This review is going to have spoilers for the first book. If you want to read my take on the series as a whole, read my review for All Systems Red.
Of all of the Murderbot books, this one is my least favorite. It’s still pretty good, but not as good as the first. Thankfully, the other books in the series all get better after this one, so if your tastes track pretty closely with mine and you still enjoy this book, you will probably love the rest of the series too.
One of the things that made the first book so good was the interplay between Murderbot and Doctor Mensah. Compared to Murderbot, most humans are bumbling idiots, and while that’s mostly true for all of the humans in the first book, Mensah has some very high level leadership and people skills that Murderbot totally lacks. Murderbot quickly realizes this and comes to admire Mensah on a very deep level, which makes it really satisfying when it turns out that Mensah is secretly one of the leaders of Preservation and has the power to buy Murderbot and grant it its freedom.
In Artificial Condition, Murderbot starts to test this newfound freedom, and sets out to discover exactly what happened in that incident where it malfunctioned and slaughtered a bunch of people. But to do all that, it has to figure out how to blend into human society and hide the fact that it’s a rogue SecUnit. It gets a lot of help from a friendly starship, whom it hilariously nicknames ART (Asshole Research Transport), and the interaction between those two robots / constructs / artificial intelligences is by far the best part of the book. In fact, ART is probably my favorite character in the series aside from Murderbot itself.
But the rest of the book suffers from the fact that all of the human characters are basically incompetent idiots, including the bad guy that Murderbot eventually has to confront. It would be one thing if they were smart for humans while still falling short of Murderbot’s capabilities, but the impression I got was that none of these people are the sharpest knives in the drawer, so to speak. And yes, a large part of that is the gender non-binary nonsense that Wells obviously threw in to get woke points from her readership. It got very tiresome to read through all the te and ter pronouns for what basically amounted to a man (or a really butch lesbian) in a polygamous relationship. On the plus side, Wells played those characters straight and didn’t Mary Sue them.
The other thing that took away from my enjoyment of the book was that when Murderbot discovered what happened in the incident, it felt a bit anti-climatic. I can appreciate that Wells wanted to focus more on Murderbot’s internal/emotional conflict regarding the incident, but the way that it was written left me very confused as to what it had actually learned. And then, when Murderbot tried to get closure by talking to ART about it, I was left scratching my head because I still wasn’t entirely sure what had actually happened in the incident. So that could probably have been written better.
Even with all of that, though, I still enjoyed this book. Murderbot is a fantastic character, and there was plenty of action—as well as other great characters, most of them non-human—to make this a fun and entertaining book.