{"id":24472,"date":"2025-03-29T10:59:35","date_gmt":"2025-03-29T14:59:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/?p=24472"},"modified":"2025-03-29T10:59:35","modified_gmt":"2025-03-29T14:59:35","slug":"artificial-condition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/artificial-condition\/","title":{"rendered":"Artificial Condition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>{5\/5} &#8220;I told myself I still looked like a SecUnit without armor, hopelessly exposed, but the truth was I did look more human. And now I knew why I hadn&#8217;t wanted to do this. It would make it harder for me to pretend not to be a person.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Artificial Condition<\/strong> by Martha Wells, published in 2018<\/p>\n<p>Murderbot is trying to be inconspicuous amongst humans, so when there&#8217;s a news story about what happened with PreservationAux it&#8217;s momentarily worried about an image that includes its face. But it looks like no one is looking for a rogue SecUnit. It makes its way onto a ship with no humans but is startled to find the ship is more powerful than expected. The ship knows it&#8217;s a rogue SecUnit. But the ship just wants to watch a new show, <strong>Worldhoppers<\/strong>, with Murderbot.<\/p>\n<p>This is the 2nd <strong>Murderbot<\/strong> novella, following <a href=\"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/all-systems-red\/\"><strong>All Systems Red<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Like Asimov and Le Guin, Wells has mastered the art of interesting conversation. The conversation between Murderbot and the bot who is a ship is astonishing.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s about finding out if you did something horrible in the past or if something horrible was done to you, and keeping your clients alive even when they&#8217;re doing something stupid.<\/p>\n<p>This is the 2nd book I&#8217;ve read by Wells.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>{5\/5} &#8220;I told myself I still looked like a SecUnit without armor, hopelessly exposed, but the truth was I did look more human. And now I knew why I hadn&#8217;t wanted to do this. It would make it harder for me to pretend not to be a person.&#8221; Artificial Condition by Martha Wells, published in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,5,8,44],"class_list":["post-24472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-book","tag-review","tag-science-fiction","tag-short-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24472"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24489,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24472\/revisions\/24489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}