Welcome to Murder by the Book's blog about what we've read recently. You can find our website at www.mbtb.com.

Tuesday, October 6, 2020

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

Tordotcom, 160 pages, $17.99 (c2018)


“Artificial Condition” is the second novella in Martha Wells’ wonderfully creative, very human Murderbot series. It’s a science fiction book fit for royalty. 


Here’s an aside. Novella is a short Italian story. Just kidding, but not really. The term's history goes back a few centuries. Currently, the term “novella” has grown increasingly popular to indicate a book of about 200 pages. I love the definition by one dictionary: “a short novel or a long short story.” Clear? So I made my own definition, clarified by the ever-cautious word “about.” I remember when 200 pages would have qualified as an actual novel.  “Artificial Condition” is 160 pages, so it qualifies. And it is a pretty perfectly paced 160 pages.


Murderbot is self-named. It is a robot with organic components and is a designated SecUnit, a security unit, with a disengaged regulator. A self-disengaged regulator. It named itself and freed itself. Until recently, it was a rogue unit who pretended it wasn’t and took on independent protection contracts. Then it met a group of people who became its protectors, crew, and friends, although the concept of “friends” was not exactly in its wheelhouse. "Friends" is a work in progress.


As this story picks up, Murderbot has snuck away from its crew/friends and is on a mission to a mining colony on a faraway moon to determine if it really did murder a bunch of humans it should have been protecting there. That's Murderbot's back story. It knows it did something bad but its non-organic memory has been erased. Probably it is its organic memory that retains a whiff of something awful.


It has the fortuitous and charming help of a sentient transport ship, ART. Murderbot hitches a ride, and they watch soap operas together to better understand humans. ART helps Murderbot to blend in as a human in order to do its research into the mining deaths.


In order to get into the section of the moon Murderbot needs to see, it must acquire a work permit. It does that by hiring itself out to a group of young (my assumption) people who have been cheated out of proprietary research by a corporation. These innocents want the data that belong to them, but they know there may be danger going up against a big corp. They hire Murderbot. Or, rather, Murderbot allows itself to be hired, thus acquiring the desired work permit. Win-win. Until the big corp tries to murder the little innocents.


ART and Murderbot make a clever and engaging team, as they try to help the innocents and learn what happened to Murderbot on that moon long ago.


I beg you. Please read this series. I will say “you’re welcome” in advance.


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