Book Review: Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries 2) by Martha Wells

Publisher: Tor.com
Published: May 8, 2018
Read from September 28 to November 8, 2022
Received: purchased

Synopsis from Goodreads:

It has a dark past--one in which a number of humans were killed. A past that caused it to christen itself “Murderbot." But it has only vague memories of the massacre that spawned that title, and it wants to know more. Teaming up with a Research Transport vessel named ART (you don’t want to know what the “A” stands for), Murderbot heads to the mining facility where it went rogue. What it discovers will forever change the way it thinks.

Review:

Two and a half years later, I finally got around to reading the second Murderbot Diaries book. I absolutely loved All Systems Red, and I never planned for it to take this long to get to the rest of the series. The bright side is that there are even more books now, and I can read all of them straight away.

I re-read All Systems Red before Artificial Condition to jog my memory, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much I remembered. The story really stuck with me, so I was excited to move right on to the second one.

Aside from Murderbot, this book has an entirely different set of characters from All Systems Red. It was great to read about Murderbot again, but I have to admit that I did miss the rest of the cast from the first book.

That being said, I absolutely loved ART! It was fun seeing Murderbot connect with a bot as opposed to a human. I also just loved ART's personality, and the connection between ART and Murderbot helped show what technology is capable of in this universe in a new way.

This book also explored Murderbot's past more as it went back to the planet where it killed its crew. We learn that the massacre wasn't Murderbot's fault, which wasn't surprising to me. I'd never actually doubted that, but I'm glad Murderbot could have that confirmed. Still, it doesn't seem fully satisfied with the answers it got, which makes me curious about where it's going to go next in the third book.

I'm going to dive straight into reading the next book now. I'm definitely not waiting another two years!