In catching up on reading end of CBR14 reviews I clocked narfna’s review of Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 132 since she titled it “Attention: Murderbot stans: I have a short story for you.” Consider my attention grabbed. I love Murderbot very much and anything that gives similar feels is something I want to at least peruse, and narfna so helpfully provided links to both The Secret Lives of Bots and Bots of the Lost Ark (and if you click those titles – so have I!).
Suzanne Palmer won the 2018 Hugo for Best Novelette for The Secret Life of Bots, and its sequel, Bots of the Lost Ark, won the 2022 Hugo (both published in Clarkesworld). Having now read both, I can easily see that these are worthy of the awards they received. Novelettes are a tough length, or they can be, at 7,500 to 17,500 words. Palmer uses that limited word count to build out the nuanced world of Ship (who feels very ART-like to me), the bots who serve on it, and the human crew. In The Secret Life of Bots the humans are tasked with a wartime task that is a last ditch effort, but it’s the bots who really get anything done. Palmer’s day job is as a systems administrator and it shows how she crafts the bots, their mantras, and the logical programming and its limitations.
Our protagonist is Bot 9 who is a tiny bot who has been woken from stasis after a very long time and assigned task 944 in the maintenance queue. It’s a bit disoriented and feels that it should be given a higher priority task, until it begins to make its way through Ship and gets a feel for just how long it was out of commission, the state of Ship, and what is going on with the new bots it runs in to. Task 944 is to take care of a biological incursion (read: pest) that has made itself at home in Ship while it was in the junkyard and is a nasty thing which may affect the other bots ability to get Ship ready to complete the task the humans need completed. Palmer switches the narrative between the human crew and Ship to Bot 9, allowing for both tension and humor to make their way into the story.
I loved the way The Secret Life of Bots ended, thus my rating it 5 stars, and was initially put off by the opening of Bots of the Lost Ark. When Bot 9 is activated at the beginning of the story 68 years have passed, the humans are all in stasis, and all hell has broken loose with the bots (including 4340 misinterpreting its job as refers to the pest population of Ship. The bots have been tasked with completing the tasks the human crew should be doing, and as part of their response have taken on the identities of the crew… leading to all sorts of problems as Ship is about to enter the space of a species which does not trust AI and will destroy them on sight if a human is not in complete control. Ship and Bot 9 must work together to get everything in order if they have any hope at all getting back to Earth. I struggled initially with the lack of humans in this story – there wasn’t that lovely back and forth of POV and a lack of humor – but once some crew members were awake again things started really clicking for me, giving this one 4 stars.
