All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells (5 stars)

I started reading this as I was going to sleep, then was up until 2am finishing it, as I couldn't put it down. It won all the awards in 2018 (Hugo, Nebula, Alex, Locus), with good reason. It's fantastic.

A SecUnit (powerful security robot artificial intelligence) has hacked it's govenor module and is now able to ignore commands from its human masters. It could go around killing everyone, but mostly it just wants to binge-watch TV and gets really annoyed when humans create work for it, or try to engage it in conversation.

I COULD HAVE BECOME a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.

At least Mensah and Arada had overruled the ones who wanted to talk to me about it. Yes, talk to Murderbot about its feelings. The idea was so painful I dropped to 97 percent efficiency. I’d rather climb back into Hostile One’s mouth.

It calls itself MurderBot, and is wonderfully sarcastic, lazy, pessimistic and depressed.

...you may have noticed that when I do manage to care, I’m a pessimist.

And in their corner all they had was Murderbot, who just wanted everyone to shut up and leave it alone so it could watch the entertainment feed all day.

Granted, I liked the imaginary people on the entertainment feed way more than I liked real ones, but you can’t have one without the other.

The story rips along full of action and sarcasm. The plot has twists, and while things end happily, it wasn't a clean path to get there, and the emancipation doesn't play out as I expected it to, which is great.

There's not a single thing I didn't love about it. It's really short (160 pages). I'm already well into the next one.

5 stars.