All Systems Red (Dramatized Adaptation)

The Murderbot Diaries, Book 1

By: Martha Wells

Narrated by: Alejandro Ruiz, Bradley Foster Smith, Holly Adams, Michael John Casey, Zeke Alton, Rayner Gabriel, Natalie Van Sistine, David Cui Cui, Khaya Fraites, Aure Nash, Megan Dorminy

A murderous android discovers itself in All Systems Red, a tense science fiction adventure by Martha Wells that interrogates the roots of consciousness through Artificial Intelligence.

"As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure."

In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety.

But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern.

On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid—a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is.

But when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and their Murderbot to get to the truth.

Performed by David Cui Cui, Khaya Fraites, Zeke Alton, Alejandro Ruiz, Aure Nash, Bradley Foster Smith, Holly Adams, Megan Dorminy, Natalie Van Sistine, Michael John Casey, Rayner Gabriel, Shanta Parasuraman, Tanja Milojevic and Wyn Delano.

©2017 Martha Wells (P)2023 Graphic Audio LLC

Competent performances, hard to tell voices apart

I adore The Murderbot Diaries and have listened to the audiobooks more than a dozen times. I've also enjoyed Graphic Audio's adaptations of Ilona Andrews' books, so I was excited to see how they would interpret this series. The sound effects and music were great and the performances were perfectly fine, but unfortunately the voices for the women of PresAux were too similar for me and I absolutely could not tell them apart during group scenes when there weren't tags to indicate who was speaking. I know the GA team often remove dialogue tags in their adaptations, which has been fine in the other dramatizations I've listened to because the voices were distinct enough, but if they're going to keep the VAs for the rest of this series, I am begging y'all to keep or even add more dialogue tags, because it was too confusing. Just from discussion with other Murderbot fans who've listened to the GA adaptation, we all had the same issue with differentiating the voices.

Very fun story!

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I downloaded this, but I was very pleasantly surprised.
The presentation format works well and the story is very engaging.
I’m looking forward to listening to the additional stories in the series. 

fantastic listen

this is such a wonderful piece of sci-fi adventure! it's got action, wonderful dialogue, and a good pace. if you ever feel social awkward murderbot has the most relatable internal thoughts.

loved it!

I love the style of these books, I can visualize everything throughout the story. Just a joy to listen too.

Voices didn't fit

This is not a good adaptation. They picked weird voices for a bunch of characters. For instance, the super depressed, terrified of people slave robot sounds happy and chipper like an intern at their first job. The older, dignified stateswoman with a 20 year old kid sounds like a college freshman auditioning for the school play. It's just such a series of mispicks, including a bizarre Scottish accent?

Everybody's reading their lines as fast as possible. stumbling over their words, sprinting through the dialogue. With odd editing choices. One of the first scenes, where most characters get their first lines of dialogue? No names. No identifiers. Just voices out of nowhere.

And due to either not taking their time, or because they don't know the pronunciation, they keep making stupid mistakes. Like the MC checks the "Completement" of supplies, instead of the complement. Lots of little stuff like that.

Voice acting was on point

I just downloaded the next six books in the series. Will compare dramatized vs non in my next review.

Interesting story but lacking in production quality

I enjoyed the simple story and the performances of the cast were great but I found the overall production very bland. I am a big fan of the Graphic Audio productions but this one did nothing to enhance the listening experience. The music, if any was just boring synth pads for the most part and the editing cut out any moments of silence between paragraphs, making the story feel very rushed and unnatural. It’s a shame they didn’t take the care to produce a high quality listening experience like they do in other graphic audio productions.

Fabulous dramatization!

This was a wonderful dramatization of a fantastic book!
Be sure and read or listen to Murderbot before listening to this production in order to fully appreciate the show.
Martha Wells is such a good author!

Already own the original audio books of this series but the dramatization is so good! Worth it!

Love the various actors cast as the characters. The casting and the voices they created was perfect. The sound effects also added to the mood of the story.

A good try at adaptation but amateurish feel.

Fake accent was annoying and distracting. Some folks might not be able to ignore it.