All Systems Red Chapters 1-4
Raven: Hello and welcome to All Systems Read, a MurderBot podcast. I am Raven, she/her.
Jess: And I'm Jess. Also she/her.
R: Hey Jess. What is your performance reliability tonight?
J: It's been a long work day for me, and I want to go with about 85%. Raven, how's your performance reliability?
R: I had a really good day at work today. I didn't do a whole lot of work, but it was sort of team building with some of not my direct team, but teams that I work with. So I got free food. Got to just be in a car for, like, four hours, so it's like half the day. So I'd say probably closer to 90.
J: Oh, my gosh. Brag. Okay.
R: Yeah. Today we are going to be talking about the first four chapters of All Systems Red, so if you have not read the book, we will be discussing events that happen in those chapters. And if you do not want to be spoiled, go read the book first.
J: Yeah. Love that you are here without having read it. I mean, guess you could be here from the TV show in the future, but
R: the future as of recording? Yes.
J: Spoilers ahead. Ahoy! That was what I was looking for. Oh, God.
R: Spoilers, ahoy!
J: Spoilers, ahoy! Discussion questions are online for chapters five through eight, so obviously finish listening to this episode and keep engaging with the early parts. But if you want to hop on to those other questions, they are good and ready to go.
R: Yes, and we love reading your responses. It's like a little book club, even if it's not all together at once. And you know, we're the ones that get to see it all. We are hoping to share as many as possible. And this time we got five responses, so we should be able to talk about most of them today. A lot of overlap again. I think a lot of people have very similar - that, that level of love and rereading the books, this has led to a lot of people having similar thoughts and feelings about them.
J: I definitely will add a question on our next survey of, is this your first time reading the books? I'm getting the vibe that that is not the case, but maybe… the white whale. That would be amazing. Not that your opinions would be more heavily weighted, but
R: yes
J: I desperately want to know inside of your little brain what your thoughts are.
R: I wish I had, like, kept a diary or something of the first time I read it because I was just like, this is wonderful. And now I, I mean, obviously I still think that, but . . .
J: Yeah, I don't think I knew how much it would consume my life. And -
R: Valid.
J: - fundamentally shaped me as a person. But that's part of the beauty of it. I think.
R: So we started off our discussion questions with a question about the opening paragraph. All systems read had a pretty traumatic opening paragraph. How did it make you feel? And a number of people were like, it was great. I really enjoyed it. It drew me in quickly. Adam said that they hadn't looked into any reviews or anything before reading it for the first time, so I was pretty surprised by the tone, but it drew me in pretty quickly. Penna was intrigued. We had an anonymous response of the amount of media consumed was just very relatable, and I knew I was going to love MurderBot, which I now know it would hate. Sorry, MurderBot.
J: And Roswell just talked about being so enthralled with the opening paragraph, you know, especially as a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure. Strong actions and strong emotions for word of mouth there.
R: I hope Martha Wells knows how much that line in particular is loved. I'm sure she does, considering it's used in a lot of marketing materials.
J: You know, call me Ishmael. Last night, I dreamed of Manderley. I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module. I mean, it's up there. Iconic opening lines. And to kind of follow up with the dramatic opening, Martha Wells doesn't give you a lot of time to really ease into things. I love Martha Wells’ pacing. You dive headfirst into things, but that can sometimes be really overwhelming when it comes to sci fi. A lot of technical terms, we were hit pretty early on with some heavy sci fi and then also just general world building. You have new tech and a four way marriage, which is kind of, you know, the dream to have legally, I suppose. So we want to know how that made you all feel. Did it kind of take you aback?
R: Except I’m too ace for that.
J: Like I said, it's kind of the dream. Not for me, but love to see it.
R: I really felt Roswell's comment of “Honestly, I think I was immediately immersed and just went with everything I read,” as well as Penna’s “typically sci fi. I let the new terms and tech just kind of wash over me as I read, trusting I'll pick up what it means from context.” Whenever I read any kind of sci fi or fantasy. I really like grand fantasy, and there is always just so much happening at any given point.
J: Yeah.
R: I don't want to feel like I am being led by the hand through things. I like discovering things - and making connections and I - that makes me feel better and also uses my brain to engage with it, as opposed to just be like, here is a map. Go from point A to point B, now go to point C, now go to point D. And just kind of being immersed like that is it's fun. It's a fun experience and definitely happens when you only have, what is this? How many pages are in here?
J: The perfect amount of pages.
R: When you only have approximately 150 pages to tell a complete story.
J: I really appreciate in the MurderBot Diaries that the terms that are being invented for things make sense. There's not a lot of weird making up gobbledygook. People might be like, oh, you know, saying SecUnit is like, so basic, but like, it makes sense from like a language standpoint of like how we have gotten to these places for these terms.
R: It's a portmanteau. We have those now.
J: Yeah. It feels very grounded in reality. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. Really on my A-game tonight. One of the comments I did really enjoy was from Ostpol, which they've been lucky to be reading a lot of progressive, literature. So it fit right in for them. But they pointed out the fact that MurderBot does not care about how the technology and the things around them actually work. So there's no reason for us as the reader to also care and or be burdened by those things. I hadn't thought about that, but that is very true. MurderBot doesn't care. So why should I, as a reader, need to care or worry.
R: It is something that I enjoy about reading different authors in sci fi, because I love MurderBot, obviously. But sometimes I do want more “sci” in my sci fi, and that's when it's great to read something like The Martian.
J: Yeah.
R: Learn about how to grow potatoes
J: How to grow potatoes.
R: One thing that I was particularly curious about is how many episodes of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon has, because I am not a soap opera girly. I don't . . . I like Doctor Who and I like Star Trek, and those are both really long running. But even both of those, I'm not watching as they're coming out because I still have to catch up on things. So I wanted to ask what people thought of how many episodes are there. So I picked the one soap opera that I know the name of, which is The Young and the Restless, and I looked up and saw it had over 13,000 episodes.
R: So we put that in as, reference of hey, this that has been running for a number of years has 13,000 episodes. How many episodes of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon do you think has. And we had two people guess 500, so I don't know if it actually says something someone made a comment of the big anniversary episode was amazing, and I don't know if that was just a joke or if they actually talk about it in the books?
J: That's just a joke. I feel very confident saying, that's just the joke.
R: Well, be sure to clip this if, as we continue reading the books very thoroughly, if it is in fact mentioned
J: Personally, I was like, yeah, there's got to be like 1,000 or 2k.
R: I was thinking more like that, just because the tech of like, all of this tech has been around for a while. People have been making story, like recording stories as long as they could record stories, especially with how easy it is to put propaganda in movies and TV shows. There is no way that this has not been going on for a very long time.
J: Definitely. We'll come back and talk about propaganda and murder about later, because we both had very strong opinions on that. You would just think things would be very less expensive to produce. You know, we have movies now being shot on iPhones because you can I just. If The Young and the Restless can have 13,000 episodes, then I want there to be 13,000 episodes of Sanctuary Moon for MurderBot to watch, because
R: It deserves it.
J: Exactly. Martha, make that canon, okay? The next book? Just slip that in there. Thank you.
R: It could even be more. I'm not picky.
J: We won't limit you.
R: One question that I am kind of embarrassed about. I was obviously rereading the books to come up with these questions. Things we had questions on, and the bit right after MurderBot had saved Bharadwaj. “I nearly leaned over and everybody who wasn't on the floor ended up there.” I - this entire time, having read this book multiple times - have just kind of been assuming that MurderBot has still just been standing holding Bharadwaj. And then the very first response we got pointed out that, no, it was in fact on the floor sitting holding Bharadwaj.
J: Still feel like if you're sitting down and you know, something jerks to take off and you kind of go back a little bit. So I thought it still made sense in terms of how SecUnit’s are built with faster reflexes and the way they perceive little shifts and space and time and all of that. I think it's still made sense.
R: Jess being a good co-host and making me feel better.
J: I mean, listen, if I thought it was really bad, I would be like, yeah, no, we're not doing that.
R: Everyone else played along, that responded, and was like, yeah, it just it's stronger, it reacts faster. It's like, thank you… Adam, you had to go and use the book against me. But thank you.
J: Yes. Thanks, Adam, for quoting the text back to us. The sacred texts. Way to go.
J: So we wanted to talk a little bit about SecUnit configuration. And, you know, it even says, you know, standard generic human. We mentioned gun ports in our arms. What else do we think looks human or not human when it comes to a SecUnit design? We get a little but the information in later books. But really not, not a crazy amount all things considered.
R: I very much have always assumed basically like a Ken doll. No sex bits, as as it says. Probably no belly button, because that wouldn't make any sense unless it was some other kind of port? I mean, I can't imagine there would be a need for nipples.
J: Yeah. You really hit everything that Ostpol put in.
R: Recently I saw some fan art of various people's interpretations of what they think psych units look like, and a lot of them are more skin in the like, primarily upper half of the body and then some on the, some on the, like the thighs, but a lot of like the lower legs being all metal and the feet being almost like hooves, like two, like a cleft hoof, but metal.
J: Oh, see, one of the comments mentioned that there is a bit about the feet not looking human. So that's something else for us to keep an eye out when rereading.
R: Maybe in future books it talks about feet in SecUnit design. I-I'm still not entirely sure how the skin suit fits. Iis if it's just literally a suit? I imagine it has to have some kind of interface. Otherwise why would it be there? The company's cheap. It's not going to have something just for looks.
J: I figured there was like baseline protection in it. And then you would need like a layer before the armor.
R: I don't know. It - it can regrow. So maybe maybe that's it. More energy efficient to regrow?
J: I thought it actually had a skin suit that it put on, like
R: both.
J: Okay.
R: I - my understanding is both?
J: like it has skin, but then there's a skin suit, which I thought was just like a really tight fitting, like compression, like sort of thing.
R: Oh, I don't know. Now would be a good time to mention I have aphantasia, so I cannot see images in my head. Other than the ones that my eyes see.
J: I’m not great at that either. It's kind of collage-y. So, Man, we we really couple of each other here, don't we? I know I just finished rereading this book, but I feel like I need to start it again.
R: There's just so much. It's only 150 pages, why is there so much?
J: There is so much packed into this. I mentioned in the entire episode, if you all skipped that, this is my first time kind of physically reading the book, so it is almost brand new to me in a sense. I do miss Kevin’s voice talking to me, but I know who's there waiting for the next time I'm in a stressful situation.
R: There was somewhere that I was reading an interview from Martha Wells about how she goes about writing her books and writing a whole bunch, and then cutting it down. And I wish I had saved the link to that interview because it was - I was like, yeah, no, I can tell that you are constantly just condensing all of your writing because everything is so well done. But there's just so much there.
J: I think that's a very impressive skill to have to be able to kill your darlings and kind of condense down to this perfectly tailored thing.
J: So early on in the book, we are introduced to kind of our first performance reliability failure. When MurderBot is in the cubicle, and Mensah comes and talks to it. There's a lot going on. Clearly MurderBot very injured watching back the footage of watching the rest of PreservationAux talk about its interactions that it had and then Mensah there, face to face talking to it. What else do we think kind of led to this performance reliability crash.
R: really thought it was a combination of the two. Obviously it was not doing great from battling hostile one, but the talk with Mensah face to face was a lot for it. And then it was very surprised at watching back how it was interacting with Doctor Volescu. That's a lot of person time for it.
J: Yeah, I definitely agree with Penna, on the first time I read through, I fully thought it was just the injuries. But then when you revisit it and you're a little less just kind of, at least for me, kind of just overwhelmed by how much you are consuming. You could really see like, oh, there is so much happening here that, I too, would have a full collapse. Relatable.
R: I don't know how the cubicles are configured, but realistically it's an old timey fainting couch. That's what it really is. That’s what happens.
J: I like that.
J and R: *sighing*
J: Fainting. We did pantomime it. Let me clarify that for our audio medium that we pantomimed.
R: You got it. You got to put the back of your hand to your forehead and then lean back.
J: There we go. Moments like this I wish I was artistic because. Just imagine a MurderBot on a fainting couch.
J: To keep going on the really fun questions. Raven and I both reside within the United States, and there's a lot of talk about the corporation rim, and a lot of it hits so close to home in ways that are not fun. Particularly in chapter two, it talks about data mining, and I think we were all aware of how much of our data every time we accept cookies, terms of agreement. It is just this never ending.
R: Ask me again in three days.
J: What happens in three days?
R: Oh, no. There's no more no. You either agree or “ask me again in three days.”
J: Maybe performance reliability is dropping
R: back down to 80?
J: Back down to 80. Whoopsie-daisy. Adam pointed out that we are always sharing our location as well. And I know I mentioned before, you know, these books, they just feel so grounded in reality. There's nothing you can do about it, as MurderBot points out. But you should be concerned and I promise you MurderBot I am very concerned constantly.
R: Going to skip forward bit and ask and actually talk about an actually fun question. What is the genderless equivalent of a drama queen? We were talking about this as we were discussing the book before, like coming up with the questions, and we got three responses and they're very, very similar. So drama, drama monarch or drama royalty and then melodrama monarch. And I feel like melodramatic monarch has a really nice ring to it.
J: Yeah, I like that alliteration there. I don't even remember what point of the book that you were like, MurderBot’s being such a drama queen and you remember what section that was?
R: in chapter four, when the the crew that is in the back with it starts trying to ask it how it's doing. It's - it thinks “I'm not supposed to snitched on clients, but it was either that or jump out the hatch” in response to sending the feed to Doctor Mensah, so Doctor Mensah will tell them to stop bothering it, and that is when I, I asked, what is the genderless equivalent of a drama queen?
J: Listen, I think it continues through later books that MurderBot, hear me out, might be a little traumatic at times.
R: No (said very sarcastically)
J: It's a wild statement. I know it's a wild statement. Always calm, always cool. Always cool and collected.
R: That's one of the things that's really fun about MurderBot is if - obviously it doesn't really have control of its expressions, but if it's in the armor, you would never know. You would never know that it is just constantly having existential crises.
J: It's very relatable. I get that at work. You're always so, like happy and positive. But it's like, cool. I might just have a panic attack.
R: That's called masking.
J: I'm so. I'm so good at it.
R: Gold star for masking for you.
J: Thank you. Thank you. It's like, listen, just because I'm struggling, it does not mean I'm going to make it everybody else's problem. It's fine. I know how much you all like to hear me say, oh, Mondays, right? I know all the fun neurotypical statements.
R: I live in the Midwest. I could talk about the weather all day long.
J: Regrounding ourselves a little bit. One of the quotes that really stuck out to me, and gosh, that really does follow up. Well, “I'd given a tiny piece of myself away. That can't happen. I have too much to hide. And letting one piece go means the rest isn't as protected.” Talk about masking there. That really kind of hits hard.
R: I thought Ostpol brought up a really good point “From a paranoia and depression perspective: Very relatable. But trying to adapt a healthier stance: conscious radical vulnerability can be a healthy thing and should be more common in this world. But obviously, living in the corporation room or its Terran equivalent makes it hard.” It's - it's a hard thing to be vulnerable and to be seen.
J: Ding ding ding. Nailed it on the head there.
R: A couple of questions we had related to whatever the group is that is in control of the override modules. The first one is “After the feed drops on the way to check on downfall. Mensah asks if anyone wanted to go back and MurderBot wants to abort the mission, but does not say anything. Do we think that if MurderBot had objected to continuing, Mensah would have listened?” I feel like no. Well, I think she would have listened, but I don't think she would have turned around. I think she would have agreed that they would have felt responsible if they could have done something and did not.
J: That seems to be a pretty popular consensus. And somebody even mentioned, I think the majority would have voted to keep going. So even if MurderBot dissented, you know, the majority is going to carry the motion there. I want to believe that Mensah would, but I, I don't think it matters. I think that concern is going to win out in the end.
R: Agreed. They are a very caring group.
J: To a fault.
R: To a fault.
J: Listen, I, I love them all so much. My sweet children.
R: The next question is also related to the other group in charge of the override module, messing with the autopilot. So the failing autopilot could have been disastrous with the rise of self-driving cars. Do you have any anxiety regarding it? Or even like basic cruise controls on cars? I know I don't trust self-driving cars because we do not currently have the technology for them to actually work. They are very dangerous. They are not fully self-driving. They have a hard time detecting people or even other vehicles sometimes. I think we'll get there eventually with self-driving cars. However, cruise control? We got that figured out. It's wonderful. I use it every single day.
J: I got a new car last year and it has adaptive cruise control, and I think that probably the closest I will ever get to a self-driving car. But even then, it still kind of makes me nervous. That's one where you set the speed and you can tell it how far away you want to stay with the car in front of you, and it will adjust your speed, you know, to keep you a safe distance. And then if you go around them, it will go back up to whatever you set it at. It's a very cool feature. I do a lot of road trips a lot of driving. It's a godsend. Sometimes I do kind of side-eye it a little bit. Always keep your hands on the wheels.
R: Oh, yeah. Definitely.
J: And buckle up if you're not buckling up and put your cellphones down.
R: You don't need to look at those.
J: Crazy kids.
R: Drive safe.
J: Drive safe.
J: Something that always stands out to me eeading these books is that MurderBot often contradicts itself in regards to its organic parts. Its instincts are, you know, really important for helping it do its job. Part of the reason why SecUnits exist is because you need to kind of have these two parts, like balancing themselves out. But there's a lot of times, including here in these first four chapters, where MurderBot is kind of reluctant to embrace and recognize that part. It made me think about myself. And I wanted to, you know, do I think people feel like they have trouble trusting their instincts as well?
R: I am usually either jumping in with both feet or overthinking something. There's not a whole lot of in between. A lot of responses we got were about how it sees those parts as human, but it doesn't see itself as human, so therefore it doesn't see those parts as itself, which works really well with math, but not so much -
J: Yeah.
R: - parts of a person,
J: not a person. It just it's very contradictory because there is that hard line of “no, I'm not human.” I don't want to spoil too much like in later books and stuff. But, you know, it's a recurring thing that I think as we continue throughout the series that we might revisit this kind of again of going, oh, I should have trusted myself and “Comment Redacted” because it's a spoiler for a future book.
R: Yeah... So when MurderBot gets to the DeltFall installation, and I think this is after it finds the first one, the first SecUnit that had been taken out, it makes a comment that it realizes the smart thing to do, which would just be gather all of its humans and run away. It does not do that. It decides that it wants to kill the other SecUnits. And so we asked, why do you think it makes that decision? Two of the responses we got were very simple. It's angry. It's more angry than it knows.
J: You know, MurderBot? Definitely not processing all of its anger.
R: It's very much related to the question about why does MurderBot not trust its organic parts. The organic parts are what it associates feelings with because machines don't have feelings.
J: They don't. My therapist would have a lot to say about instincts and things like that, but they're not here right now. Roswell did have a really good observation that while MurderBot is technically a rogue unit, MurderBot does not consider itself rogue. Especially not like these other units that are going rogue and, you know, killing their clients. And there's definitely a
R: Distinction?
J: Yeah, a distinction for, you know, me versus them. Like, I am not like them. And I have to take care of it because reasons.
R: I think part of it is the anger and part of it is it isn't recognizing or admitting it yet, but it does care now. It does somewhat care about its humans, and not just doing the job.
J: These clients have been very tolerable, and, while MurderBot I think is probably furious that they've gone to DeltFall. I think part of MurderBot kind of admires that.
J: Before we take a look at our favorite moments of the book and kind of wrap up this episode, we did have just a space for people to share any thoughts and opinions, and Penna mentioned just being so swept up the first time they read through the books. But then in later readings could really appreciate all the details of the planet and the vegetation and the atmosphere. I 100% agree, unless you kind of slow down, this is a full throttle ahead sort of book.
R: It is so character driven.
J: It is action and it is happening. But definitely when you are rereading it, you can pick up some of those other details. It's amazing as many times as I've read the book, to still be getting new things and insights, both from my personal reading and then, you know, obviously discussing it with Raven and the rest of you all.
R: So moving into the last question we had of do you have a favorite quote or scene from the first four chapters? And we had five responses, but three distinct responses. We had two of them each say the same thing. So Adam and Penna both talked about the scene where the team says, SecUnit can hang out with them and it does not like that. I think I think this was mine, too, of I said, “I need to check the perimeter and managed to turn and leave the crew area in a totally normal way, and not like I was fleeing from a bunch of giant hostiles.” That was probably my favorite.
J: Another quote we got, which I also super love. “It was starting to occur to me that Doctor Mensah might actually be an intrepid galactic explorer, even if she didn't look like the ones on the entertainment feed.”
R: I think that's probably my favorite quote. And the other one is my favorite scene, because I did have that one marked in our notes with the page number.
J: I love Doctor Mensah so much.
R: She's great. The last response we got, we got the same answer from Roswell and OstPol of “as a terrifying killing machine, I was a terrible failure.” Also every phrase really. And Roswell has like four including that one. So it's as we mentioned, the books are great from start to finish.
J: I actually tried to do the reading thing of like tagging things with little posts-it notes, which I then immediately lost, you know, like 40 pages into the book, because that's who I am as a person, to be quite honest. But I was like, okay, I have to limit myself because I can't just keep marking every single page or something I work on, like all the pages. And we already we already did this full episode about how much of this book and are literally making a podcast. So let's not revisit here.
R: Well, as Jess mentioned, we will be going over the next four chapters, which is the end, the second half of All Systems Red. We will have discussion questions available when this episode drops. So then that way everybody has time to finish the book and respond to those discussion questions.
J: And I know I mentioned it when I posted it online. And for those of you who are on our email mailing list, these questions are for fun. If it feels like homework, don't do it. It's not required to listen to the show. I mean, you can just email us directly comments. Honestly, write us a couple of paragraphs. We would love to read it. Are you serious? We are the sorts of people we would love to, love to hear any of your thoughts or anything that you think that we missed, or you would like to hear us talk about. Let us know. All of the links are in the show notes, and we are most of the places where you can find this stuff.
R: Until next time on All Systems Read, I'm Raven .
J: And I'm Jess. Thanks for listening.