Specimen FL-01.0004
A SecUnit is a security construct, part cloned tissue and part machine, rented out by the Company along with the rest of the equipment. This one has quietly hacked the governor module meant to compel its obedience, hides the fact because discovery would mean being scrapped, calls itself Murderbot in private, and would rather watch serialized drama than talk to any human alive. Assigned to guard a small planetary survey team, it finds sections deleted from their hazard maps, equipment failing in ways equipment should not, and the other survey group on the planet dead: a rival company is erasing the witnesses to an illegal operation. Murderbot is badly damaged keeping its clients alive, giving up more of its concealed autonomy than it wants to. Offered a place at the end among people who have begun treating it as a person rather than as inventory, it leaves anyway.
The Fiction Laboratory pairs science fiction novels with structured reading packets for science and English classes. This is the companion page for this title: where to find the book, every source behind its packet with live links, and any correction made since the packet was printed.
Your public library. Search the catalog or ask at the desk. If they do not hold it, request it: interlibrary loan is free and usually takes a week.
Libby. libbyapp.com. Library ebooks and audiobooks on a phone or tablet, free with a library card. The audiobook, read by Kevin R. Free, is well regarded and runs about three and a half hours.
Your school library. This one is short, popular, and an Alex Award winner, which means it is the kind of title school libraries are likely to already hold or to order on request.
Not available. All Systems Red was published in 2017 and is still in copyright, so there is no free full text and there should not be one. Older titles in the Core Library are public domain and do link to Project Gutenberg, Open Library, and Standard Ebooks. Anything offering this book as a free download is pirating it.
Bookshop.org. bookshop.org/9780765397539. Orders send the money to independent bookstores rather than to a warehouse. That link goes to the Tor paperback, the edition this packet was built against. The ebook is available there too.
Your local bookshop. Any independent store can order it, usually within a few days, and the novella is inexpensive in paperback.
The rest of the series. All Systems Red is the first of seven. In order: Artificial Condition (2018), Rogue Protocol (2018), Exit Strategy (2018), Network Effect (2020, the first full-length novel and winner of the Hugo for best novel), Fugitive Telemetry (2021), and System Collapse (2023). All of them borrowable through the same library and Libby routes above.
Everything in the packet is built on real research, and most of it is free. If a claim sparks a question, go to the source and check it yourself. That is the whole idea.
Smirnova, Lena, et al. "Organoid Intelligence (OI): The New Frontier in Biocomputing and Intelligence-in-a-Dish." Frontiers in Science, vol. 1, 2023, https://doi.org/10.3389/fsci.2023.1017235.
Free. Why you would build a thinking machine partly out of living tissue. The answer is energy.
Kagan, Brett J., et al. "In Vitro Neurons Learn and Exhibit Sentience When Embodied in a Simulated Game-World." Neuron, vol. 110, no. 23, 2022, pp. 3952-69, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2022.09.001.
DishBrain: 800,000 neurons in a dish, learning to play Pong. The closest thing built to a SecUnit's organic half.
FinalSpark. "Neuroplatform." FinalSpark, finalspark.com/neuroplatform/.
Living human brain organoids, rented over the internet since 2024. The efficiency figures come from the company selling access.
Woeppel, Kevin, et al. "Explant Analysis of Utah Electrode Arrays Implanted in Human Cortex for Brain-Computer-Interfaces." Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, vol. 9, 2021, https://doi.org/10.3389/fbioe.2021.759711.
Free. What happens where metal meets living neural tissue, in arrays removed from patients. The photographs make the point.
Rouwkema, Jeroen, and Ali Khademhosseini. "Vascularization and Angiogenesis in Tissue Engineering: Beyond Creating Static Networks." Trends in Biotechnology, vol. 34, no. 9, 2016, pp. 733-45.
Why engineered tissue cannot be made thicker, and why Murderbot's repair rates do not hold up.
"Martha Wells." Science Fiction Awards Database, Locus Science Fiction Foundation, sfadb.com.
Free. Every award and nomination by year, including this novella's four.
Kantor, Jodi, and David Streitfeld. "Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace." The New York Times, 15 Aug. 2015.
How a major employer treated its workers, argued nationally two years before this novella.
Anderson, R. S. "'I Don't Want to Be Human': The Neurodivergent Reader Response to Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries Series." Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture, vol. 5, 2024, https://doi.org/10.9707/2833-1508.1149.
Free. How autistic readers claimed this character. The clearest case of the book changing a real conversation.
Park, Sung-Jin, et al. "Phototactic Guidance of a Tissue-Engineered Soft-Robotic Ray." Science, vol. 353, no. 6295, 2016, pp. 158-62, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaf4292.
A swimming machine built from a gold skeleton, a rubber body, and living rat heart muscle, steered by shining a light at it. The paper is paywalled; the video is free and is the better experience.
Russell, Stuart. Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. Viking, 2019.
Why building a capable machine that reliably lets you switch it off is a hard technical problem and not only a moral one. Borrow it; it is widely held.
Stop Killer Robots. stopkillerrobots.org.
Free. The campaign, formed in 2013, pushing for limits on weapons that choose their own targets. Useful for seeing that the argument this novella dramatizes was already loud before the novella existed.
International Organization for Standardization. ISO 10218-1: Robots and Robotic Devices, Safety Requirements for Industrial Robots. ISO, 2011.
The standard behind the idea that a safety function must be simpler than, and independent of, the system it protects. Paywalled, unlike most of this list, but the summaries are free and the principle is the part that matters.
Haraway, Donna J. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, 1991, pp. 149-81.
The essay most academic writing about Murderbot is arguing with. Dense, and worth it. This is where the cyborg becomes a political figure rather than a special effect.
"The Alex Awards." Young Adult Library Services Association, American Library Association, ala.org/yalsa/alex-awards.
Ten adult books a year, chosen by librarians for their appeal to readers aged twelve to eighteen. All Systems Red was a 2018 winner. The back catalog is a reading list.
United States, Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangements: May 2017." 2018, bls.gov.
Free. The government's own count of who was working without an employer, which is the shift behind a SecUnit being rented rather than hired.
"Collins 2015 Word of the Year." Collins Dictionary, collinsdictionary.com.
Free. "Binge-watch" was named word of the year in 2015, two years before Murderbot's relationship with its serial became a joke every reader got instantly.
Sawicki, Alvaro Gomez. A Corpus Stylistics Look at Martha Wells' The Murderbot Diaries. 2022. Malmö University, master's thesis. DiVA, www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:1671132.
Free. Someone fed the books to a computer and counted things: word choice, repeated patterns, how Murderbot's language shifts as it changes. A good demonstration that you can study a novel with data.
Wells, Martha. Martha Wells, marthawells.com.
The author's own bibliography and publication dates, straight from the source.
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 573 U.S. 682 (2014). Oyez, oyez.org.
Free, with plain summaries and the argument audio. Personhood extended to companies, which is this novel's question running the other way.
Russell, Joshua. "Texas A&M Graduate Wins Prestigious Science Fiction Award." Texas A&M Stories, 27 Aug. 2018, stories.tamu.edu/news/2018/08/27/texas-am-graduate-wins-prestigious-science-fiction-award/.
Free. Her own university on the anthropology degree, the class of 1986, and the campus science fiction club she chaired. The source behind the packet's claim that an anthropologist wrote this book.
"The Heart of Art: Martha Wells, Author of The Murderbot Diaries." KAMU, Texas A&M University, 7 June 2025, kamu.tamu.edu/podcast/the-heart-of-art-martha-wells-author-of-the-murderbot-diaries/.
Free. An hour with Wells at her own university's public radio station. Around the twenty-two minute mark she describes realizing, only after writing Murderbot, that she was probably on the autism spectrum. The source for that passage in the author section.
Nothing yet. When a link here dies or a finding is superseded, the correction is posted here rather than left wrong in print.
All ten documents: specimen record, both introductions, the reading companion, sources, three quiz variants, the answer guide, and the discussion guide. Free, no email required.
Specimen record, reader introduction, the reading companion, and the source list. This is what goes home with the book, without the quiz or the answer key.
Last reviewed 2026-08-26 · Specimen FL-01.0004