For someone who enjoys writing things I’m not very good at elaborating on things that I enjoy or have read in any great detail (this post is probably going to be a good example of that I guess). Anyway, I’ve been reading through a series of novellas and novels over the last year or so by Martha Wells, a series I’m hoping people are familiar with, by the name of The Murderbot Diaries (which as far as I am aware aren’t finished yet, at least I certainly hope not, I might be enjoying them a little too much). All I can say is, they are great.
Ok, that’s a lie, that’s not all I can say. But the point stands that they are extremely fun and have enjoyable characters. Normally I shy away from first-person perspective books, I’ve never figured out why, I assume it was something to do with reading some “bad” ones as a kid (I say “bad” in quotations because let’s face it, kids aren’t exactly objective in their assessment of literature - especially not when I was said kid), every since then they’ve pushed me away a little. Sometimes by putting me too close to a character that I was meant to like (and hated) or simply by the way they were written. But this series is one that I don’t think could work anywhere near as well if it wasn’t told through the titular Murderbot’s eyes.
I really can’t recommend it enough, between the snappy and sarcastic (but mostly biting his tongue, thoughts contained within his own head) protagonist and the futuristic yet I-could-totally-see-this-being-a-future-we-unwittingly-drive-ourselves-into-as-a-species setting I had an absolute blast, and I’m sure everyone else would too (also All Systems Red, the first in the series is less than a dollar for the digital version from Amazon so it’s a pretty low cost bit of really great fiction if you want to see what I’m talking about).