My life in books

Kelly Robson’s novella Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach takes place partly in a post-apocalyptic future where humans live in habitats, some on the Earth’s surface, some beneath, and where those who survived climate disruption and plague, among other things, live through the benefit of advanced technologies - including the ability to travel into the past - but in often borderline existences. Some humans have been mutated by the plague; others are dependent on specialised prostheses to function; some appear to be what we would still thing of as fully human.

Minh, a private contractor and specialist in multiple fields, most having to do with water systems and ecologies, has won o competition for a unique and exciting project - to travel into the past to do a complete survey of the Tigris-Euphrates river valley. Her three person team - herself, Kiki, and Hamid, accompanied by Fabian, a ‘tactical historian’ supplied by the time travel organisation, will rely on the most advanced tech - satellites, probes, all manner of mobile monitoring devices, to collect the first wave of data.

Intercut with the narrative of the team’s preparations and journey back in time, and the beginning of their work, is a second narrative, the story of Shulgi, the king of the Mesopotamian state of Ur, who faces a political crisis when new stars appear in the sky, and strange flying creatures are seen across the land. At first the high priestess Susa, the only power that rivals his in the kingdom, names these an evil omen and calls for Shulgi’s death to appease the gods, but after a time she withdraws into the temple and begins to issue strange orders. Shulgi, meanwhile, prepares to face whatever the omens bring, for it is the role of a king to protect his people.

What happens when the inevitable interaction occurs is unexpected, and showcases both the best and the worst of human nature, past and future. A profoundly thought provoking work.

Cynthia Ward’s The Adventure of the Dux Bellorum continues the exploits of Lucy Harker, not exactly human daughter of Mina Harker by the vampire Dracula, adventuress and spy in the employ of the WWI era British secret service, where she works for the consummate spymaster known as M, short for Mycroft Holmes - who is also her stepfather.

Her mission, to protect Winston Churchill, who, currently out of favour and out of cabinet, has decided to join the army and fight the Germans at the front if he cannot fight them in the halls of power. But some things not even a dhampir can fight. When a squad of 20 German created and controlled wolfmen attack, kidnapping Churchill and leaving Lucy for dead, then the only choice is for Lucy and her lover Clarimal - the 300 year old upior, or vampire, Carmilla von Karstein - to go behind enemy lines in search of him. But there is much worse waiting for them than wolfmen.

I’m really enjoying this series, not the least because of all the material from texts that form the basis of science fiction and fantasy, and other genres from the adventure fiction of the Victorian era to the classic mystery. References to characters, milieus and events from authors as diverse as H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Agatha Christie are found here, intermixed with historical characters such as Sophia and Catherine Duleep Singh.

Definitely a series that I hope will continue.

Nicola Griffith is not a writer to be pigeon-holed. She’s written science fiction, hard core detective stories, and stunningly well researched historical fiction. She is also a person with MS who has not been content to sit back and take received wisdom about her condition. She’s researched it with the same tenacity that has marked her writing, and explored new theories of the disease mechanism for herself.

In So Lucky, Griffith takes her experience in living with MS, in the entire spectrum of what living as disabled is like, and turns it into a compelling, enveloping story of Mara, a woman who is diagnosed with MS just as her wife of over twenty years decides to leave her for another woman. She loses her job, explores the increasingly depressing world of support groups and pharmaceutical interventions. She learns all the things you never know about how the world treats cripples until you are one. And eventually, she takes her experience in the non-profit sector and her rage and builds a new organisation modelled on the fierce personal advocacy of the early year of the HIV epidemic.

So Lucky is in some ways the story of anyone who has suddenly gone from category normal to category disabled, and it chronicles so many of the changes in status, energy, self-image, priorities... everything that changes for the disabled person, which is in most cases everything in your life. It’s powerful, and painful, and in its portrayal of becoming a crip, it is very, very real.

There’s a narrative here, of course, a story to follow, a build-up and a climax and a denouement, and it’s interesting in itself and a parable of the relation between society and the disabled. But it’s Mara’s coming to terms with her own changed status and life that’s the real story. And it’s one of the most compelling I’ve read in a very long time.

Nnedi Okorafor has described the arc of her Binti trilogy as: “African girl leaves home. African girl returns home. African girl becomes home." Which is to say, that this is not a narrative in which the important things are what Binti does, but rather, who Binti is, and who she becomes.

By the time we as readers embark on the final volume of the trilogy, Binti: The Night Masquerade, Binti has already become much more than she was in the beginning. She starts out her journey as an African girl, of the Himba people, a marginalised group within the area she grows up in, which is dominated by the more numerous and far more aggressive Khoush. She is a harmonizer, someone who can sense and use the currents of energy in its very broadest sense - emotional, physical, cultural - to bring things into harmony with eachother, a peacemaker. But she longs to be more.

She travels to an ancient, galactic university, surviving a massacre of her shipmates by the non-human enemies of the Khoush and entering into an exchange of genetic material with her attackers in order to bring about a measure of truce. She becomes friends, perhaps even more than friends, with Okwe, one of the Meduse who attacked her ship, and in the second volume, when she returns to Earth and Himbaland, Okwe accompanies her. At home, she discovers that she has grown beyond the limitations placed on her by the traditions of her people, and learns that through her father, she has a heritage communion made many generations ago between sone of her people, not treated as outcastes, and an alien race, the Zinariya. And yet again, Binti becomes more, as she chooses to join the outcaste community, having her alien DNA activated. Bonding with Okwe gave her the ability to communicate at a distance with the Meduse; becoming Enyi Zinariya opens her to a gene-based technology that permits long-distance communication with all others of her kind, and access to a racial history.

But at the opening of the third novella, Binti is in dire circumstances. Still struggling to adapt to the changes in her ways of thinking, perceiving and communicating brought about by the activation of her Zinariya self, she learns that the Khoush have attacked her parent’s home, seeking to kill both her and Okwe. Having failed to find either, they have set fire to her family’s house, and all her relatives, who sought safety in the deep roots of the ancestral structure formed from a massive tree, are believed dead. And Meduse ships, summoned by Okwe, are en route to avenge the attack and open up a new chapter of the long Meduse-Khoush war, on a battleground of the lands of the Himba people.

Despite her deep personal loss, despite being rejected by the other Himba for what and who she has become, Binti tries to use her skills as a master harmonizer to bring about peace between Meduse and Khoush.

And here is where it is vital to remember that this is a story about who Binti is becoming, not a story about what Binti does. Because despite her efforts, she is betrayed, and the peace fails. And everything that follows after is about what Binti will become, and not what happens to the Himba, the Khoush or the Meduse.

And part of Binti’s becoming is learning to be her own judge and arbiter, not to accept without question the beliefs if others, which her own experiences have shown her are so often limited and blind. In becoming her own home, Binti becomes mistress of herself, unbound by the restrictions others have always placed on her, freed by the web of connections she has forged with others to be fully herself among them.

John Scalzi’s Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome is an odd but interesting piece of fiction. It’s a companion of sorts to his novels Lock In and Head On, in that it is, quite literally, what it says on the label. It’s written as a selection of personal accounts by medical researchers, doctors, journalists, scientists, business people, and people with Haden’s Syndrome, illuminating various aspects of the fictional disease that creates the world in which thise two novels are set.

It reads as if it were real, which is a testament to Scalzi’s gifts for characterization. The narrators have their own voices, perspectives, insights, into the ways American society develops after the world-wide catastrophe that is Haden’s Syndrome begins. My only regret is that Scalzi didn’t take the opportunity to give us more than a few casual remarks on what happened in the rest of the world while all this was unfolding in the US.

The second Murderbot Diaries novella, Artificial Condition, is just as delightful as the first. In this new adventure, our protagonist, the still unnamed “free” security unit/cyborg construct, has left its human “governor” Dr. Mensah, and is trying to find out what happened on a previous contract, before it became autonomous.

It has been informed that while serving as security for a mining concern, it went rogue and destroyed nine other security units and the human personnel. It wants to find out why, and whether this is the reason that it was able to hack its governing module and become capable of independent action.

The murderbot has been hitching rides on automated transports, exchanging its collection of entertainment media for passage with the bots controlling the ships. On the last leg of its trip, it hitches a ride with a scientific vessel that normally carries a crew, but is travelling empty. The bot that runs the ship is a highly complex AI called ART with more computing power and almost as much autonomy as Murderbot itself. They establish what might be construed as a friendship, and the AI decides to help Muderbot become more able to pass as human, and to use its experience dealing with its human crew to help Murderbot successfully investigate its past.

In order to have a reason to go down to the planet, ART advises Murderbot to take a job as a security consultant to a group of researchers, which turns out to be a serious matter in itself, as someone is definitely out to kill Murderbot’s new clients, though all ends well, thanks to assistance from ART.

What’s fascinating about this installment of Murderbot’s story is watching its process of moving from a being accustomed to following orders to a truly independent being. It makes mistakes in handling its clients’ affairs, because it hasn’t quire grasped that it doesn’t have to settle for doing the best it can within the parameters set by its clients, it is allowed to insist on the parameters the clients must follow. Reading these diaries is like watching an intelligence begin to understand itself and the nature of freedom and responsibility, and it’s a very interesting process.

Cassandra Khaw is an author I’ve only recently come to appreciate. I’ve read a few short stories, and one novella - A Song for Quiet, which rocked me deeply. The pieces I’d read up to this point have been dark fantasy and horror, which she does very well, so well that I thought I’d acquaint myself with her other work.

Hammers on Bone, another novella, and I believe the first one featuring John Persons, who also appeared in A Song for Quiet, is a horror story with a difference. It draws on parts of the Lovecraft mythos for its characters and situations, but the real horrors are all too human - domestic and child abuse. Persons is an interesting character, definitely in the anti-hero mode. A private detective by trade, and a Yith by nature - one of the time travelling, body snatching entities found originally in Lovecraft’s stories, he has otherworldly powers, but also a detached, inhuman perspective that is partly influenced to occasional human responses by the faint presence of the human whose body he wears. Being who and what he is, his cases tend to have something of the supernatural and monstrous about them, and he does not necessarily handle these the way a human PI would. Khaw does an excellent jib if capturing the alienness of Persons, and the desperate humanity of those he deals with. With two Persons stories written, I rather hope there Khaw intends there to be more.

Bearly a Lady, on the other hand, is supernatural chick lit comedy. Zelda Joshua Andreas McCartney is a werebear, which is hard on all sorts of things, like underwear and dating. Her best friend and roommate Zora is a vampire. And she has, thanks to Zora’s pushing, a hot date with a very sexy werewolf she’s been lusting after for a very long time. And she’s still got a bit of a crush on co-worker Janine. Then her employer assigns her to act as a bodyguard to her visiting nephew, an arrogant, entitled fae lordling with full-tilt glamour. It’s Bridget Jones for the fantasy-reading woman, and it is as different from Khaw’ dark fantasy as it can be and still occupy the same broadly-defined genre.

There’s a lot of good stuff in here about female friendship, and some pointedly cautionary advice for the modern female wereperson who wants to have a bit of romance in her life. It’s a delightful change fir this author, who says in her afterward, and with perfect truth, “Because there’s a place and time for darkness and grim ruminations, and there’s a place and time for bisexual werebears with killer wardrobes and a soft spot for pastries.”

And then there’s the Rupert Wong stories: Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef and Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth, two novellas which I read packaged in omnibus format and titled Food of the Gods. I’m not entirely sure how to categorise these stories. Not exactly horror, though certainly full of horrific things. Not humorous, really, although the main character does use humour to deal with the improbabilities in his life. Definitely supernatural, full of gods, ghosts, ghouls and monsters from multiple cultural traditions. But whatever you decide it is, it’s certainly interesting.

Rupert Wong is a self-described “superstar chef to the ghouls and liaison for the damned of Kuala Lumpur.” His specialty is preparing human flesh and blood for the consumption of the various undead. He employs a large number of kwee kia, ghouls created from unborn fetuses, and despite the blood bind between them - he feeds them ritually from his own wrist - but he’s the kind of guy who believes in educating the exploited workers, and now they’re threatening to unionise. But that’s hardly the worst if his problems.

He’s a hard-working chef with a commitment to satisfying his employer, and not just because his employer is a powerful ghoul who’s likely to kill and eat him if he doesn’t. He’s a devoted family man, though both his wife Minah and their son are undead themselves. A sad story - Minah was pregnant when her first husband murdered her, and so when she awoke from the dead to take vengeance, her unborn child did as well. Rupert feeds both of them, too. And he has a lot of other responsibilities, too.

Rupert, you see, has a past. A very bad past. And when he finally realised that his bad past was going to seriously affect his afterlife, he made an arrangement with the gods to start working off his time in the Courts of Hell early. As he explains: “So now I’m working off my karmic debt through community management. I mediate arguments. I listen to complaints. I exorcise stubborn ghouls. I push pencils on hell paper and do the books every Hungry Ghost Festival.”

In the first of these tales, Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef, it’s this reputation that brings the Dragon King to him, with a demand that he investigate the reasons why the Erinys killed his youngest child. It’s not a request he can refuse. He wants to, of course, but the Dragon King isn’t just threatening to kill him if he declines - or takes the job and fails. The dragon holds a trump card. He can procure a reincarnation for Minah, a chance to work out her own karmic debt for killing her ex-husband. And Rupert would do anything for Minah. But as he begins his search for the Erinys, complications compound and he repeatedly runs afoul of various persons living, dead and divine, it begins to look as though there is no possible solution that doesn’t end in death, or worse.

Rupert does find a way through the maze of conflicting loyalties and demands, surviving to return in Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth. Due to various repercussions from his mission for the Dragon King, Rupert is now persona non grata among certain Asian pantheons, and his patron loans him to the Greek gods - currently based in London - to get him out of Kuala Lumpur. With his wife Minah reincarnated, and thus lost to him, there’s not much to keep him there anyway.

Being in London as the chef of the Greek gods is not a pleasant experience. No one seems to want to tell him what’s going on - why, for instance, a band of men in suits with guns suddenly appear on his first day in Demeter’s soup kitchen and gun down most of the homeless people eating there. As best as he can figure, he’s caught in a war between the old pantheons and the new gods created from human needs. And he has no idea what are the rules of engagement, or what role he’s supposed to play.

These stories are not for the squeamish. Rupert is, in his own way, a kind of a hero, but he does cook people for a living. And the gods and ghouls of the new and old pantheons around him are generally rather bloody and violent beings. But there’s a certain pleasure in watching Rupert as he survives the machinations of the endlessly powerful and manages to keep body and soul more or less intact.

Gwyneth Jones’s novella Proof of Concept is a densely packed narrative, weaving multiple thematic threads together into a single coherent story. The protagonist, a young woman named Kir, was chosen from a life of brutal poverty to be the host to an AI called Altair - serving as the biological platform for a software too complex to run solely on inanimate hardware. That brutal life was the result of being an outsider, a ‘scav,’ in a world ruined by ecological collapse leading to a severe population crisis. This post-climate-change earth has dead oceans and limited agricultural land, vast areas of the planet’s are unlivable and most of humanity survives - just barely - in crowded cities known as hives. The dream is The Great Escape - a way out of the solar system, to inhabit a new, fresh world.

Dan Orsted is known as the Great Popularizer. He creates Very Long Duration Training Missions in which groups of potential space explorers simulate interstellar travel conditions - while the world watches, the newest version of reality television. Margarethe Patel is a physicist working on the theory of instantaneous travel.

The Needle is an experimental space travel device built in a deep chasm. Here a group of Patel’s scientists and Orsted’s LDM reality star colonists will spend a year in isolation while Patel’s team works on the problem of directing instantaneous travel. They already know they can send the Needle out, and bring it back - now they need to find out how to find out where it goes, and eventually make it go where they want.

At first, it seems to be working well. There’s some interpersonal discomfort - friction is a bad word in the intensely social society of the hives - between the mostly driven an introverted scientists and the determinedly gregarious media stars, but nothing serious.

Then one of the scientists dies. A few months later, another. And shortly after that, another. All older, with known health issues, but still it doesn’t feel right to Kir. Meanwhile, Kir has suddenly started to ‘hear’ Altair speaking to her. The first thing he does is ask her to check certain offline data, data which, if she understands correctly, means that solving the instantaneous travel problem is much closer than she believed it to be, that they have ‘proof of concept’ - but Patel hasn’t told anyone yet. And then her casual lover, oe of the LDM personnel, is brutally murdered.

Proof of Concept is a heavily layered mystery, tightly plotted, with deceptions and evasions on almost all sides, as Kir struggles to find out what is really going inside the Needle Project. By the time she finds out, it is too late for the characters to do anything except accept the challenge to survive. What’s left for the reader is to consider the morality of certain acts in the face of extinction of not just humanity, but all things on the Earth.

Jones never gives easy answers in her fiction. Proof of Concept is no exception.

What with the Hugo nomination period for 1943 Retro Hugo being open, I’ve decided to kill two birds with one stone by reading the collections of Heinlein’s shorter fiction that contain anything published in 1942.

I begin my Heinlein Hugo reading with the odd little volume that packages his 1942 sf novella, Waldo, with his slightly earlier contemporary fantasy, Magic, Inc. The edition I have contains an introduction by the self-proclaimed Heinlein expert William H. Patterson, Jr., who tells us that Heinlein did not see why these two novellas were published in one volume: “...he considered these stories so mismatched, he told his agent, that, “[i]t seems to me that they go together about as well as mustard and watermelon.” It was a headache to come up with a title for the book. He ran through several lackluster possibilities and gave up: the book was published in 1950 with just the titles of the two stories joined together.”

Patterson argues that they are in fact thematically linked: “...for what “Magic, Inc.” and “Waldo” have in common is that they are both explorations of cognitive boundaries, of the mental cages we erect for ourselves, whose limits we pace out and self-reinforce.” I think he’s reaching a bit here, not because this isn’t true, but because it is true of most things Heinlein wrote, and indeed most of the best that any writer of speculative fiction has written.

Anyway, on to Waldo. It is, of course, the story that gave remotely operated robotic instruments their nickname, “waldoes,” because it is the story of an isolated and eccentric genius, Waldo F. Jones, with severe myasthenia gravis who invents and relies on such instruments to do the things he cannot. The set-up of the novella: 15 years after the transition to the use of radiant power, and the elimination of all physical means of power transmission, something is going wrong with the system. Unexplained failures, breakdowns in equipment that should not break down, findings that go against all the science that resulted in radiant power being adopted in the first place. No one can explain the problem, let alone solve it. The last option is to seek the help, if it can be obtained, of Waldo, the crippled, misanthropic genius who lives in a self-contained orbital satellite and generally refuses to interact with anyone unless it serves his interests and is on his terms.

The last time I read Waldo, which was many years ago, I did not see myself as disabled. I was overweight, and limited in certain ways, and frustrated that no matter what medical advice I followed, I could not lose weight, but just kept getting heavier. I had some respiratory issues, but the environmental illness that would eventually force me into seclusion had not yet become obvious. I could understand Waldo, the character, intellectually, but I could not feel as he might feel. Now, imprisoned by gravity and my extreme susceptibility to environmental toxins, I identify with Waldo. I long for a Freehold where I could move freely. I want to dance again. So that’s a big part of my response to the novella.

I’m also, as always, delighted by Heinlein’s premise in this story, that there are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies, and that some of those might in fact involve a basis for some kinds of manipulation of reality, something that looks like magic. This time around, in reading Waldo’s unravelling of the science of the science of the Other World, I was struck by an image of the mind, resident in the Other World, reaching into the continuum of physical reality to make the body function, like an organic simulation of the mechanical waldoes created by the protagonist.

Magic, Inc. is a contemporary fantasy, a forerunner to the modern and burgeoning genre of urban fantasy. It takes place in a world where magic works according to recognised laws and principles, and is fully a part of everyday life. Our protagonists flag down a flying carpet, not a taxi. Restaurants offer “vanishing meals” - you experience all the sensation of eating, but the food magically dematerialises once it reaches the stomach. Most industries run on a combination of technology and magic.

The protagonist, Archie Fraser, runs a building supplies and construction business. He employs licenced, professional magicians on a contract basis, just as he does any other tradespersn or specialist needed to do any given job. But his freedom to hire whom he wishes is being threatened, first by an organisation that purports to be a professional standards body, that wants to regulate contracts and fees, then by a gangster who threatens serious damage to his business unless he only hires magicians they recommend, and pay protection bribes on top of that.

Being a rugged individualist, Fraser refuses, and soon there are consequences. The situation escalates, with curses, hexes, and depredations by gnomes and salamanders on his business properties, and the emergence of a heavily funded lobby that seeks to enact regulation that will put all practising magicians under control of an organisation called Magic, Inc, and compel every business using magic to negotiate only with them. Fortunately, Fraser has a friend, who is a bit of a witch himself, and who knows some very powerful allies who are willing to help Fraser fight this massive attempt to take over the practice of magic.

It’s an engaging story, well-plotted, with some truly memorable characters, including a South African anthropologist who is also a traditional “witch smeller” - a black character portrayed with an uncomfortable mix of respect and racist stereotyping. Heinlein actually manages to show some awareness of the impacts of colonialism on Africa in his handling of the character, and to treat African magical traditions with as much respect as the European ones he draws on - and this is one magical Negro who does not sacrifice himself for anyone.

All in all, it’s a fun romp that shows why Heinlein was a force to be reckoned with in science fiction, right from the very early days of his writing career.

Heinlein only published three short stories in 1942: “Goldfish Bowl,” under his own name, and two others, “Pied Piper” and “My Object All Sublime” under his Lyle Monroe pen name. The Lyle Monroe stories have apparently only been anthologised once, in Off the Main Sequence, and it was never made into an ebook. That makes it difficult to try to read those. “Goldfish Bowl” is in The Menace from Earth, which I have in an omnibus edition with The Green Hills of Earth, so I’m reading both collections.

The Green Hills of Earth, ironically enough, contains a great many stories about working and living in space, or on the Moon. Read in order, these stories - all of them part of the Luna City cycle, which may or may not be part of Heinlein’s Future History - tell, or at least suggest, the ‘history’ of humanity’s movement into space. There’s “Delilah and the Space Rigger” which tells two stories - one about the construction of the space station that makes travel from Earth to the Moon feasible, and one about the psychological shift from space as frontier and space as living environment. “The Space Jockey” continues both themes, the establishment of regular transport to the Moon and the establishment of family life on the Moon. “The Long Watch,” one of Heinlein’s most moving stories, references politics on Earth, but is about the courage of the average man called on to do extraordinary things, and the role of the Moon in making those green hills of Earth safe from war. “Gentlemen Be Seated” is set during the construction of Luna City, and, like three of the following stories, “The Black Pits of Luna,” “It’s Great to Be Back,” and “Ordeal in Space,” highlights what it take, psychologically, to live in space, away from the relative comfort and safety of Earth.

“We Also Walk Dogs” takes place entirely on Earth, but deals peripherally with the preliminary steps toward the establishment of a solar system government that integrates multiple cultures, human and otherwise. It’s in “The Green Hills of Earth” that Heinlein, in another classic and emotional tale, bridges the contradictions between the drive outward, into the far corners of space, and the memory of Earth that the spacemen carry with them - a memory as idealised as all the other things that the blind poet remembers but can not see. “Logic of Empire” ends the collection on a sombre note, an oppositional piece to the optimistic story of human progress to the stats. It is the dark underbelly of the romance of exploration - the tragedy of exploitation - and brings the reader, shockingly, down to earth with the fear that the errors of earth’s past will all be replayed in space’s future.


The stories collected in The Menace from Earth are less thematically linked, and can be divided loosely into two groups. Some of the stories are part of the Luna City cycle, including the story that gives the collection its name. In these stories, one sees the same focus on the spirit of exploration as in the other stories set in this particular timeline and frequently set in, or referencing, Luna City, most of which are collected in The Green Hills of Earth. Some of the stories - “ Columbus Was a Dope,” “The Menace from Earth,” - show Luna City as a well established habitat, with its own full culture, serving as a cradle for further exploration, while “Skylift” focuses on the downsides and the dangers of a space-faring society.

In addition to the Luna City cycle stories, the collection contains several stand-alone stories, including some of Heinlein’s best known short fiction - “The Year of the Jackpot,” “By His Bootstraps,” and “Goldfish Bowl.” These stories, and the two lesser known tales “Water is for Washing” and “Project Nightmare,” interestingly enough, do share a common theme of menace - from the sun, from the waters, from the skies, from the future, from other humans.

Rereading these short stories reminds me of Heinlein’s great versatility, and of how very good a writer he was, and how modern his work still feels today, despite his being in many ways a man of his time. So many sf short stories of the period lack in characterisation, or use language in ways that feel forced, overwrought, or insufficiently nuanced upon rereading. Heinlein ages well in many ways, even when the inevitable casual sexism and racism of the times is too much a part of the story to be set aside - though even then, it is important to note that Heinlein seems to have thought more about the social status and roles of women and people of colour than many other writers of his time, and he does his best to make them fully realised characters, and not just stereotypes, when he includes them in his writing.

Martha Wells’ novella All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries is the story of a cybernetic Security Unit that has hacked into its own programming, rendering it capable of autonomous thought and decision-making, although it has most definitely not entertained the notion of letting its employers know about that.

It’s designed to be a killing machine, and we see just how good it is at its function in the opening sequence, in which it saves teo human scientists from something large and nasty that attacks them. But what it really enjoys is consuming entertainment media - films, books, music.

It’s current contract is to provide security for a group of scientists surveying an uninhabited planet. As contracts go, it’s not a bad one. The scientists are a reasonably compatible group who have worked together before, and after sll, it’s not as if they want to socislise with their SecUnit - and their SecUnit definitely does not want to socialise with them. But after the incident with the large and aggressive lifeform, the SecUnit and the survey team have a serious problem. There’s no mention of the lifeform in the official papers on the planet - and closer inspection shows that those documents have been altered. And that’s just the beginning of the problems.

This could have been your standard semi-milsf mystery thriller, and it certainly has all the elements necessary for that, but the unique voice of the narrator transforms it into something rather more interesting, a speculation on the nature of choice, responsibility and autonomy. The self-named “murderbot” has free will, and is not particularly fond of human beings. Yet it risks itself to save its employers, repeatedly. A sense of duty? The need to hide its ability to make decisions, a sort if ironic self-preservation? A sense of right snd wrong?

All Systems Red is entertaining as an action-adventure style sf story, but it’s also an interesting turn on the classic AI examination. What is self-awareness? What is free will? What does an autonomous being that has none of the human drives do when it’s left to its own choices? Wells has more stories in the Murderbot series planned, and I’ll be interesting in seeing where she takes this.