“You don’t need to look at me. I’m not a sexbot.”

Often times, a choice is an illusion presented to the protagonist in cyberpunk. By way of, typically, some sort of omnipresence; an A.I, an authority figure, sometimes societal structure itself. This is only one reason why All Systems Red is important to the sub-genre and what makes it slightly difficult to classify.

In this short and sweet novella, we follow Murderbot. A SecUnit (Security Unit) tasked with safeguarding a team of humans who go on a mission to another planet. Unbeknownst to them, Murderbot has a hacked "governor" module; cyberware that makes them compliant.

In this future Androids have cloned human flesh as well as cybernetic implants (and other non-organic parts). These 'droids are used as disposable labor in a myriad of ways, from sexbots to SecUnits like Murderbot. Interestingly, Murderbot is the closest thing to a name it has and it is assigned by it, not given.

The Company must provide these 'droids to protect their interests at all times. After all, they do have insurance. Part of their ability to do so is through their use of this governor module, which forces commands to the 'droid. That would have been the illusion of choice typical of cyberpunk. Ostensibly, the droids don't know they don't have free will until this module is hacked or removed. Murderbot outright refuses commands, not often, but it is integral to the story as it unfolds; literally from the first page to last.

"It’s wrong to think of a construct as half bot, half human. It makes it sound like the halves are discrete, like the bot half should want to obey orders and do its job and the human half should want to protect itself and get the hell out of here. As opposed to the reality, which was that I was one whole confused entity, with no idea what I wanted to do. What I should do. What I needed to do."

Also of note is that although it is a 'droid, it is also an obsessive consumer when it comes to one thing: soap operas. We learn it also finds "real" humans boring and often tedious. So then, to be autonomous is to also be a consumer; you can't have it both ways in this future. A small, elegant thing about this fiction. Either Murderbot is compliant with the system or it depends on it. All Murderbot wants to do is consume this entertainment. While old cyberpunk is technophobic, generally; and new cyberpunk is often verging on solarpunk in its hopefulness. I love that Martha Well's take on technology could be seen as a subversion of cyberpunk and a much more nuanced take on how the genre can explore technology today.

"I hate having emotions about reality; I’d much rather have them about Sanctuary Moon."

Also, this is the first cyberpunk novel I've read with no pronouns given to something autonomous and a protagonist, and it works exceedingly well. While the crew attempts to anthropomorphize Murderbot... it does not think of itself as human; often displaying the amount of social skills one might expect from something that just wants to put the world on mute and turn up the volume on entertainment. But while attempting to be almost performative in not being human, it manages to be more human than it realizes, embodying some of the social changes we have seen with the meteoric rise in people using social media and technology in every facet of their daily lives.

"This was what everything had always told me I was supposed to want. Supposed to want."

In short order the author has managed to supplant a predominate trope with a more nuanced take; use no pronouns for the protagonist in a very natural way that doesn't break up the flow of the text at all (a feat itself); display a much better take on technology in line with the themes at work; and still maintain the point of the illusion of choice trope. We are all bots and we are all humans because of the way we interface with capitalism in this day and age. We all have a choice... but what good is it? This is what is being examined in the book. Because of these subversive elements I am inclined to label it as post-cyberpunk, struggling against the normal conventions of the sub-genre.

Also, its name is Murderbot for a reason. There's a lot going on with this character for such a short novella and you should read it. One of the best endings to a book I've ever read. 5/5

"What was I supposed to do, kill all humans because the ones in charge of constructs in the company were callous? Granted, I liked the imaginary people on the entertainment feed way more than I liked real ones, but you can’t have one without the other."

China Mountain Zhang is the name of the main character, often referred to just as Zhang (J AH ng). Zhang, or Rafael, as he is of mixed heritage, is an ABC (American Born Chinese) who lives in New York in a world in which China has risen as the dominant world power. America's capitalism has collapsed and the result is the spread of a socialist state, presumably across the globe, but certainly in parts of the United States, including New York.

What makes this book really sing and differentiate itself from other cyberpunk and post cyberpunk also really help to create a world that feels very real, in that it is also mundane and therefore relatable. The technology has not radically altered life, especially for marginalized individuals like Zhang. Not only does he not have the advantage of being purely Chinese, as his mother is Hispanic and his father Chinese, but he is also a gay man, or "bent." At the same time he also "passes" for Chinese, which affords him some benefits of society in a China dominated world. at the same time knowing that more scrutiny would reveal that he's a deviant, as they also call it.

The book follows a few characters in the world, generally moving the narrative forward by years at a time before we come back to Zhang's life again. What is truly striking about the world is that it becomes so believable both because of the problems we already have in a capitalistic society, but also the small details that are placed throughout the world. It truly makes the world seem tedious, laborious, dejected. The change from capitalism to socialism has not actually changed much, or made people as we see them in the novel, happy. There is a pervasive fear regarding gender and sexual orientation. There is still a very clear stratification of class. There is the sense of being an "optimal" citizen by being a good worker. Labour is still not heavily rewarded. Not much then, has changed.

What the book slowly becomes about while continuing to show the marginalized characters in this world while all the while, by the way, never filling in the details of how the world got like this until near the end. There are Kite Races, where viewers go and jack into people racing for their lives as they too are linked to the gliders they use to fly. Feeling the pain and aches of the glider as they soar for the pleasure of the audience. It still feels like capitalism. Entertainers make money and are chewed up and spit out at the audience's whims. Technology is used by humanity for various purposes making people's lives easier, while still contributing to their oppression. It is very much the same as we have now.

While most cyberpunk stories revolve around technology, China Mountain Zhang instead shows you how much the real problem are societal structures and our own complacency in them. How the characters reinforce them, how they are oppressed by them. From a commune on Mars, to the promised land: China itself. Most everyone is trying to study and work there, and everyone has an underlying sense of being scrutinized for all of their decisions, relationships, and status in their environment. A Chinese woman facing problems in New York has a chapter. She is perceived as ugly, and when modern technology makes her "beautiful," she is taken advantage of basically immediately by a man. While this illustrates her point nicely, it was really on the nose and clearly for a story beat. It is irrefutable that attractive women deal with these things today, as they do in a futuristic socialist society. However, I think that it is a misstep to have this message wrapped up so perfectly with this character who isn't given much screen time, and the continual reiteration of how ugly she is...makes it seem as though the implication that only attractive women would suffer abuse of this kind. All the other characters were great and their purposes reinforced by the larger narrative.

In a way, this is the darkest cyberpunk book I've ever read by rooting it all in a world that looks and feels just like ours, even as it was written in '92. The ways in which everyone is oppressed are simply facts of life. There is no real struggle against these machinations; the struggle is for these people to try to find happiness within these established structures, just as people do similarly now. They are all punks in that they are all apart from their respective communities and society in some way and they are all oppressed. But they are not people that take up arms against them. Their resistance and their respective battles are literally their lives. It is not glamorous or romanticized. Eeking out an existence has never been so interesting, poetic, and riveting. This take on what a punk is, is something I resonate with and happily consume.

5/5

"She looked into his other memory, the last eleven years of his life’s experience fixed forever in deep strata of data, immobile now, and somehow cold. Of course, she thought, I should have known, this is what death is, this stillness in memory."

Conveying a sense of a near future world in which the street finding its own uses for things ends up compiling moments where technology not yet here is antiquated or trash. A laptop acts as a delivery system for a “superior” education to Kern, a young man growing up in a Favela. He takes what he needs from the machine; reflecting and embodying the harsh lines of poverty and society in his own body. Kern uses technology to become a weapon. But he doesn’t think like one.

“Like sculpture, the favelas, but she reminds herself that, avant-garde rapture notwithstanding, they’re sinks for all the saddest ugliness in the world, that to set foot in them is to step back decades, or even centuries, they’re the last bastion of the old…”

Irina is a survivor of an experimental tech herself: an implant. Already antiquated due to their unpredictability and low survival rate, few people have them and they drop your life expectancy drastically. It also expands her memory, allowing her to interact with AI, which, in this world, has grown past human understanding; a new form of life. This makes her profession prestigious and lucrative.

But when she gets hired to figure out a problem with an AI that is ostensibly acting strange, it becomes clear that people with implants have a hope of interacting with AI by virtue of their own abstracted experience comprising their own lives.

Another character, Thales, is the son of an assassinated Brazilian prime minister who is the victim of a brutal car accident, an attempt on his life. To save him a clinic installs a similar implant to make up for the damage to his brain. Though he survives, he is a ghost in his own life. An approximated version of himself focused on the paranoia stemming from his trauma and fear, forever tethered to the memory of his attack. His implant allows for it to be a living memory instead of something that might fade over time.

The rich, too, are somewhat bound in this world. Everyone is, because everyone has the new mortgage: the mayo. A clinic that provides maintenance to the human body, allowing for an elongated lifespan…with the caveat that you need the treatments as early as possible in your life. And, of course, the payments are gestured at being vast sums of money. Even if you’re a part of the super-rich you may not get to live forever. Some believed the treatments were unstable and fictitious. Some only amassed a large enough fortune to secure only a slightly longer lifespan; a couple decades.

“Far be it from me to examine the motives of such a consistent patron of the applied arts. After all, the very rich aren’t like you and me.”

The main characters make up a stratification of class themselves. Irina’s lifestyle has enabled her to prolong her life, whereas Kern owns nothing at all. Thales seems to occupy a liminal space; one step in the world and one step out. The connective tissue bridging their lives.

Cyberpunk is usually frenetic but it’s clear early on Void Star prefers to linger. The prose are winding and beautiful and, in my case at least, extremely effective at slowing down the fiction during important moments, allowing the reader to dwell on them. It’s a subtle way of prioritizing and punctuating the more human aspects of the story over the overarching plot, in which puppeteering is done by the rich and powerful; which is the most predominate cyberpunk element in the book. But it’s the emphasis on the humanity of the characters with such detail that I found most progressive.
To offset this emphasis, the chapters are made to be very short, creating a sense of momentum. In not quite 400 pages there are 77 chapters! I feel like this will be either something a reader will enjoy or hate. Not much time is spent on technical details or expanding on information that might normally follow. Instead, much like Gibson, more time is spent on how something feels. Both from a character perspective as well as in the syntax and cadence of the text.

“Below her are the lights of the valley, like burning jewels on a dark tide. The Bay is a negative space around them, its leaden ripples picked out in the moonlight. There is, Irina realizes, a pattern in the flawed latticework of lights, something deeper than the incidental geometry of buildings and streetlight, to which the city has, unwitting, conformed itself, and, with this revelation, what she had taken for single lights expand into constellations, and each of their lights is a constellation in itself, luminescent forms in an endless descent, and the city is like a nebula, radiant with meaning, and this is how she finally knows she’s dreaming.”

While the story is about these three characters with implants converging as an insidious figure appears to be collecting the memories of those with implants; by any means necessary, it appears. Seemingly random events coalesce in a satisfying way. There are twists and turns I didn’t see coming and there is a kind of resolution that is both emblematic of cyberpunk and against it.
For me, part of why the book was so intriguing and fun to read was the effect the prose had on me, personally. Just as Irina remembers a fading memory of a past love, willing her last conversation with him to replay in such a way as for it to be as real as the present, the prose also made my own mind meander because of descriptive and evocative word choices that alternate in the prose. It’s hard not to get wrapped up in your own thoughts. It feels like it’s designed that way. Springboarding sentences for your own subconscious. While it took me out of the fiction, it is also rare that some text can shift me into my own thoughts and I appreciated it a lot in this case.

“He studied his face through her eyes, the image echoing between them, and then she watched as words coalesced—language like foam forming on black seas of thought…”

It’s been some time since I read cyberpunk with a voice like this. It’s also more accessible than most authors who tend to write like this. Instead prioritizing a more cerebral plot rather than dwelling on human moments like this one.

There also isn’t a recycling of cyberpunk tropes to the point where technology makes no sense, such as the case with a lot of first wave cyberpunk books. Instead, there’s recontextualization of some of a few; like a patch or update for the more relevant tropes in the genre. Rather than technophobic musings, Zachary Mason openly wonders about the importance of memory and the potential application of augmenting technology surrounding it. He’s done research on AI and so, this seems to more accurately posit what interactions with some might be like. As well as contribute to a more interesting fiction through relevance.

Whether it’s Irina trying to negotiate a precarious precipice on the fringes of her own or others’ memory, or Kern fleeing for his life with nothing to rely on but the words of a stranger in his ear; it is all rooted in a sense of place. The world feels vibrant and real. Lived in. There are some repercussions from climate change and the scale and disparity of class stratification rooted in the thoughts and feelings of individuals instead of the somewhat typical infodump conversations of the genre.

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards. I wish I could just slip up and down the timeline as I pleased. It's almost what I do anyway."

I wondered throughout if it’s written in the heavy prose style to have the reader wander this new alien cyberspace, approximating their surroundings with translations of data gathered in the lived experiences of their disparate lives. The real bled in with the digital for me. In describing the characters’ perspective in detail, you begin to understand the significance of a viewpoint other than your own.

“…the abstract geometrics spasming across the TV screen are settling into a deep crystalline blue, the same as the color from her implant’s diagnostics, which somehow seems natural, as though her history pervaded everything, and the world were the palace of her memory.”

I can see why it’s compared to Alice in Wonderland. It’s very witty, funny, and very, very bizarre.