I thought I would provide a rare Audiobook focused review today! I picked up All Systems Red at the suggestion of my cousin, and I LOVED it.
The story itself is a first-person narrative from the perspective of Murderbot - a synthetic security bot assigned to a planetary survey team. Unlike most security bots, our Murderbot hacked its governor, giving it autonomy over its own decisions.
The audiobook is a pretty quick listen, all things considered - and clocks in at a total of 3 hours and 18 minutes of audio so it's nice and easy to get through. Also, it's narrated by one of my favorite voice actors in the podcast and audiobook space - Kevin R. Free.
Kevin is fantastic, and I think he absolutely nails the tone for Murderbot. He first made an impression on me with his work for Welcome to Night Vale, and since then I've been able to pick his voice out of anything he does. He's a very versatile voice actor, and his narration here - again, as I can't stress this enough - truly embodies Murderbot.
Through Kevin's narration, we get to experience what it might be like to be a surveyor on an alien planet when something goes terribly, horribly, wrong. Unfortunately for our darling protagonist Murderbot, doing their job wasn't really ever high on its priority list - so being suddenly thrust into a situation where troublesome humans are in danger really cuts into Murderbots entertainment television time.
If you're interested in a fun and short first-person sci-fi book from the perspective of an annoyed slacker whose primary job is to kill anything that they're told to, this book is for you. I've bought the next one in the series as well and will be excitedly listening to it before buying the next book in the series... and so forth.
If you have Audible, I encourage you to check it out. If you have $4 to spare, it's also worth buying in text format.
I suspect that if you're anything like me, you'll end up falling in love with this character and you'll be gobbling up the rest of the series too!