All Systems Red
Why this book?
I’m a character-driven reader and I find humanity frustrating. I’m watching people slowly slide or blindly jog towards cliffs of their own making and sincerely wish I could have been born a dinosaur, or an octopus, or anything else that didn’t involve this nonsense. But here I am. And so is Murderbot, the brilliantly cynical protagonist of Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries. Murderbot is a self-named security cyborg (Sec-unit) slave, self-liberated, and wishing to escape both its past and present by being left alone to watch TV.
It observes the bald-faced stupidity, greed, and self-inflicted misery of humanity with confusion and disgust, commenting with an internal monologue reflecting my own and maybe yours. In spite of its own cynical realism and the grim realities of the universe it lives in, it manages to carve out a life that is nearly as rewarding to it as its favorite shows, so that’s nice too.