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.