bookcloob reviews: all systems red
3/6/26
trying to revive my interest in reading by partaking in my friends' book cloob! first on the docket: All Systems Red, first book of the Murderbot series.
what's a book cloob?
The first rule of book cloob is that you don't tell anyone about book cloob.
Wait no.
The first rule of book cloob is that you are allowed to force everyone to read whatever book you want when it's your turn to pick. The second rule of book cloob is that everyone else is allowed to tear the book apart (metaphorically) if you made them read something they hated. And the third rule of book cloob is that everyone does indeed have to read the book— assigning something you've already read is allowed but you must be willing to reread it.
Or in other words: it's just a normal book club. My housemates have held book club previously but fell out of the habit in 2024; they decided to pick it up again in 2026 and I decided I'd join since I want to read more anyways. Since I think it'll be useful to keep a record of what we've read and what we thought about it, I'm going to try doing writeups of each book. Heavy emphasis on try.
all systems red
rating
10/10 no notes, we all loved this book.
vibes
Serialized sci-fi for the modern era. A quick and engaging read; feels a little incomplete on its own but works in the context of the series. Good for nerds and the four As (aromantics, asexuals, alexithymics, autistics). Themes of trauma recovery, anticapitalism, justice and atonement for those who want to dig into them.
thoughts
As previously stated, everyone in the group loved this book; most of us loved it enough to go on to read the second installment, Artificial Condition, but I will try to constrain myself to talking just about the first one.
The book opens with the POV character, a rogue SecUnit that calls itself Murderbot, saving the scientists it has been charged with protecting from a hostile alien earthworm-thing that nearly kills them. It later emerges that the knowledge of the hostile lifeform was deliberately erased from the group's systems, prompting a search for answers. More pressingly for Murderbot, who had removed its helmet to keep the scientists calm in the crisis, the group now seems intent on treating it like a person. Which it isn't. Definitely.
I found Murderbot incredibly relatable as a character; I suspect the same would be true of anyone who spent an extended period of time coerced into a specific set of roles and expectations. Once the barriers of who you are allowed to be get lifted, you kind of end up just being a puddle for a bit while you figure things out. For Murderbot this manifests as watching its shows— it has moments of locking in on the things it knows it is good at (protecting its people), but the rest of the time it doesn't want much of anything. That changes near the end of the book, where it finally finds something that it wants to do for its own sake, which isn't resolved in All Systems Red but sets up for the events of the following book.
To that end, the story felt somewhat incomplete on its own to me, but as my friends pointed out this was the case for older serial sci-fi novels. The main character's emotional development gets spread out across multiple books or sometimes isn't present at all, with the story instead focusing entirely on the plot. I think this story can certainly be read that way, but there's a lot of details to pick apart in the worldbuilding and broader themes if one wants to do that. I had some thoughts about the author's choice to pair Murderbot with a group from a non-corporate state that allows for freed constructs, since I felt it predisposed the characters to thinking of it as human. Thinking about it for two more seconds, however, made it clear that if this were not the case the story would end halfway through since the rest of the group would have had no reason to put themselves in danger to save Murderbot's life.
To summarize: very good very fun book. This was the first physical book of fiction I have read in... an embarassingly long time; and yet, it's grabbed me enough that I'm planning to nab the next few books in the series next time I'm in my local bookstore.