My life in books

Martha Wells’ fourth Murderbot novella, Exit Strategy, brings Murderbot back into the world of corporations it was seeking to avoid. Murderbot’s last client as a corporate SecUnit, Dr. Mensah, is being held against her will by GreyCris, the corporation that’s been behind so much of the violence and skullduggery that Murderbot has been dealing with in its quest to discover what enabled it to become self-governing, and what nearly destroyed Dr. Mensah’s expedition.

Murderbot deduces that GreyCris has captured Mensah because they believe that Mensah has been co-ordinating Murderbot’s activities, which have been highly detrimental to GreyCris’ plans. A logical assumption, perhaps, since by Corporation space law, Mensah is Murderbot’s owner.

Murderbot decides to make the attempt to free Mensah from GreyCris’ clutches, and to bring GreyCris down with the evidence of their actions it has gathered.

What follows is another tightly plotted adventure story, which serves as the background for further development of Murderbot’s ethical and emotional understanding of its own self, and of its social interactions with human who have at least some small understanding of what it is.

The novella ends with Murderbot in a temporary state of safety, contemplating its future, having for the first time a choice of options and the freedom to choose openly.

I hear that Wells is working on a Murderbot novel. That’s very exciting news.

In Rogue Protocol, the third of Martha Wells’ wonderful Murderbot Diaries novellas, Murderbot - having resolved some serious questions about its own past in the second volume - undertakes a mission to unravel the secrets of GreyCris, the corporate entity behind the disastrous events that led to the deaths of most of its clients in the opening installment of the series and led to its becoming a free, if not precisely legal, agent. This time, Murderbot is investigating an abandoned GreyCris terraforming project, having theorised that the ailed project was actually a cover for secret excavations of ancient alien artefacts.

When Murderbot discovers that a small salvage company has purchased the rights to the abandoned project, and is on its way to the terraforming complex to begin surveying the scene, it makes contact with the company’s human-form robot Miki, a simple and innocent being who has never been violated by humans as Murderbot has, and who considers the salvage company personnel to be its friends. Murderbot convinces Miki that it is backup security for the company, secretly shadowing the team of two human security agents hired by Miki’s friends - but as it turns out, GreyCris has left some unpleasant surprises at the abandoned facility to protect its secrets, and it will take all of Murderbot’s considerable abilities to get the vulnerable humans out of the trap and back to safety.

What’s important to Murderbot’s growing sense of itself and its relationships in the world of humans is its observation of the close, caring relationship between the robot Miki, and Miki’s owner/employer, Don Abene. For the first time in its existence, Murderbot sees a model of mutual respect between artificial and human life forms, and the experience is a significant influence on Murderbot’s developing understanding of empathy, responsibility, and connection between intelligent beings. For lack of a better word, the events of this mission show Murderbot a new dimension of its own capacity for humanity.

This is in so many ways a story about becoming a truly empathetic, compassionate, and righteous being, and watching Murderbot, cranky and anti-social as it is, develop into such a being is a delightful experience.

More Murderbot, please.

The world of Artemis was created as a pleasure planet for the richest citizens of a technologically advanced galactic empire, one in which both science and psionics interacted to enable almost fantastic feats of science and engineering.

Created from an airless asteroid, seeded with genetically engineered life - even to the humanoid servants who lived on the planet, serving as resort personnel - Artemis was a playground for the elites. But empires end, and violent power struggles among the ruling families of this empire brought about its destruction. Lost is much of the psionic technology, and the remaining planetary civilisations, while still space-faring, are much diminished. Lost also is the location of Artemis, where for 500 years, the genetically altered humans and animals have been left to build a functioning society. Their past as a vacation resort is still very much a part of their way of life - they have no advanced technology of their own, and live in the same simple agrarian ways set for them by the long-absent “seegnurs.”

Griffin Dale is a historian, archeologist, and anthropologist, whose field of research is the old Empire. In his research, he discovers clues to the location of long-lost pleasure planet Artemis, and being somewhat young, over-confidant, and a bit hungry for glory, he sets out alone to check his findings. But not only does he find Artemis, but his shuttle, which he intended to use to observe the planet from a closer distance than the high orbit of his spaceship, suffers mechanical failure due to the presence of destructive nanobots in the atmosphere, a relic of the wars that raged between imperial factions even on Artemis. Trapped on the planet, he is fortunate to encounter three Artemisians - two genetically adapted humans, Adara and Terrell, and an adapted puma, Sand Shadiw, who is telepathically bonded to Adara.

Together they embark on a quest to uncover what may remain of the old technologies, so that Griffen can go home again.

In Artemis Awakening, the first of two novels following the hunt of Griffin, Adara and Terrell seek information from a respected loremaster who has studied the technology left behind by the seegnurs - an adapted human known as the Old One Who Is Young because of some mutation that has left him with an extended life span. But instead they are drawn into his unsavoury secret plots, which include a forced breeding program intended to re-establish the psionic powers of the ancients in a new generation of Artemisians who would be bound to him.

As they work together to foil his scheme and rescue the unwilling participants of his program, both Terrell and Adara begin to manifest unexpected abilities. Terrell, descended from a line of Artemisians bred to be the perfect tour guides, turns out to have the ability to link telepathically with Griffin, who is, after all, descended from seegnur stock. And Adara, together with her bondmate, is somehow in communication with the awakening consciousness of the artificially created planet itself. The developing love triangle between Griffin, Adara and Terrell is handled in a refreshing manner, with both men keeping the lid on the potentials for pointless competition and jealously, and acknowledging Adara’s right to make her own choices, or no choice at all, in her own time.

Artemis Invaded, the second novel, finds Griffin, Adara, Sand Shadow and Terrell on a mission to explore a forbidden region of Artemis known to its inhabitants as Maiden’s Tear. Legend has it that the surviving seegnurs of a massacre fled to that region - but were killed by their enemies before they could use whatever they sought to fight back, or escape. Griffin hopes that he will find another secret installation of the seegnurs, and something to help him return to his home planet.

But the Old One and his chief lieutenant, Julyan, who escaped to destruction of his secret breeding facility, are on their trail, seeking revenge. And unknown to Griffen, others from his own civilisation have followed his trail to Artemis, fully intending to find, and use, the old imperial technology to rebuild an empire. Where Griffin wants knowledge, and to help his companions maintain the integrity of their own world, those around him seek power that could unleash horrors not seen in war since the end of the old empire. But to prevent that from happening, he may need to give up all ties to his family and his own world.

The Artemis books are quite a lot of fun. It’s refreshing to see a post-apocalypse story where what survives may actually be more worth preserving than what preceded it. And the ways in which the narrative subverts all the romantic tropes of handsome offworlders and spirited alien women is a pleasant change from the usual. An enjoyable story, complete in two volumes, but with room for more if the author ever decides to return to Artemis.

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.

Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes begins in a violent crime scene. Four bodies, floating in null gravity, the air full of globules of blood. A fifth body will be found hanging, an apparent suicide, on the bridge. The sixth and last crew member lies in the medical bay, battered, in a coma, near death.

One of the dead, in her final act, initiated the automatic sequence that would awaken six clones, implanting the last back-up of their memories, resurrecting the crew to deal with whatever catastrophe brought about their deaths.

There is, however a problem. The last backups are those the crew made on beginning this generations-long voyage. And from the age of most of the bodies, and the position of the ship, over twenty years (in ship’s time, over a century on Earth) have passed, years that the newly awakened clones have no memories of.

It gets worse. The AI that essentially runs the ship, IAN, is down. Important data files and software have been wiped. The machine that create new clones from a kind of allpurpose protein gel and give the new clones the memories of their last body have been fatally sabotaged - no new clones can be created when the current ones die.

One more thing. Every crew member is a criminal, offered this long watch over the sleeping colonists as a way to repay society for their crimes. No one knows what the crimes of the others are - at least, no one is supposed to know - but odds are at least one of them is a murderer.

This oddly matched crew must solve the mystery of their predecessor’s deaths, the multiple acts of sabotage that range from a food replicator that only makes hemlock to a major course deviation, and try to salvage the colony mission - all without any knowledge of what has happened over the past 25 years, and without killing themselves or each other, again.

The main narrative - solving the mystery of what happened to them - is interspersed with flashbacks to each character’s life before being recruited for the colony mission. As the reader learns more about the former lives of the crew, a link emerges - Sallie Mignon, one of the first people to become a clone, and one of the richest and most powerful people in the world that the ship has left behind. Not only was Sallie in one way or another involved in placing these specific crew members on board, but they have been connected to each other in multiple other ways, though sometimes unknowingly. Even more than their hidden criminal records, they carry secrets, and are not necessarily who, or what, they seem to be.

Six Wakes is a solid mystery thriller in space, with some truly interesting characters, a tight, suspenseful plot, and a very satisfying conclusion. The world these characters inhabited, a world of cloning and hacking of DNA, personalities and memories, is also a world of serious ethical questions about identity, responsibility and autonomy. Is a cloned person responsible for a crime committed by a previous clone, especially if that clone died without leaving a memory map? Is killing a clone murder, when resurrection of a new clone is a simple matter? Is it ethical to hack the biological data of someone with a generic disorder, so that once killed, their clone will live on without the illness? Is it proper to waken a clone of someone who has committed suicide? More than just a thriller, this is science fiction that makes you think, and that’s always a good thing.

More novelettes from 1942 pulp magazines.

Isaac Asimov’s “Runaround” is one of the Mike Donovan Robot stories, in which a robot acts strangely and Donovan has to figure out why, and how to fix the problem. Both error and solution usually involve some bizarre circumstances that impacts on the way the robot resolves the tensions between the famous Three Laws of Robotics, and this story falls perfectly into the pattern. A robot with a deliberately heightened sense of self preservation is given a casually worded order to do something that would endanger him. In this case, the two a mathematically balanced, causing the robot to run in circles around the location he was ordered to, while singing Gilbert and Sullivan songs. Kind of amusing, standard Asimov robot story.

1942 was the year in which Isaac Asimov published the first of the stories that would eventually become his iconic Foundation series. “Foundation” is the origin story, which gives us the basic background to the series, and covers the first “Seldon crisis” - how will Terminus, the remote and relatively isolated home of the First Foundation and the Encyclopedists, hold into its independence as the Empire crumbles? It really was one of the most ambitious concepts of its time, even granting that lots of writers were creating lengthy and complex histories for their fictional universes, from Heinlein to “Doc” Smith. Just one month after “Foundation” appeared in print, the second story dealing with the next Seldon crisis, was published as “Bridle and Saddle.”

1942 also saw the publication of Asimov’s “Friar of the Black Flame,” in which an Earth ruled by the reptilian Llhasinu from Vega are driven from Earth and destroyed by a battle force drawn from all the human worlds. It’s fairly standard milsf, but what makes the story interesting is that it mentions Trantor as one of the human worlds, establishing it as part of the backhistory of the Foundation series.

Alfred Bester’s “The Push of a Finger” is a story of the sort we now associate with the “butterfly effect” - the idea that a butterfly’s wings flapping could a tornado on the other side of the world - though of course it predates that formulation. In a future society where the prime principle is stability, a machine is developed capable of calculating the future - and it predicts the end of the universe in a catastrophic scientific experiment in only a thousand years. The pronosticators use the machine to track back to the one moment that, if changed, can prevent the disaster. There’s a surprise plot twist, of course, which the modern reader will immediately deduce because we’ve seen it too many times, but the story is well told and, I expect, was fairly new and original back in 1942.

Lester del Rey’s novelette “My Name Is Legion” is an example of the “time loop” story, in which the subject is caught in the same sequence of time, looping through the same events. In this story, it’s a defeated Hitler trapped in the loop by a scientist bent on revenge for the deaths if his Jewish wife and children, and it is a particularly nasty loop with an all-too-appropriate end built into it. Quite an effective story.

“Though Poppies Grow,” also by del Rey, is the most powerful of all the war-themed anti-fascism stories I’ve read in the past few weeks, and there have been quite a few of those, what with the US being at war in 1942. In this story, the ghost of the Unknown Soldier from WWI is called forth from his tomb, acting out the promise from the famous poem - “If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.” The writing in this novelette is so evocative, so well-honed, as del Rey follows the young soldier, confused, knowing only that he has a mission, wandering through the streets of Washington, touching people as he passes in various ways. At first he does not know he is dead, a ghost, but slowly as it dawns on him, he is overwhelmed, until at last, he is led to understand his role is to remind these who waver, or are complacent, that there can be no compromise with fascism, with tyranny, with hatred. The story is exquisitely told, the character made so real you can feel his struggle to understand, the message as important today as it was in 1942.

A story in a completely different vein, del Rey’s Lunar Landing s about a mission to the moon, sent in the (faint) hope of rescuing three men from the first lunar voyage. The crew of the Moth - five men and two women - encounter serious problems in landing themselves, and their search for the first ship becomes even more important because they hope to cannibalise it for parts they’ll need to get home themselves. But very little goes as planned in this mission, beginning with the first surprise, plant and animal life adapted for survival on the moon. As I’ve noted elsewhere, del Rey’s style, like Heinlein’s, has aged well. His characters are quite fully and realistically developed, and the two women in the story are intelligent, brave and have lived lives of their own - they have relationships with men, but are not defined solely by them.

Ross Rocklynne’s “Jackdaw” portrays the bewilderment of an alien species on discovering a world where only one living being remains, alone on a planet whose cities, roads and farms have been destroyed by massive bombardment. When the lone survivor dies in a suicide attack on their craft, they are bewildered, but despite their best attempts, the end of the species and the actions of its last member remain incomprehensible to a species that cannot envision war.

“QRM—Interplanetary” by George O. Smith is a cautionary tale of what can happen when you put a businessman whose only focus, and area of expertise, is cost-cutting, in charge of a facility that depends on scientific and engineering excellence to function. QRM, we are told, is the shortwave code for man-made interference in radio transmission. The story takes place in a communications relay station on an asteroid whose orbit is positioned such as to ensure radio transmission between Earth and Mars at all points of both planets’ orbits. The man-made interference is a new Director who knows nothing about either the technical aspects of communication, nor the intricacies of life in an artificially sustained environment. The consequences of his policies, while humorously described, are disastrous. Eventually, the proper order is restored, but not before his decisions come close to killing everyone on the station.

1942 was the date of E. Mayne Hull’s first published work, a haunting novelette called “The Flight That Failed.” Set during the war, it’s the story of a time traveller who tries to avert the destruction of a plane crossing the Atlantic with a secret cargo that will change the course of the history he knows if it gets through.

Fredric Brown’s “The Star Mouse” is a rather poignant tale about a mouse who is shot into space in a small experimental rocket built by your standard eccentric tinkering scientist. Mitkey, as he’s been called by the professor, and his rocket come to the attention of a civilisation of very small people living on an asteroid that happens to be passing near earth. Concerned about potential threats from humans, they explore Mitkey’s memories to find our what they can about human civilisation - but doing this involves giving Mitkey intelligence equal to that of humans. Mitkey goes home again, but alas, the boost in IQ doesn’t last. Still, he survives, is reunited with his mate, and the professor provides him with lots of cheese.

In Jane Rice’ “Pobby” a writer of horror starts a new story - his idea is to tell a gruesome tale of a poor farmer named Pobby who finds a strange seed, plants and waters it, hoping that it might grow into a rare flower that will make him some money, only to be eaten by it once it flowers. As he starts to write his installments for magazine publication, however, someone named Pobby, who looks and talks like the character he’s writing about, appears to various of his friends, saying he needs to find the writer and get him to stop making him grow the flower, because he doesn’t want to die. Finally, Pobby and the writer meet face to face, but the writer persists in following his story - until he finds himself in a writers block just before the final scene. Frustrated, he travels to the lace where he has set Pobby’s farm, finding the town much as he’s written it, with characters he’s mentioned, and Pobby’s farm, where he discovers the cause of his block - Pobby, out of desperation, has written his own ending to the story. An interesting exploration of the conceit that characters can take on a life of their own.

“The Magicians’ Dinner,” also by Jane Rice, is a comic ghost story about a young bride, married to a magician, who tries to handle a dinner for forty in their first home, when she’s never cooked before. Fortunately for her, her family’s long-dead cook decides to return from the other side to save her firmer employers’ daughter’s bacon, so to speak. The tale is told in first person, the narrator is rather self-depreciating and quite engaging and likable, so that the story comes across as light-hearted and sweet. We will pass over the class issues and the trope of the help who care more for the families of their employers than they can for their own, and some if the annoyingly sexist assumptions about how marriages between men and women should work.

In Rice’s “The Elixir,” the narrative voice is again a somewhat unconventional woman, a out-spoken, accident-prone, unmarried writer of mystery novels. In this light-hearted time travel yarn, Amy Parrish’s equally unconventional neighbour, Clare Holloway, throws a Halloween party and Amy decides to attend as a witch. While waiting for the party to get started, Amy mixes up a batch of punch, tossing in liquor, ice cream, and halloween candy, while reciting some off-the-cuff doggerel, and ends up in Salem during the witch hunts. Much strangeness ensues, but all ends well, with Amy back in her own time, wondering if everything happened as she recalls it, or if she was just drunk silly and hallucinating. Having read several of Rice’s stories now, I must say that I am quite delighted with her descriptive style, which is both unique and very apt, and her mastery of tone. It’s a pity that her work is not remembered nearly as well as that of other writers of this era.

Ann Leckie’s latest book, Provenance, is a most engaging science fictional political thriller cum murder mystery. Set in the Radchaii universe, but not in the Radch itself, it’s a smorgasbord of plots, conspiracies, political infighting, diplomatic maneuverings, hidden identities, thefts, attempted invasions, and murder, where every major character and most minor ones have at least one hidden agenda and no one’s motives can be assumed. And that is why it’s so much fun.

I’m not even going to try to explain the details of the plot, because before we’re through the first chapter, it’s gotten hopelessly complicated by circumstances. The protagonist is Ingray, the daughter of a powerful politician in the Hwae government. Overshadowed by her sibling Danach, who is favoured to become the heir to her mother’s power and position, Ingray has come up with a very risky scene she hopes will improve her house’s fortunes and her own position in her mother’s eyes. That scheme involves the dishonored and exiled child of another powerful house, and some very valuable historical documents, known as vestiges, purporting to show the origins of that house. But things get complicated, and then they get more complicated, and then... well, that’s why I’m not trying to give any plot details. You’ll have to read it for yourself. But one thing that’s very important to the success of this novel is that Ingray, despite her attempts to scheme and plot, is basically a nice person. That’s part of why things get so complicated for her. But it’s why you want to keep reading, because you really want everything to work out well for her.

A lot of the action, the scheming, the secrets and mysteries, centre around vestiges. The Hwae have a deep regard for the histories of things - houses, events, people. And what other peoples might treat as souvenirs, or interesting historical artefacts, are matters of great seriousness in their culture. A signed menu from an important dinner. The original draft of an important law. A floor tile from a building where something significant happened once. These are vestiges. For the Hwae, vestiges have almost the status of sacred artefacts. They connect them to their past, tell them who they are by declaring where they come from, what they have done, and who they have been.

As one might gather from the title, history, documentation of history, and the legitimacy of such documentary evidence is at the heart of much of the plots and conflicts in the novel, from the ownership of a space ship, to the foundations of a house, to the origins of an entire people. The social and philosophical questions that underlie the narrative are very much about how we construct history and self, and the value we place on how things came to be, in comparison to how things are. As one of the characters says: “Who are we if our vestiges aren’t real?”

Bogi Takács, “Some Remarks on the Reproductive Strategy of the Common Octopus”; Clarkesworld, April 2017
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/takacs_04_17/

This is a story within a story, with one sentient being - a genetically enhanced octopus - telling another sentient being - a human - what is remembered in the group memory of the octopi about a great wrong committed by humans. The details unfold slowly, through filters of memory, time and difference, but the issues are familiar, the arrogance and assumption of human exceptionalism, the unthinking use of other living beings, the carelessness of the species. It’s not dramatic in its accusation, but it lingers nonetheless.


“Sun, Moon, Dust,” Ursula Vernon; Uncanny Magazine, May/June 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/sun-moon-dust/

A sweet story of the “swords into ploughshares” variety; a farmer inherits a magical sword from his grandmother, a famous warrior in her day, but has no need or desire for war.


“Goddess, Worm,” by Cassandra Khaw; Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/goddess-worm/

Khaw deconstructs a Chinese legend about the discovery of silk weaving, revealing the acceptance of gendered violence that underlie it.


“Monster Girls Don’t Cry,” A. Merc Rustad; Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/monster-girls-dont-cry/

A powerful story about making room for difference. A young girl grows up hating and trying to erase the things that make her a monster in the eyes of the world finally learns to accept herself and demand acceptance from those around her.


“Carnival Nine,” Caroline Yoachim; Beneath Ceaseless Skies, May 11, 2017
http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/carnival-nine/

Yoachim’s short story places us inside a world of conscious wind-up dolls, living in miniature cities around a model train layout. Each day the maker winds up the dolls, and they live their lives, ever watchful of the number of turns they have - a figure that varies with the conditions of their mainspring and possibly the whim, or degree of attention, of the maker. It’s an extended metaphor for human life, with not a great deal to add to the conversation about life, death, and fate, but does get points for including a situation that parallels the way family dynamics can change with the addition of a disabled child. A touching story.


“The Last Novelist (Or a Dead Lizard in the Yard),” Matthew Kressel; Tor.com, March 15, 2017
https://www.tor.com/2017/03/15/the-last-novelist-or-a-dead-lizard-in-the-yard/

Reuth Bryan Diaso is perhaps the last novelist in a galaxy in which no one reads books anymore. He has come to the planet Ardabaab to finish his last novel before he dies, but he has lost his inspiration. A chance encounter with a young girl whose enthusiasm for knowledge and raw artistic talent gives him the energy to renew his writing, and to share with her his love of books, of the physicality of reading, of the crafts of creating not just the sequence if words that make up a novel, but the actual process of printing a book. This is a story about loss and creation, endings and perhaps beginnings, death and renewal. I found it quite compelling.


“Utopia, LOL?,” Jamie Wahls; Strange Horizons, June 5, 2017
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/utopia-lol/

It’s millions of years in the future, and human beings exist solely as uploaded intelligences in a vast artificial environment controlled by an AI known as Allocator. Almost all the usable mass of the solar system has been converted into the physical substrate that supports the set of virtual realities in which the human race spends its time, playing with simulations of millions of scenarios. But Allocator has limitations. It cannot interfere with human choices, which means that even as virtual beings, they continue to reproduce, requiring ever more substrate material. Allocator cannot extend its influence beyond the solar system - another programmed limitation - but humans can. Allocator’s dilemma - where can it find humans willing to inhabit space probes that will take them to other solar systems and find more space for the multitude of human minds? It’s a very well thought-out story, which touches on a number of issues related to artificial intelligence and informed consent.


“You Will Always Have Family: A Triptych,” Kathleen Kayembe; Nightmare Magazine, March, 2017
http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/will-always-family-triptych/

Kayembe’s novelette is powerful, terrifying, triumphant, laying bare the worst and best of the binds between family. In the midst of grief over the loss of his wife, a man does the unthinkable, destroys the son he believes caused her death, takes the other son away with him to America. Years later, he is truly haunted by his actions, and pays the price. Yet in the midst of a tale about supernatural revenge, there is also fierce love of brother for brother, mother for child and finally the discovery of self-love for the young woman who survives the toll exacted by the dead.


“Mother of Invention,” Nnedi Okorafor; Slate.com, February 21, 2018
https://slate.com/technology/2018/02/mother-of-invention-a-new-short-story-by-nnedi-okorafor.html

Anwuli is pregnant, almost ready to give birth. She is alone, deserted by her lover, a married man who deceived her about his status, then left her when she got pregnant. Shunned by her family and friends. All she has left is the smart house her lover built for her, an intelligent, self-repairing, self-improving home. But Anwuli has an even mire serious problem - she’s become severely allergic to the pollen of the genetically modified flowers that grow everywhere in New Delta City, and there’s a massive pollen storm brewing, one severe enough to put her into anaphylactic shock. When she goes into labour just as the pollen storm hits, help comes from a most unexpected source.

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.