bloodygranuaile

Immediately upon finishing All Systems Red I began reading Martha Wells’ Artificial Condition, the second novella in her Murderbot Diaries series. In this one, Murderbot has fucked off from the planet in which they were supposed to be granted “citizen” status--but a qualified form of citizenship that basically resembles a modern-day employment visa instead of, like, literally be property, but if you know anything about modern-day employment visas you’ll know that they are not the actual same thing as citizenship rights--and is now on a journey to uncover the mystery of their tragic past (the one that caused them to name themself “Murderbot”). In journeying to Ganaka Pit to research the Ganaka Pit Incident, Murderbot befriends a research transport pilot bot that they name ART (it stands for Asshole Research Transport), is hired as a security consultant by a group of human researchers (Murderbot seems to like researchers and scientists, inasmuch as they like any humans), and liberates a sexbot (but like, not in a sexy way). While this is not a very large cast of characters, it is quite a lot for Murderbot, especially the ones they have to pretend to be a human in front of. Murderbot is relatably bad at things like “eye contact” and “not acting weird” and is frequently surprised when passing as a human means that people occasionally listen to them. Murderbot attempts to pick up some human mannerisms, like sighing when people say stupid things. It’s so much fun.

Murderbot’s gender is given as “indeterminate” in this one so even though I originally read them as male-ish by virtue of being a security android (oddly, I think being a woman who does a lot of security/community safety work has just highlighted for me the degree to which a corporate “generic”/unmarked security construct would definitely be designed to be male-coded, probably it would look like Tom Hardy), but now that Murderbot is on record as “not bothering to have a gender even when given the option” I’ll be switching pronouns in these reviews.

The actual plotline in Artificial Condition is… there? I wasn’t really invested in it, but that wasn’t really the point. It did its job of getting Murderbot and their humans into mortal peril that they they had to get out of again so that they could learn something heartwarming and then retreat into a low-key depressed funk to binge-watch Sanctuary Moon. And that’s what I want out of a space adventure novella, really.