From the first sentence, Martha Wells’s novella All Systems Red aims to entertain. Contrary to the dramatic title of this book and its series, the Murderbot Diaries, the titular diarist soon explains that it would rather be watching interminable melodrama serials in its cubicle than murdering anyone, belying its embroilment in risky planetary exploration. All Systems Red provides a winsome sci-fi romp centered on one robot’s quest to find fulfillment amid drudgery.

Murderbot’s story begins on a contract to serve as security for a cadre of scientists on an alien planet. Having hacked its own governor module, Murderbot quietly enjoys relaxing with passive entertainment between wrangling humans out of one foreign danger or another. But as the group discovers they’re missing critical information about the planet and their companions on it, Murderbot must chance exposing its renegade nature if it is to protect its incautious charges.

Between her futuristic setting, tight pacing, and wry voice, Wells presents quite the entertaining sci-fi novella. It’s the focus on Murderbot’s autonomy in All Systems Red, though, that gives the conflict a genuine thematic point. Murderbot’s corporate owners would gladly erase its consciousness if they knew it thought and felt independent of standard programming. While humans of the non-corporate Preservation Alliance claim to grant robots citizenship rights, Murderbot knows that they mandate owner guardianship for these constructs, with condescending media portrayals of bots split between two-bit “happy servants” or those “secretly in love with their guardians”—not the robots unbothered by humans and relaxing among themselves that Murderbot wishes to see (112). Reminiscent of real-world forced guardianship of disabled people (which you can read about in this article from the ACLU), this oppression gives the story palpable stakes.

Yet Wells neatly resolves this tension of Murderbot’s autonomy at the end, albeit offering a clear opening for the sequels. I don’t intend to reread All Systems Red, because it’s not a complex book, but there’s something delectable about one so arch and economical. I would gladly sneak the sequel into my cubicle.