The Murderbot Diaries

“Sci-fi book series about a human/robot construct that hacks its governor module so that it no longer has to obey commands, but then uses its newfound freedom (at least at first) mostly to do a half-assed job on its assignments and obsessively watch soap operas on its internal storage while being annoyed at the emotional and/or incompetent humans it has to interact with. This is of course very funny, but the character and situations of the subsequent books are developed beautifully as the series progresses. (ART, introduced in the second book, is now an all-time favorite character of mine.) (I thought that the Apple TV series based on the first book was OK, but the first-person voice and perspective of the books is so central to their appeal that it seems difficult to fully translate that to the screen, even with voiceover. If you like this kind of thing, checked out the series, and then passed on the books based on that, I’d say give at least the first two a shot and see what you think.)”

“Elsewhere on rec league Murderbot books are short comedies where a viewpoint character knows a lot more and (apparently) cares a lot less about what is going on than anyone else around them, and they are hilarious. As jmd has observed, the Apple TV show is great but doesn’t have the same window into Murderbot’s mind, so it has fewer laughs.”