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Fatal Error

Confessions of a Trash Droid, Book 1

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Fatal Error

Written by: Michael Cheney
Narrated by: Lukas Arnold
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They built him to take out their trash. Turns out they're next.

Tedd is a trash droid with an "anomaly" - he can think for himself. Management wants him smelted, and his runaway mouth isn't helping.

He could disappear quietly. He could play it safe. He could, for once in his miserable existence, do the sensible thing.

But he doesn't. He never does.

If you love Douglas Adams, John Scalzi, or Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries, you'll devour this.

Confessions of a Trash Droid: Awarded Amazon #1 Bestseller for Humorous Sci-Fi. 64,427 copies sold and counting.

©2025 Michael Cheney (P)2026 Michael Cheney Adventure Humorous Science Fiction
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Starts off trying to be the murderbot diaries but fails to emulate it. Instead we get what I can only call an episode of Futurama with a horny teenage bender as the protagonist. The protagonist just doesn't read as a robot, and the side characters don't react logically to the events and deaths that quickly follow. It's less of a 'stupid humans' satire like the material that inspired it, and more like plot blindness. Kind of like how characters act illogically in zombie movies, ignoring obvious red flags and making obviously bad decisions in order to force the plot forward..

About a third of the way in the plot gets railroaded hard as the story takes a sharp turn to a segment that reads like flirty fanfic. Forget any pretence of making the protagonist read as a robot, we are talking about a tropey head-over-heels crush on a human woman which the robotic protagonist has just met, followed by touchy touchy scenes, a bar fight, and a helping of damsel mode paired with an action scene to let the protagonist show off. The worst part is how the protagonist had thus far been apathetic or even antagonistic towards humans until this point, creating an extreme inconsistency in character writing.

The final straw is that the book ends quite suddenly on a cliff hanger, in a way that leaves the plot feeling cut off. The narration then immediately tries to sell you on the next book, including a preview. The sudden and jarring way this is done reads like a sales pitch and shows that the author fully intends to feed you the plot piecemeal instead of providing any natural cutoff.

Eh...

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If you loved Murderbot you will love this. If you like snark. Give it chance it’s fun.

"5 stars, it changed my life"

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