Reading tales: Project Hail Mary and the Murderbot Diaries

I haven’t written a post on my blog – or for #BlogchatterBlogHop – in a while and it does not surprise me that I’m breaking this dry spell because this week’s prompt says: a book or movie that deeply impacted you. And now I have zero excuses to not talk about these two books that I read in 2022 that have completely taken over my psyche and altered my brain cells.

I have a problem. I can never talk about books I love because I’m deathly afraid that either you won’t like them or you won’t read them even after I have talked to you about it for several thousand hours. But I’m going to attempt talking about these 2 books because they deserve all the love I can shower over them.

I read this book exactly a year ago and I have not shut up about it. It is frankly a bit embarrassing.

On the face of it, it feels like a regular SciFi book with the earth in peril. A bunch of people figure out how to save earth and then a few go to space, there are usual shenanigans of Houston we have a problem, before everything gets tied into a neat little package.

This book has none of that. Our protagonist is a science teacher who loves physics a bit too much and when we meet him, he does not have his memory of how or why he’s in a spaceship. All questions and more are answered in the book.

I’m not telling you any more apart from:

Now that I have calmly, and rationally explained why you should do yourself a favour and read Project Hail Mary, lets talk about the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. This woman, if I meet her, I will fall on her feet to do a pranam and ask her to write more about Murderbot and ART. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

All Systems Red is the first novella in a series of 6. The 5th one – Network Effect – is a full length novel. Though the books are standalone, I would recommend you read them in order because our protagonist grows every book and that won’t make sense if you don’t read it in order. Yes, I’m recommending you read it even before I tell you why.

Our protagonist here is a bot who has a generic name SecUnit. It is a security consultant and is hired out to parties who are visiting planets to provide security. And while it is protecting its clients, it is also required to record their conversations so the corporate entity that owns it can use those conversations for leverage. Social commentary anyone?

Bots are computer systems that do not have autonomy since that autonomy is controlled by humans – corporates to be exact. But our SecUnit has hacked its governor module so it is now a rogue SecUnit. No one is controlling it except its own sense of moral compass.

Why it calls itself Murderbot I’ll let you figure out. But if the thought of reading a bot’s diary takes you to the erroneous assumption that it’ll be boring, or dry…well…here’s an excerpt:

Ah SecUnit…I do adore you so. Since these books are novellas, they’re quick reads but it has everything I love about the SciFi genre: social commentary, deep understanding of how empathetic and yet deranged the human species is, understandable tech and science and of course, humour.

So these are the two books that have left a deep impact on me. How about you? Do you have any books or movies that have altered your brain chemistry? Tell me in the comments!

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Header Photo by Aideal Hwa on Unsplash

This post is a part of Blogchatter Blog Hop.