Murderbot Diaries
This ebundle includes: All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, Network Effect, and Fugitive Telemetry. Now an original series on Apple TV+, starring Alexander Skarsgård as Murderbot! The Murderbot Diaries, by bestselling author Martha Wells, is an action-packed, cerebral science fiction series about a self-hacking robot searching for the meaning of life. All Systems Red: In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid — a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is. But when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and their Murderbot to get to the truth. Artificial Condition: It has a dark past—one in which a number of humans were killed. But it has only vague memories of the massacre that spawned the title “Murderbot”, and it wants to know more. Teaming up with a Research Transport vessel named ART, Murderbot heads to the mining facility where it went rogue. What it discovers will forever change the way it thinks... Rogue Protocol: The case against the too-big-to-fail GrayCris Corporation is floundering, and more importantly, authorities are beginning to ask more questions about where Dr.
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42recommend
53mentions
50people
2017–2026years
85% recommend15% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Tangental, but can’t wait for automated blackmail from crawlers continuously digging through my digital footprint. /s
Martha Wells hit it nicely in The Murderbot Diaries.
- Humble Bundle has spoiled me and my ebook library has grown by around a 100 books this year...
Tech book recommendations: 'Secure by Design', 'Designing Data-Intensive Applications', 'Building Secure and Reliable Systems' and 'Fundamentals of Software Architecture'.
For scifi: 'Murderbot Diaries' and 'The Expanse' - both are just great entertainment
- I'm on my about 10th re-read of Dungeon Crawler Carl. I also reread the Murderbot Diaries.
Some new listens that I liked:
* Blood Over Brighthaven
* Fleabag: A Monster Evolution LitRPG
* Flybot
* The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
* Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
- Things I really liked:
- The Murderbot Diaries (all of them)
- Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Count Zero (Sprawl Trilogy) – perfection
- Discworld series (almost all of them)
- Bobiverse serise (all of them)
- Old Man's War series
- Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir – Werner Herzog's autobiography
- The Songlines - Bruce Chatwin
- Kissinger: A Biography (approval of Kissinger not required)
- various collected works of Borges
- various works of Carl Jung
- Starship Troopers
- A Man Called Ove – made me cry
- A Stitch in Time – a star trek actor novelizing his headcannon of the character he played
- Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town
- Mickey7
- Solaris
- Flowers for Algernon
- Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death
- I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life
Things I disliked:
- The Wheel of Time (I forget how many I got through)
- Eruption – a posthumous Michael Crichton book was really terrible
- The Book of the New Sun
- The Creative Act: A Way of Being – an artist trying and failing to talk about science
- Similar experience w/ my daughter (now 12 y/o) here. We read the heck out of children's books when she was little. There were nights when I really didn't want to slog thru the same Suzy Spafford[6] book again, but I did it anyway. I think it paid off. My daughter is an avid reader now.
She says she still wants me to read to her, so I do. This year was a bit sci-fi heavy, and we've decided to target more fantasy and literature in 2026.
This year's books included:
"Below the Root", "And All Between", and "Until the Celebration" - The "Green Sky Trilogy"[0] by Zilpha Keatly Snyder. We held off on playing the "Below the Root" video game[1] but I'm hoping that as we get into winter weather and outside time becomes more scarce we can get to it. It's arguably the final book in the "trilogy".
"Redshirts"[2] by John Scalzi. We've been slowly making our way through Star Trek TOS in the last couple years so. That gave her enough cultural fluency with the tropes in the book to make it effective.
"To Say Nothing of the Dog"[3] by Connie Willis. My daughter adores Victorian England and comedy. This book also turned her on to Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)"[4] (which I'm still working thru on my own-- I do not particularly love Victorian England but it is a good book).
Besides the books I read to my daughter, I also read Martha Wells' "The Murderbot Diaries"[5] series myself. I'm vaguely interested in the television adaptation. I'd love to hear what somebody who has read the series thinks of the TV version.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Sky_Trilogy
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Sky_Trilogy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirts_(novel)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Say_Nothing_of_the_Dog
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Men_in_a_Boat
- It has a tendency to recommend books in the same series as are input (putting aside that if I like a book in a series I've likely already read the series).
It did suggest Murderbot Diaries (not on the input but a series I have read and did like) and an Adrian Tchaikovsky I hadn't read :).
