When my wife and I were reading Murderbot together for the first time, I couldn’t wait to get to Network effect. I knew it was a novel, so we’d get more content, I knew it had more ART and Murderbot, and I knew it was, just generally speaking, more of the storylines I’d become completely addicted to. It held up for the second readthrough.
There’s a moment in this novel where one of the PreservationAux colonists is listening to Murderbot and ART angrily snipe at one another and mutters, “Anyone who thinks machine intelligences don’t have emotions needs to be in this room right now.” That’s once again the best dynamic in the series: ART and Murderbot are vastly intelligent and capable, but sheltered in specific ways like all bots. This means they understand some things that the other one doesn’t and vice versa. This is the best stuff Martha Wells explores, and it’s always entertaining and tense.
In this case, Murderbot is performing security for Dr. Mensah and her daughter, and over the course of this they (and some other Preservation personnel) are abducted by ART. Only it’s not ART, ART has been taken over by Target Control System, and Murderbot fears ART is dead. Eventually Murderbot finds a way to restore ART, discovering that the augmented raiders piloting it were sent to find Murderbot, putting it and the Preservation personnel in danger, infuriating Murderbot.
As they attempt to reconcile, they also have to figure out how to take care of their injured crew, get ART’s crew back, navigate corporates on a lost colony world, and also figure out what to do about the whole alien contamination thing. I’ve already spoiled too much by revealing that ART and Murderbot are reunited so I’m stopping here, just rest assured this is plenty more of what makes these stories great.
11/10 would read again (probably will). Oh my god this series is my Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon…