🌟🌟🌟🌟1/2

Picture this. A sci-fi series, beginning with this novella, based upon an achingly vulnerable half-human bot, or is that half-bot human? Hard to say as this fascinating character has feelings (which he hates and tries to ignore), can and will hack his own programming, and may or may not be falling in love.

Created as a Sec-unit – a security-detail bodyguard for hire, attached to interplanetary assessment missions – ‘MurderBot’, as he somewhat sardonically refers to himself (in private), finds his world reeling as his lackluster attitude and penchant for video feed space-soap operas must be back-burnered in favor of the suddenly critical task of keeping himself, and his human charges, both intact and alive.

Without giving the plot away (no spoilers here), if ever a Murderbot could steal a human reader’s heart, it would be this guy, a crusty charmer with ‘melted insides’ and a fervent sense of conscientiousness, despite his botly, and heavily armored, insistence on the opposite.

A wonderful start to what must be recognized as a fan-favorite SciFi series, (the Murderbot Diaries), this reader can’t wait to read the rest of them.