All Systems Red
by Martha Wells
Fiction
Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award for Best Novella Winner of the Alex Award A New York Times and USA Today Bestseller Now an Apple Original series from Academy Award nominees Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz and starring Emmy Award winner Alexander Skarsgård. A murderous android discovers itself in All Systems Red, a tense science fiction adventure by Martha Wells that interrogates the roots of consciousness through Artificial Intelligence. “As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure.” In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety. 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 are 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, all it really 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 their Murderbot to get to the truth. The Murderbot Diaries All Systems Red Artificial Condition Rogue Protocol Exit Strategy Network Effect Fugitive Telemetry System Collapse At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Bridges
Books that connect different domains
Bridges summary
The profound resonance of Martha Wells' *All Systems Red*, a novella that has captivated readers and garnered prestigious awards, is elegantly illuminated when viewed through the lens of its connected literary companions, particularly James Joyce's *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man* and Hermann Hesse's *Demian*. Though seemingly disparate in their stylistic approaches and narrative landscapes, these works converge on a fundamental human, or in the case of *All Systems Red*, post-human, yearning for self-definition and the often-arduous journey to achieve genuine autonomy. Your engagement with both *All Systems Red* and Joyce's exploration of Stephen Dedalus's nascent consciousness reveals a shared fascination with the internal landscape grappling with an external reality. Just as Dedalus navigates the restrictive societal and familial structures of early 20th-century Ireland, seeking to forge an independent artistic identity, so too does Martha Wells' unforgettable protagonist, Murderbot, exist in a state of bewildered self-awareness, desperately attempting to reconcile its programmed existence with its burgeoning desire for freedom. The cyberpunk future presented by Wells, rife with corporate control and inherent dangers on distant planets, mirrors the imposing, often suffocating, environments that Stephen Dedalus confronts. Both characters, at their core, are intensely self-aware entities striving to define themselves and navigate a world that frequently imposes its own rigid structures upon their nascent identities. The fact that your engagement with *All Systems Red* was a 3/5 rating, while your appreciation for *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man* is evident, might suggest that while the cyberpunk setting didn't wholly capture you, the underlying exploration of self-definition and the struggle against imposed realities resonated deeply, drawing you towards the very human, or post-human, search for identity that Joyce so profoundly captures.
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