Artificial Condition
Review
Artificial Condition, by , is the second book in the The Murderbot Diaries. It follows Murderbot as it digs into its past and, once again, saves some scientists.
Artificial Condition moves faster than All Systems Red, with a smoother blend of action and exposition. Murderbot arrives at a mining station, gets hired as a security consultant by a group of researchers trying to recover their stolen work, saves their lives twice, investigates the massacre it thinks it might have caused, saves the researchers again, and kills the bad guy. Along the way, it makes friends with a super-intelligent, super-bored, asshole research transport (ART).
I like how is slowly expanding the universe of The Murderbot Diaries. It lets her balance worldbuilding with plot and avoids the problem where exploring the setting drives the excitement in book one but feels played out by the sequel—a trap that both A Drop of Corruption and City on Fire fell into.
A theme of The Murderbot Diaries is identity and purpose. Murderbot is slowly realizing that its need to protect people isn’t leftover programming but a core part of who it is. There’s a scene where ART proposes surgically modifying Murderbot to help it stay hidden, and Murderbot instinctively rejects it. To it, changing itself feels like losing part of what makes it it. In the end, though, Murderbot accepts the alteration as necessary to remain free.
This question of “what makes the self” is a common theme in sci-fi, one we’ve seen explored in Blindsight and Echopraxia, in A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace, again in Use of Weapons, Look to Windward, and Surface Detail, and of course in We Are Legion (We Are Bob).
One of the things I enjoyed about this book was how competent Murderbot is. He beats the bad guys because he’s just better at security and violence than they are. It was never a fair fight. It gives me the same thrill as ’s The Bourne Identity. The other standout is ART, who’s both hyper-competent and a little naive—a perfect, friendly foil for Murderbot.
Artificial Condition was great, even better than All Systems Red, because of the pacing, the character dynamics, and ART. I’m starting Rogue Protocol right away!