Review: Artificial Condition

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not nearly as compelling as the first one. The primary conflict / character development seems to be about the terror MB feels about interacting with humans. The first 40% of this very short book has it riding on an automated spaceship with no humans present, telling us the whole time how scared it is of humans. 40% in it actually comes face-to-face with a human for the first time this book, and from that moment on it seems to essentially forget any sense of fear, and act supremely confidently and competently at all times. MB seems a bit classically MarySue-ish, in that it is extremely competent in all things mental and physical - to the point of being genuinely superhumanly above every other character in the book in all ways except the robot ship sidekick - and it's only weakness is its anxiety-driven inferiority complex. Honestly, if everyone who has these SecBot mods is able to essentially remotely control all computers - including security and banks - to the point of trivially re-writing things in realtime, then why on Earth aren't the humans lining up to have it done? Or for that matter just ordering SecBots to do it on their behalf? And we keep going back-and-forth between MB being able to seemlessly pass as human, and it being essentially an unstoppable invulnerable physical paragon compared to mere humans. Everyone who could afford it would have that done.

The earlier story kind of worked, because we didn't have time to dwell on any of these issues, and the action was all isolated from society on a remote survey planet. Bringing MB home exposes the lack of any kind of logic or societal framework that would somehow explain all of this discrepancy, and this book doesn't even try to give us any answers. It's still amusing enough to read along with, but it's straining really hard at the bounds of my suspension of disbelief. (I'm also a huge hypocrite, because I often fault SF books for being overly long and needing a good editor, but I'd have been hugely disappointed if I'd paid full price for this tiny book instead of getting it from the library. If you're Ursula Le Guin you can sell me a 150-page book for full price; the Dispossessed this aint.)

View all my reviews