All Systems Red by Martha Wells

I'm trying not to make every review all about the Hugos this year, but I am at least going to mention that this is the second nominated novella I've read so far, and in general, for all my reading, I am really struck by how difficult many of these categories are going to be to rank. Which is a delightful problem! I'm trying to rank as I go along, partly judging by how much I want to (and do) tell people around me about what I've read.

I don't think All Systems Red gets my top spot, but I wanted to say the above to make it clear that that in no way says anything about the quality of the book!  I really enjoyed this, although I sometimes felt like it wasn't breaking new ground in what it was about and how it was about it, but it was a great run at the rich question of the humanity of a cyborg.

Of course, in this case, the cyborg is self-named Murderbot which gives you a good idea of how they see themselves. (I don't think gender is ever indicated, and the cyborg is generally given the pronoun "it," but the crew around the cyborg, to the cyborg's dismay, has trouble using "it" as a descriptor. Pronouns are not discussed in the book, but the cyborg seems to be okay with "it" because it creates and reinforces distance from the crew, but the crew is determined to see Murderbot as more, and I think me wanting to use the "them" pronoun comes from the same place. I'm not sure what to do in this case, except maybe try to take the advice of a professor of sociology whose gender diversity workshop I attended recently, and figure out how to write in such a way that doesn't use pronouns at all. It's hard and I haven't mastered it, and preferred pronouns are easier, but in that case, preferred was no pronouns, so I will keep working away.)

Which is all to say, damn, I may have trouble with it, but Martha Wells does not, and it was absolutely seamless and unobtrusive that there are no gendered or nonbinary pronouns used for the Murderbot, except in the aggregate, when I had a moment to stop and think. I am a little in awe right now.

So! This novella is about Murderbot, a part-human, part-machine...uh, killing machine. I mean, in theory, security provided by a company for a crew exploring a planet, but since this particular security robot had had a previous programming glitch that led to a lot of dead humans, the self-given title of Murderbot tells you a bit about how those events were regarded. Also the part where Murderbot has now hacked their own "governor" module so that glitchy programming can't cause that sort of malfunction again. This would make most humans feel scared, when in this case, it's probably more reassuring.

When things on the planet suddenly start trying to kill the human crew, and some of those things seem to be the very security robots sent to protect them, Murderbot's self-hacking may be all that saves them.  But really, what much of this book is about is how the crew tries to humanize their part-machine compatriot, even though Murderbot might be more comfortable being seen as an appliance. That Murderbot is obsessed with soap operas and hidden autonomy suggests that there is more going on, but does more going on necessarily translate to humanity?

And when is sharing humanity an imposition? What they want for Murderbot is to allow a self-actualized human to develop despite machine parts, but they have a clear idea of what that would be, and what the path and result would be, and that too is a limitation, in many ways. All of these themes were layered in subtly, but well, and I found them very interesting. I'm looking forward to reading the other novellas in this series.