All Systems Red

She's written multiple fantasy series, including Il Reen, Books of the Raksura, the Rising World series, and the young adult Emily, in addition to standalone fantasy novels, as well as books in the Star Wars and Stargate universes.

She's won four Hugo Awards for her writing, plus shared in a fifth this year when Murderbot All Systems Red, which aired on Apple TV, won Dramatic Presentation Short Form.

Plus she was on this year's Hugo Awards ballot for a novelette, Rapport, Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy.

She's also won two Nebula Awards and a Dragon Award, and has been a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, the Ignite Award, the World Fantasy Award, and others.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, Murder Bot was kinda like that.

All Systems Red, I, I was finishing up the end of the Harbors of the Sun, which was the last book in the Rex Cora series, and I was getting a bunch of different ideas for stuff, and I got the idea for All Systems Red.

So I had to, um, kind of...

Picture a standard Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster.

Like, you're sitting in the theater, the lights go down, and you are immediately looking up at the stars.

Right, and you're fully expecting this massive armada of warships charging their lasers.

I mean, for decades, the genre has been built entirely on adrenaline.

Yeah.

From the, uh, the Cold War paranoias of the mid-20th century to modern existential anxiety, sci-fi has always projected our biggest, loudest fears directly into the void.

It really has.

We've just been conditioned to believe that space is vast, terrifying, and basically fundamentally hostile.

everybody's seen the uh article uh going around the latest musing on oak and ai's feel pain and i rescheduled it with god i hope so

okay let's get this out in the open like we did with the uh with the um i almost said woods all uh woods all red all systems red we're always doing we're doing a lot of colors in this uh podcast um The AIs in this are not LLMs, obviously.

Yeah, no, no, no.

They are fantasy science fiction robots that are basically people.

Stay Behind is the closest – I mean, like, none of these characters are Murderbot, but this character, like, seems like a character out of Murderbot.

Yeah.

Out of All Systems Red.

That's right.

Right.

Now, the final inclusion that caused uproar is Martha Wells' 2017 novella, All Systems Red.

That's the first entry in the Murderbot Diaries, which you know Apple TV is also adapting in 2025.

This book is brilliant.

Let's start with a polite disagreement.

User, Polygon user M5JR2CE7 writes, "Really stretching the definition of cyberpunk here.

Quantum Thief and All Systems Red are both wonderful books that everyone should read and are absolutely not cyberpunk." They even included a little text-based shrug emoji.

Notice the critical concession there.

It was just as uncomfortable as it sounds.

Music Hello and welcome to Best Seller, where we read and rate the latest book at the top of the New York Times hardcover fiction list.

20 minutes with us and you'll know whether to read it or re-gift it.

I'm Brian.

And I'm Barbara.

Today we're reviewing Platform Decay by Martha Wells, the eighth book in her science fiction series called The Murderbot Diaries.

This installment entered the list at number eight on May 24th, 2026.

And it fell off the list after just one week.

They've got a lot of categories here.

Yeah, Murderbot, All Systems Red, the series that was based on the books by Martha Wells, won for Best Dramatic Presentation Short Form as well.

Wait, so the Hugos are giving out awards for non-book things now?

Oh yeah, games too.

...

it was based on, it's based on All Systems Red.

Oh, good point.

Looks like.

Yeah.

Book one, a novella titled All Systems Red, holds the lowest score on Goodreads out of all eight entries, placing it at number eight on our list.

And we should clarify immediately, it's not like it's a bad book.

Oh, absolutely not.

We're talking Hugo Awards, Nebula Awards, Locus Awards.

Right.

And All Systems Red itself was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award back in 2017.

So why is it bringing up the rear?

It really has.

We are talking about a franchise that began with a single novella, All Systems Red, and has exploded into eight distinct books.

And it didn't stop at prose either.

No. It's making huge, undeniable waves in television right now.

You get both on the exact same page.

That's a really good point.

And if you look at the creative team Cosmic Lighthouse has hired to adapt that very first book, All Systems Red, they are very clearly leaning into a specific aesthetic to differentiate this from the TV show.

Who did they bring in?