this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Every fricken' time. Someone posts that they want something specific and everybody dog piles into the conversation to recommend a bunch of the stuff that ALWAYS gets recommended, but that doesn't really have anything in common with what the poster asked for, and are even stuff they straight up said they already read.
There's not much out there like Murder Bot, though IMO it owes something to the Stainless Steel Rat. If you liked the humor, you might like Expeditionary Force (the Skippies from Bobiverse are named after an absurd AI character from ExForce). Craig Alanson's, let's call them "old fashioned" feelings about gender are on FULL display (which I find off putting, but I can look past it), but the books are hella funny.
I also just the Jinn Bot of Shantiport, which is a fun take on the Aladdin story (if Aladdin was a hot girl and the genie was an old bot from an era with better tech, so its' basic hacking skills make it a god). The writing style is very different, but it's also fun, funny and has goofy AIs.
I quite like the Exforce series but the last two books kinda felt cash grabby.
I'll check out Stainless Steel Rat.
Stainless Steel Rat is an excellent shoutout.
The Scarlett and Brown series is about outlaws on the run in a slave society, has similar bursts of violence, deeply scarred main characters, and somewhat snide narrator.
I read Ann Leckie's series that starts with Ancillary Justice around the same time and it tickled a lot of the same places in my head as Murderbot, in that it's about a construct forced into violence that then escapes to move in the human world with its own agenda. Very different in tone, pacing, and scope though.