threatened with violent diaspora, Misha and Sulfur’s very unusual child faces a stark choice: deploy a planet-altering weapon, or watch their people lose everything they’ve built on Sask-E.

This book was structured as several interconnected stories, each one set further into the future on the planet of Sask-E. I definitely gravitated toward certain characters more than others and found that Destry in the opening section was my favorite.

The terraforming technology was used to make the planet hospitable and it was designed to mimic a paleolithic Earth. The main character at the beginning, Destry, is part of the Environmental Rescue Team, ironically tasked with protecting this artificial environment that humans have painstakingly created. She discovers a hidden society of the original terraformers, thought long dead as a result of the changes to the planet and deals with the crisis that arises as a result. However, when the book cuts to the next section, I was disappointed that I didn’t get to keep reading about Destry.

The novel looks at some interesting ideas – about what makes an organism sentient, how humans change the environment, and who gets to make the decisions about the world they live in. I also loved the idea of the sentient train in the later portion of this book. Overall though, this book was a bit of a let down and didn’t quite come together to me. I enjoyed The Future of Another Timeline more.

Have you read any of the author’s books? Let me know in the comments (above).

Find more of my reviews here.

Book Review – Titan

05 Feb 2024 2 Comments

by Clare in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Titan by John Varley is a book that I read for a recent book club meeting. I had never read anything by this author until now. This is the first book in the Gaea trilogy. Read on to see what I thought (paid links).

I read an e-book edition of this.

I had a hard time finding a blurb for this one, but eventually located two short versions:

The first one: When Cirrocco Jones, captain of the spaceship Ringmaster, and her crew are captured by Gaea, a planet-sized creature that orbits around Saturn, they find themselves inside a bizarre world inhabited by centaurs, harpies, and constantly shifting environments.

And a second one: It begins with humankind’s exploration of a massive satellite orbiting Saturn. It culminates in a shocking discovery: the satellite is a giant alien being. Her name is Gaea. Her awesome interior is mind-boggling—because it is a mind. A mind that calls out to explorers, transforming all who enter.

Those blurbs don’t really explain much of what this book is about. In many ways, it reminded me of Ringworld by Larry Niven (which I didn’t like) (paid links). Like that book, the story in Titan follows a group of explorers as they travel across a toroid-shaped artificial world. In Titan, this party is all human, but they are scattered when they enter Gaea and have to search for each other while exploring the place.

I did like the characters in this book (definitely better than the ones in Ringworld) and was pleasantly surprised to find that the protagonist was a (mostly) well-drawn female character written by a male author in the 1970s. Not that there weren’t some missteps, but overall Cirrocco Jones was a daring, gutsy, and believable heroine.

The opening chapter with the emphasis on relating how all of the astronauts on the Ringmaster had all had sex with each other over the course of their journey to Saturn was a strange way to start the story, and I think this could have been worked in better in another way. The relationships were important to the story, but I didn’t need it spelled out up front.

This is the first book in a series, but did reach a satisfying conclusion and could be read as a stand-alone tale. The other books finish out a trilogy and are Wizard and Demon (paid links). I’m undecided about whether I’ll read them.

Have you read Titan or any other novels by John Varley? Which would you recommend? Let me know in the comments (above).

Find more of my reviews here.

Book Review – The Three-Body Problem

02 Apr 2020 Leave a comment

by Clare in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , ,

While one of my goals since 2019 has been to finish reading some of the series that I’ve started, I can’t help but read books by new-to-me authors, which often means starting new series. I have also been trying to read from a more diverse selection of authors, so one book that I had been interested in was The Three-Body Problem by Chinese author Cixin Liu. This book is one of the most popular science fiction novels in China, and is book one of a trilogy (Remembrance of Earth’s Past). The translation by Ken Liu brought the book to English-speaking audiences and it won the Hugo award for Best Novel in 2015.

This book gets its name from a famous physics problem that tries to model the motion of three celestial bodies. I had never heard of this, and this is one reason why I like to read hard science fiction. It encourages me to look things up and to learn more about the world.

I also learned about the Chinese Cultural Revolution by reading this book. If you’ve never learned that part of history, it is worth looking into and doing some reading. This event has been likened to the Holocaust in terms of the lives lost and the discrimination that occurred at that time. So while the characters in the book are fictional, the historical setting for parts of the story is not.

The narrative follows a couple of characters, but the central protagonist is Wang Miao, a nanotech scientist. An unknown force seems to be interfering in science and working against progress all around the world. Miao ends up playing an immersive video game where he must solve puzzles on a strangely changing world, unlocking hints to what is really going on.

Most of the characters in the story are scientists, but one of the most interesting characters is a police investigator who spurs Miao to investigate. The different threads of the plot come together toward the end of the book and even though this is the first book in a trilogy, enough is revealed to have some resolution by the end.

One thing that I learned after finishing this book was that the original Chinese text had been told in a different order. The sections detailing events during the Cultural Revolution had been in later parts to help reduce the chance that the book would be censored.

I am glad that I read this book, but I doubt that I will continue on with the series. I never really identified with any of the characters and found the anti-humanity themes off-putting. The concepts were interesting but there wasn’t enough to encourage me to keep reading.

Read more of my reviews here. Oh, and please follow my Amazon affiliate links to help support this blog.

Book Review – Salvaged

17 Jan 2020 Leave a comment

by Clare in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , ,

Salvaged is a science fiction novel that features more biology than physics, with a touch of romance. Author Madeleine Roux is new to me, but I was interested in this book because I’m always looking for stories that explore the implications of biotech or biochemistry in fictional setups. I received this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review. If you’d like to support this blog, you can pick up your own copy using my Amazon affiliate link here.

Rosalyn Devar has fled her family and her problems and has found a new life working for a salvage company in space. But when her excess drinking is reported, she is given one last chance before being cut loose from employment.

Strange deaths have been reported on a couple of ships recently and now another ship, the Brigantine, has seemingly gone down. Rosalyn is sent to investigate and salvage the vessel, but things are not exactly as expected.

The crew on board the Brigantine has been infected with a strange parasite that has put them into some sort of suspended animation as it tries to control their minds. Rosalyn struggles to discover the source of the parasite while staying alive and uninfected herself.

This was a fun book to read, but the basic plot reminded me a lot of Julie Mao from The Expanse. I’ve only seen the show, so that is what my comparison is based on. This isn’t really a criticism because the plot takes the characters in a different direction that The Expanse story.

I enjoyed this book and read it pretty fast. It also functions well as a stand-alone novel and the ending kept me guessing with how it would end. There aren’t any devastatingly new science ideas here, but it was still a nice exploration of how biology can play a role as a speculative element in fiction.

Read more of my reviews here.

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