I wanted to give myself some extra time to catch up with all the Hugo Nominees, just in case one of my favorite authors decides to release something between now and August 19 (or if I wanted to take a week off to just read comic books. I’M ONLY HUMAN.) so this week’s review will be for two of the entries in the Best Novella category. Click the jump for a review of Martha Wells’s All Systems Red and Sarah Gailey’s River of Teeth.
All Systems Red – Martha Wells
We all know the trope: a self-aware killing machine – one that’s programmed to obey orders without question – somehow manages to break free of its programmer’s control. Usually one of two things happen. Either the robot decides to subjugate and/or kill humanity, or it tries to reach across the barrier between species to prove that it has just as much of a soul, that it’s just as human, as its creators.
But what if neither of those things happen? What if all the robot wants to do is catch up on its TV shows and just be left alone?
All Systems Red is our introduction to Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries and its protagonist, a SecUnit who’s named itself “Murderbot” after an incident in its past that it isn’t proud of. The story is set in an expedition on a remote planet, where a research team has to deal with incidents that are looking more and more like sabotage.
Pros: Despite not having any interest in being human, Murderbot is one of the more delightfully human killbots I’ve come across. I’m sure most of us imagine that if we were a robot who suddenly found our freedom we’d set out on a grand adventure or find true love or something like that. But it’s also likely that we’d do what Murderbot does: keep our head down, pretend to be a docile wage slave, and do a half-assed job that lets us spend as much time as possible watching TV.
Murderbot also has a totally believable amount of social anxiety, and tries like hell to keep the visor on its armor closed all the time so it doesn’t have to make small talk with its human employers. This gets much more difficult when said humans realize that their artificial security actually has emotions, and there are a lot of fun moments when the head of the expedition has to try to get the rest of the team to not pester Murderbot about its feelings. I loved that the first impulse by the human team is to try to make friends with it, and I also enjoyed Murderbot’s gradual realization that it actually likes the team, and starts becoming more and more determined to keep them safe.
Nobody was touching my humans.
Cons: Murderbot doesn’t really care much about anything, it’s awkward in social situations, and the expedition has been supplied with a lot of cheap and shoddy equipment. I get that. I probably would have gotten it with half as many mentions as Wells made in 177 pages. Wells also seems to be trying to avoid large info dumps by breaking exposition into small pieces, but that means we end up jumping from the story in progress, to Murderbot’s feelings about it, to an explanation about tech, to Murderbot’s reflections, another incident in the story, a conveniently-placed bit of tech, and so on. It’s jumpy, and there were times when a plot development felt like it came out of nowhere because the lead-up was about ten digressions ago.
Probably my biggest complaint is that this feels less like a novella and more like a chapter of an ongoing book that the author had to tack a somewhat unsatisfying ending onto. The second installment has already been released, with another scheduled for August, but you’ll have to decide if it’s worth paying full price for a chapter at a time.
River of Teeth – Sarah Gailey
“It’s not a caper, it’s an operation.”
Despite what the main character says (repeatedly) this story is most definitely a caper. Set in the Louisiana marshlands in the 1890s it follows the adventures of an unlikely group of gamblers, mercenaries, and livestock wranglers as they try to fulfill a high-paying commission by the Federal Government to clear some dangerous animals out of the Mississippi.
The animals in question just happen to be hippopotamuses.
Yes, the bone-stupid idea of importing hippos as an alternative meat source was a real proposal in the early twentieth century. You can thank government bureaucracy for the fact that we don’t currently have dangerous, several-thousand-pound animals wandering around the southern US.
It’s fun to imagine what it would be like if we did though. Sarah Gailey fudged the time period of the hippo-ranching plan (along with some of the social mores of the time, and the availability of high-powered explosives) to write a story of Winslow Houndstooth – former hippo rancher, now out for revenge – and his crew of ne’er-do-wells who have been paid to make things a little easier for people to travel down the Mississippi without worrying about deckhands getting snatched off the deck and eaten. Nothing that a solid plan and a few pounds of black powder can’t handle; the problem comes with the type of people who have a lot of money riding on having things stay just the way they are.
It’s a silly, dime-store novel idea, and the characters can sometimes be two-dimensional enough to use as a bookmark. But come on, there’s stabbings and betrayal and cheating at cards, and everyone rides across the marsh on their specially-bred, touchingly loyal hippos. How can you not enjoy it?