Artificial Condition

June 11, 2018
Wells follows the classically tight adventure pacing of All Systems Red with a slightly disorienting shift to self-exploration, making intense moments out of data dumps and matter-of-fact narrative out of fights to the death. Murderbot, a sentient artificial intelligence, is on the lam, hopping cargo transports and hacking security cameras on a quest to discover the truth of its own origin story as the villain of a massacre. Sounds like a rollicking time—which it is, but not in the way one might expect. The real discovery is not about the horrific events Murderbot may have participated in some 35,000 hours ago, but the bonds it never intended to form with beings who were no part of its plan. The most endearing is ART, a wacky cross between 2001’s HAL and Mycroft Holmes, who plays to Murderbot’s Sherlock with acerbic and infinite superiority. The broadening of Murderbot’s experience, however mundane, “make it harder for me to pretend not to be a person,” and the dizzying, inarguable plenitude of personhood is what this dense novella most intimately explores. There’s plenty here to entertain the many fans of the first novella. Agent: Jennifer Jackson, Donald Maass Literary.

In the second novella in The Murderbot Diaries, narrator Kevin R. Free finds delicate nuances in Murderbot's developing personality. On a quest to research its own disastrous past, the former security android hitches a ride aboard an unmanned research transport. The AI pilot's voice is a nice blend of sarcastic and robotic tones, and Free does an equally fine job with the voices of other characters, particularly the gender-neutral ones, both artificial and human. At times, Free seems to run short of air at the ends of long phrases, and at one point he can be heard to swallow mid-sentence, but overall he delivers a strong performance in this satisfying follow-up to ALL SYSTEMS RED. D.L.Y. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine