I've already reviewed the first four novellas in the series no longer simply known as 'Murderbot' and now called 'The Murderbot Diaries'. It has continued with two novels and a fifth novella, plus three short stories, but also gained a lot of attention through the announcement of an upcoming television adaptation, starring Alexander Skarsgård as the title character, which is due in May on AppleTV. Therefore TorDotCom have coupled these stories together in fresh editions with pretty covers by Jaime Jones and that gives me an excuse to prioritise finishing up the series.

The first volume contains the first two novellas, which means half of a story arc, to be wrapped up in the second volume. They're 'All Systems Red' and 'Artificial Condition', originally published in a variety of formats in 2017 and 2018 respectively. The former landed both the Nebula and the Hugo for Best Novella in 2018. The latter also won the Hugo in what could easily have been described as the year of Murderbot. Faced with novellas two to four all making the final ballot, Martha Wells chose to decline the nominations for the latter pair, leaving only 'Artificial Condition' in the race. Needless to say, it won.

'All Systems Red' serves mostly as an introduction to Murderbot, a cyborg SecUnit programmed to function as a killing machine in a future space society. She's particularly notable because, when by the time we meet her, she's already hacked the governing module that ensures that she's always under human control. It is highly illegal for SecUnits to do this, of course, as it is to disguise their nature to pass for human or even to simply exist alongside humans in regular human society. This isn't a long way from how replicants were treated in 'Blade Runner' but this series is told entirely from Murderbot's perspective rather than a human policeman trying to find and stop her.

And I should explain yet again that Murderbot has no gender, so is often given "it" as a pronoun in TorDotCom publicity releases, all the way to the final novella. That's because she doesn't have the luxury of looking between her legs to find out what parts she was given, because there aren't any, but also because she hasn't yet chosen a gender for herself. I'm using "she" and "her" because I'd read her as female from the outset and, at least by the fourth novella, saw no reason to think any different. Interestingly, many readers consider Murderbot to be male and the TV show has taken that path too. And that's fine. I see her as female and I'm not alone in that. Many see him as male. Murderbot itself hasn't decided yet.

The initial story arc runs four novellas, so only half of it is found in this volume, and it covers a pair of goals. One is the story that Murderbot runs through, which isn't incredibly complex, as perhaps is inevitable for a set of novellas. The worst thing about each of them is that they end at a novella length. I can see why Wells took that approach and it's probably the best one, but that didn't stop me wanting them to keep going to novel length, flesh out background characters and deepen that story. Put simply, there's a company doing bad things and Murderbot is on the case, having been a tool of that company in the past.

The other is the most important one and the biggest success of this opening novella and the series as a whole. That's the character of Murderbot. There have been many attempts by many hands for many decades to look at what it means to be human through a character who technically isn't, but Murderbot is very possibly the best of them. She's a combination of human and artificial parts, so technically a cyborg, but the vast majority of them now are artificial, making her closer to being a robot, as her self-adopted name might suggest. She's designed to function like a berserker, seeing all her parts as disposable, running into battle, absorbing ridiculous amounts of damage and then taking care of business, safe in the knowledge that almost everything can be replaced.

Some of the quirkiest characters we meet throughout the series are other AIs, like the cargo pilot that takes Murderbot to RaviHyral in 'Artificial Condition', who's bored with routine tasks so lets her on board in exchange for episodes of a soap opera called 'Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon'. A majority, of course, are human, but they're always less interesting and often less human than she is. She's sarcastic, with a line in snark that is simply glorious to behold. She's immensely powerful but also fundamentally insecure. She's awkward. She's pessimistic. And she has a form of PTSD.

That PTSD comes from a mission she worked while her governing module was still intact, meaning that she had no responsibility over her actions at all. However, it led her to take the name she did and she is keen to find out what actually happened, given that it's been erased from her memory. She knows that fifty-seven people died in some sort of massacre, which prompted her to be wiped and repurposed. One line in 'Artificial Condition' highlights her guilt perfectly. As she walks into the remnants of a massacre, she comments, "I reminded myself that the terrible thing that had most likely happened there was me."

There are other subplots here, especially in 'Artificial Condition', but I've talked about them in my original reviews of the first four novellas. I've said enough here to introduce new readers to this series through this new set of editions except that 'All Systems Red' serves as a wonderful intro to the series but is inherently limited by its length and the fact that it has to introduce everything, a curse of first volumes, while 'Artificial Condition' is a perfect second, better and deeper in a whole slew of ways. Both capably tell and wrap up their individual episode stories while progressing that broader arc forward.

'The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 1' is a solid and affordable way for new readers to dive into the series, not only a two-for-one bargain but a solid first half to that initial story arc. The catch is that those two novellas are all you get. There's no introduction, no afterword, no additional supplementary material of any kind, not even a contents page to tell you where in the book 'All Systems Red' ends and 'Artificial Condition' begins. It's as basic as it comes: the first two novellas in one paperback. Buy the first two volumes to get the whole arc and hey, why not just follow up with the novel that follows them, 'Network Effect', and then the third volume for good measure. I'll do just that. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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