By Martha Wells
I loved Martha Wells’ City of Bones and Death of the Necromancer, which I read decades ago, but I hadn’t seen anything by her in a hot minute, until this series started coming up on my feed. This isn’t a novel-length work; it’s more like a novelette or long short story, which isn’t my favorite length to read. But the premise of a security bot that dislikes its job and hacks its own system so it can spend time watching TV instead of spending time with the humans it’s supposed to be protecting is darkly hilarious, as is the fact that it calls itself “Murderbot.”
It’s set in a dystopian hyper-capitalistic future where “the company” owns pretty much everything and planets have to rent things from it, often at usurious rates. The company is cheap and heavily corporate, with lots of rules and protocols which Murderbot avoids as much as it can. For example, Murderbot has no idea the mission the humans are on because it finds mission briefings boring and annoying and it deleted it unread to make more space for serial entertainment. This was hilariously relatable.
The weakness of this story was in its plot, specifically, the big climax. They didn’t explain what their big plan was to defeat the antagonists, which is fine (good storytelling, actually) but even after they executed their plan, I wasn’t sure what happened. There wasn’t enough exposition to put the pieces into place for me. They won, okay great, and now into the denouement. I would have liked a few more paragraphs explaining things for me, especially since all the technology was so new that it wasn’t obvious where people had to be in order to carry out their mission, etc. Probably it would merit a re-listen, especially since the character details were front-loaded and my brain categorized them as the injured one, the asshole, the leader, and any other name was just “another human.”
Still, it’s a fun listen and worthwhile sci-fi. At three hours (give or take) your investment is low. It’s part of a series, but it’s not like it left on a cliffhanger, so you can stop at one and not feel ripped off.
