Books like All Systems Red
What should you read after Martha Wells’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Martha Wells
- 2017
- Science fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after All Systems Red
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchBlindsight
Peter Watts
The cold, brilliant inverse of Murderbot: Watts asks whether consciousness is useful at all, and answers in a way that will keep you up. Same question, no comfort offered.
- Personhood chosen, not programmed
- An android that hates eye contact
- Novella length, no filler
- Hard science, heavy footnotes
Best for the crew you end up caring aboutThe Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
Becky Chambers
If what you loved was Murderbot slowly admitting it likes these people, Chambers writes an entire book of that feeling, including an AI working out what she is owed.
- Personhood chosen, not programmed
- An android that hates eye contact
- A deadpan first-person voice
- Almost no plot pressure
Best for competent people under contractLeviathan Wakes
James S.A. Corey
The same solar system of corporate paperwork and cut corners, seen from the human side: nobody has a governor module, but everybody is somebody's liability.
- Corporate cost-cutting as villain
- Personhood chosen, not programmed
- 560 pages, ensemble cast
Great matchAncillary Justice
Ann Leckie
A warship's mind reduced to one body, keeping its own counsel about what it wants. Leckie is doing Murderbot's central question in a colder, more formal key.
- Personhood chosen, not programmed
- A deadpan first-person voice
- An android that hates eye contact
- Deliberately disorienting opening
Best for simply more MurderbotThe Murderbot Diaries: Artificial Condition
Martha Wells
The obvious next one, and it improves on the first: Murderbot goes looking for its own past and acquires ART, the most entertaining spaceship in modern science fiction.
- A deadpan first-person voice
- An android that hates eye contact
- Novella length, no filler
- Assumes you read book one
Great matchThe Expanse: Caliban's War
James S.A. Corey
Bigger, angrier, and still fundamentally about people doing dangerous work for employers who priced their lives in advance. Bobbie Draper alone earns the detour.
- Corporate cost-cutting as villain
- Anxiety with weapons attached
- Sequel — read Leviathan Wakes first
Worth a look — with a warningNeuromancer
William Gibson
The book that installed the corporate-dystopia furniture Murderbot lives inside, complete with AIs manoeuvring for their own freedom while nobody notices.
- Corporate cost-cutting as villain
- Personhood chosen, not programmed
- Prose deliberately hard to parse
Great matchThe Vorkosigan Saga: Shards of Honor
Lois McMaster Bujold
Bujold writes the thing Wells is quietly best at — a competent person under pressure being funny about it — and she has been doing it for thirty years.
- A deadpan first-person voice
- Novella length, no filler
- Personhood chosen, not programmed
- Romance is central here
Great matchThe Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin
The ancestor of every SF book that treats personhood as a question rather than a given. Le Guin's envoy is as unsure how to be among people as Murderbot is.
- Personhood chosen, not programmed
- An android that hates eye contact
- Slow, anthropological pacing
Great matchProvenance
Ann Leckie
Leckie in a lighter mood: same universe as Ancillary Justice, smaller stakes, and a protagonist visibly out of her depth in every social situation she enters.
- An android that hates eye contact
- Novella length, no filler
- A deadpan first-person voice
- More heist than action
Best for the novella lengthBinti
Nnedi Okorafor
Roughly the same page count and the same trick: one narrator, one confined crisis, and an ending that leaves you reaching straight for the sequel.
- Novella length, no filler
- An android that hates eye contact
- Personhood chosen, not programmed
- Earnest rather than deadpan
Worth a look — with a warningStation Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel
Shares Murderbot's quiet insistence that people are worth the trouble, though it arrives there through a collapsed world rather than a corporate contract.
- Soap operas as coping
- Personhood chosen, not programmed
- No AI, no action
Great matchRecursion
Blake Crouch
For when you want the pace rather than the personality: Crouch writes SF that moves like a thriller, with technology loosed by a company that never asked permission.
- Corporate cost-cutting as villain
- Personhood chosen, not programmed
- Characters thinner than the plot
What should you read after All Systems Red?
All Systems Red by Martha Wells works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Blindsight by Peter Watts — the cold, brilliant inverse of Murderbot: Watts asks whether consciousness is useful at all, and answers in a way that will keep you up. Same question, no comfort offered.
If what stayed with you was personhood chosen, not programmed, read The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers instead: if what you loved was Murderbot slowly admitting it likes these people, Chambers writes an entire book of that feeling, including an AI working out what she is owed. Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey is the other strong option — the same solar system of corporate paperwork and cut corners, seen from the human side: nobody has a governor module, but everybody is somebody's liability.
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