After removing itself from a condition of self-imposed confinement, due in large part to its desire to help the humans it was assigned to protect, its running away from all but very few of those things that are familiar to it. The first, ALL SYSTEMS RED, won a Hugo in 2018 (and a whole plethora of other awards as well), and this follow up novella was nominated for the Hugo in 2019 and became a finalist. These days it’s a bit out of the ordinary for a novella to get the hardback treatment, and this series has four of them.

She was a new author to me, but has been around for quite some time. So this step was kind of the next natural one to take, yeah?ĪRTIFICIAL CONDITION ( Amazon) is the second of the Murderbot Diaries novellas put out by Martha Wells. I had recently read the first in the Murderbot series (Vanessa’s EBR Review) and liked it quite a bit. I mean, the competition was Robert Jackson Bennett ( EBR Archive) and Alastair Reynolds ( EBR Archive), which both sit pretty high on my scale of READ-THESE-AUTHORS-NOW. Although out of the bunch, it definitely sat near the bottom. I was actually pretty excited to get to it. This is the second of those shorties that I read. Agent: Jennifer Jackson, Donald Maass Literary.If you read my previous review, you’ll know that I recently ran through a few novellas. There’s plenty here to entertain the many fans of the first novella. 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.

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 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. Sounds like a rollicking time-which it is, but not in the way one might expect. 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. 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.

Artificial condition by martha wells