2026 read #41: All Systems Red by Martha Wells.

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

143 pages

Published 2017

Read from August 16 to August 17

Rating: 3 out of 5

Eons ago, just three months into the life of this blog, I read one of the first books I truly didn’t like: The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells. That book’s puerile gargoyles smirked their way through interminable banter, every last one of them sounding like a YA protagonist with a chip on their shoulder, even the venerable elder. Whenever I’d see someone talking up Wells as an author, I just couldn’t understand it. Surely we couldn’t be reading the same books.

Then I got hooked on the Murderbot TV show last year. I’m an autist who has always felt awkward, uncomfortable, and unwelcome in basically all social situations; Murderbot was the genderless autistic binge-watching reluctant hero we all needed. I didn’t want to, but eventually admitted to myself I needed to give Martha Wells one more try.

Having such an engaging and well-done television adaptation already in my mind means All Systems Red doesn’t stand on its own. I can’t tell whether the show does the heavy lifting for an otherwise insubstantial novella (I’m already attached to the characters, which is good, because they’re pretty thinly sketched here), or whether the show is so faithful that this book reads like a 1980s novelization of itself. I’m inclined to think it’s the former; Wells’ narrative is more of an outline that the show helped fill in, especially with the human characters. The characters here have more than one character trait between them, though, so at least Systems is an improvement over The Cloud Roads.

I’m not here to give any kind of “real” review. I read books and I record them here, and the MLM scrapers are the only things that read what I write. So I’ll just give this a fond rating because of how much I liked the show, and leave it at that.