Activation Degradation is an Amazon Editor’s pick for best Sci-Fi!
Purchase at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or through your local independent bookstore via IndieBound.
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.
Praise for Activation Degradation:
“Unit Four is a fascinating character, and Lostetter’s vivid descriptions create a marvelously textured setting for this story of human error and hidden history, where nothing is really what it seems and the truth may be the strangest thing of all. The twisty plot and masterful storytelling set this apart..”
—Publisher’s Weekly, starred review
“Activation Degradation features a spunky robot hero in a fast-paced tale of alien invasion in high orbit over Jupiter, one with plenty of twists and turns along the way.”
—Black Gate
“Filled with the horrors of space, the horrors of humanity, and the rising and falling implications of the reverberations of the past continuing to slam dunk on the present. It is delightfully queer, and heartwarming, and heart pounding all at once.”
—The Suspected Bibilophile
A Little Lost 