Reading Wednesday ON A WEDNESDAY YESSSS

I zoomed through All Systems Red, the first of Martha Wells's Murderbot stories, and enjoyed it as much as I'd hoped I would, which was enough that I've already bought it for half my children. Among other things, I love the *competence* of Murderbot. Competence, suppressed or understated emotions, loyalty/dedication--OMG so my jam.

The action centers around Murderbot, a SecUnit (human-bot composite person created as a security unit) assigned to protect a planetary survey team. Murderbot has no gender, but I think of her as a she, so that's the pronoun I'll be using. She's hacked her governor module and so is in control of her own person, but because of the above-mentioned loyalty/dedication (and also because she doesn't want to be found out), she's still carrying out all her security duties. Quickly it becomes evident that the team she's assigned to protect is being sabotaged, and plot ensues.

People have made a big deal over the fact that Murderbot would rather spend time enjoying her hours and hours of downloaded media (books, TV-type serials, etc.) than interacting with people, but what I liked especially about that situation were the complex feelings that feed into *why* Murderbot dislikes interacting with people. I also liked that her media fixation actually makes her smarter and more strategic in how she deals with problems--the media has been inadvertently educational.

I plunged right into the second novella, "Artificial Condition." A big part of the fun of the first third of this story is Murderbot's interactions with a research transport ship AI, whom she refers to as ART (short for asshole research transport). Murderbot bribes her way onto ART by offering to share her media, but it turns out--to Murderbot's chagrin--that ART can only really enjoy it mediated through Murderbot, which is to say, ART wants to watch it *with* Murderbot.

ART's sensitivity to plot stressors** was HUGELY identifiable:

After three episodes, it got agitated whenever a minor character was killed. When a major character died in the twentieth episode I had to pause seven minutes while it sat there in the feed doing the bot equivalent of staring at a wall, pretending that it had to run diagnostics. Then four episodes later the character came back to life and it was so relieved we had to watch that episode three times before it would go on.

... After two more run-throughs of Worldhoppers, it wanted to see every other show I had about humans in ships. Though after we encountered one based on a true story, where the ship experienced a hull breach and decompression killed several members of the crew (permanently, this time), it got too upset and I had to create a content filter.

Very enjoyable!

**For ART it's character deaths, but for me it's deceit. When one character maliciously leads another astray, especially if it involves maligning a third character, I often have to leave the room until the scene is over.


I also read a little more of The Souls of Black Folks, including this statement on the purpose of higher education:

The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization ... And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man

Good stuff ... though I think I like the part about what the university is not more than what he says the university actually is, because I'm not sure what exactly he means by "that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life." Does he mean that it's our way of catching ourselves up, as a culture, on what we know about life?