Reader’s Digest

I thought it would a cool idea if I kept a summary of the things I’ve read or listened to on a monthly basis. Here is January of 2021 so far. Enjoy.

All systems red - Murderbot

This book is SHORT. It’s little over 3 hours of listening time. I’m listening at 1.30 so it’s just short of 2 hours. But it’s entertaining. The murderbot series is following a rouge security bot which hacked its own governor module and is self aware and free. But… it kind of hates humans and interacting with them. It just calls itself murderbot but has no intention of killing all humans. Instead, all its wants to do is basically… watch movies and various series on something called a Feed. In the first book of the series, this one, we follow Murderbot protect a few humans that it gets to short of like after an attempt on their lives.

The narrator, Kevin R. Free, is doing a great job of impersonating the robot and you can feel the anxiety from his words when inevitably, the robot has to interact with humans. Whether it likes it or not…

Artificial Condition - Murderbot

Another short story following our Murderbot. This time, it wants to get to the bottom of a mystery involving its past. In his past, the Murderbot, when it hacked its governor module, it went berserk and killed 80 people in the process. The company who owned it, covered it all up. Or so it thought. During its journey to find out what happened it met a new friend, Art. Art is a huge vessel capable of massive computing capacity, and happens to also love watching series. They team up and help a rag-tag group of researchers while trying to find out what happened to Murderbot and those 80 people.

Rogue Protocol

Another fantastic episode of Murderbot. You can sense that the bot is slowly evolving into a more caring bot. Even though it’s saying repeatedly that it doesn’t case, it starts to care. This book was an action packed one. Lot’s of tension and fear inducing moments. Silence then all out war! We also meet Micky, who is a “pet bot” for some humans. Their relationship starts off as rocky but after a while, Murderbot comes to appreciate Micky for another free soul. There are some open question in there once the story finishes.

The vexed generation - Magician 2.0

Being a programmer, I followed Magician 2.0 with an interest. I listen to all of the books in the series. It was fun at first, but then started to get a bit low in quality and repetitive. I don’t really care about the people in it, and I don’t really care about what’s happening to them. And since they are effectively immortal there is no real danger to them at all. In this episode however, there was real danger at the end. And while the protagonist kids were kind of annoying, and it could have been narrated better and I felt like some of the characters weren’t fully utilized, the story kind of still was fun to read. Definitely better than the previous one about dragons.

Heaven’s River - Bobiverse

The latest addition to the Bobiverse universe. This time there is civil war amongst the Bobs and, of course, there is a new species to explore. The species was interesting, and the talk about mega-structures was also interesting, but I found that the lack of coding, and fighting and technical stuff ( what caught me on the first couple of Bob adventures ) left me wanting for more and left me with an empty feeling at the end. I really missed the proves of Bob and couldn’t care less about Starfleet.

Armada

This one was interesting. It talks about the same premise as The Last Starfighter ( there is a reference to that in there ) which I found fascinating as a child. It is about the fact that an alien race uses video games to find the best soldier for a mission to save the universe. This time though the Earth is doing the recruiting and it is against an alien invasion. And much like Ender’s Game, it turns out that the threat is real and that all fighting on the video game that our protagonist did was preparing him for this situation. The twist was pretty good too.

Prometheus Up And Running

This one has a larger post incoming.

That’s all for this month. Thanks for reading, Gergely.