Review: Activation Degradation – Marina J. Lostetter

Review: Activation Degradation – Marina J. LostetterActivation Degradation
by Marina J. Lostetter
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Publication Date: September 28, 2021
Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 480
Source: NetGalley

I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

My rating: One StarOne StarOne StarOne Star


The Murderbot Diaries makes first contact in this new, futuristic, standalone novel exploring sentience and artificial intelligence through the lenses of conflicted robot hero Unit Four, from Marina Lostetter, critically acclaimed author of Noumenon, Noumenon Infinity, and Noumenon Ultra.

When Unit Four—a biological soft robot built and stored high above the Jovian atmosphere—is activated for the first time, it’s in crisis mode. Aliens are attacking the Helium-3 mine it was created to oversee, and now its sole purpose is to defend Earth’s largest energy resource from the invaders in ship-to-ship combat.

But something’s wrong. Unit Four doesn’t feel quite right.

There are files in its databanks it can’t account for, unusual chemical combinations roaring through its pipes, and the primers it possesses on the aliens are suspiciously sparse. The robot is under orders to seek and destroy. That’s all it knows.

According to its handler, that’s all it needs to know.

Determined to fulfill its directives, Unit Four launches its ship and goes on the attack, but it has no idea it’s about to get caught in a downward spiral of misinformation, reprograming, and interstellar conflict.

Most robots are simple tools. Unit Four is well on its way to becoming something more....

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Oh, hello, blurb that barely scratches the surface of this book. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was getting in to with this book, but it was exactly what I needed right now. At its heart, it’s a book about found family, about finding the people who love you even when you mess up, who love you for who you are and not what you can do for them.

“It had a job to do. It wanted to do its job. It wanted to pilot the boat, defeat the aliens, earn its handler’s praise, and then live out the rest of its activation period in whatever state of being was exactly the opposite of this go go go go.
It had been awake for less than fifteen minutes and already it longed to rest.”

Autonomous Maintenance System Unit 4 is not having a good day. Freshly reconstituted during an attack on the mining platform around Jupiter that it calls home, Unit 4 is immediately sent off to fight the aliens that are dismantling pieces of the station. Something isn’t right, with Unit 4 or the aliens, but it sets off on its suicide mission anyway. After all, it’s a robot designed to do its job, so it’ll do the best job it can. But this attack – and its aftermath – have more ramifications than Unit 4 can possibly have imagined. Angry and confused, will Unit 4 take the chance to become more than it was intended to be?

“But what’s happening here, between all of us, could change everything. I know it could.”

This is one of those books it’s hard to talk about without getting into spoilers. The plot twists are interesting, and in at least one case for me, highly unexpected. While you’re thrown right into the middle of the action, the beginning is a bit slow but quickly accelerates once the reader understands exactly what’s at stake – even if Unit 4 doesn’t. While there’s a decent amount of action, the heart of the story is the characters and the relationships they build, especially Unit 4’s.

“Why look after the soul of a thing if you’ve trained it to believe it has no soul?”

The blurb specifically compares this to Murderbot, which I can see on a surface level. There’s the focus on found family, but the tone is very different from Murderbot’s sarcasm and cynicism. Unit 4, instead, spends much of the book confused and frightened. There are so many lines in the book that start with “It didn’t know what to do” and, wow, after this past year, I empathized so much with that. One of Unit 4’s first actions after being reconstituted is “decommissioning” one of its counterparts when it’s injured, complete with a wash of feelings that it doesn’t understand. From that moment on I spent a good chunk of the book just wanting to wrap it in a warm blanket and give it a hug. All Unit 4 wants to do is complete the job it’s been programmed to do and its slow awakening to the realities of what that job entails, of its purpose, were both intensely heartbreaking and heartwarming.

Much like Unit 4, the reader slowly gets the feeling that something isn’t quite right, and then gets hit with the horrifying clue-stick long before the character does. A good part of the emotional weight of the book is anticipating how Unit 4 will react to those revelations – and how the characters around Unit 4 will react to it. Speaking of those characters, it’s casually queer (space is gay, folks), with characters with nonbinary pronouns, a m/m couple and an intersex person. There’s a sweet romantic element, too, just delightfully gentle in the way it was woven in.

Overall, an easy 4.5 stars, and definitely a book I’ll be recommending. While the main plot is wrapped up neatly, I’m hoping for a sequel as this is definitely a universe I’d like to explore more of!

Content notes: View Spoiler »

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