Review: Artificial Condition

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Murderbot has been haunted by a massacre it believes that they committed on their human clients in a mining pit. They either hacked their own governor module to commit the murders or they malfunctioned and that loss of governance resulted in the murders. And so they make plans to return to the RaviHyral Mining Facility to discover what happened, ditch Dr. Mensah and PreservationAUX and go rogue. At the start of the story, they manage to talk their way onto a lonely, snarky, unmanned research mindship that we'll just call ART (don't want to spoil the acronym's meaning). After the unsettling introductions, discussion ensues and ART points out that Murderbot's thinking about the massacre is short-sighted. The first question is whether it really happened or not since Murderbot's memory was partially wiped afterward. And the second and most important question is, if it did happen, whether an outside influence caused the massacre since Murderbot's employer never much bothered to surveil whether or not Murderbot's governor module was hacked again after the incident. This is a story of AI friendship, murder, and intrigue.

In order to get back into the RaviHyral Mining Facility, Murderbot faces a lot of challenges with ART's help, not least of which is getting hired as a security consultant for a trio of human researchers whose data was seized. The married researchers rely on Murderbot to keep them safe while they try to retrieve their research. Wells also gives us a uniquely gendered person from the Divarti Cluster in this collective, termed a tercera (literally 'the third one" in Spanish), complete with a pronoun (te) and a possessive (ter). The dynamics of Murderbot's relationship with their clients, facilitated by ART, made for an interesting read.

The only thing greater than my surprise about loving an augmented human construct that calls itself Murderbot is how much I love Martha Wells writing! How had I never read her before? In addition to looking forward to reading Rogue Protocol later this summer, I am eagerly anticipating reading Wells' Raksura series, which is nominated for Best Series in the Hugos.

I received an ARC copy of this book.

View all my reviews