The third installment of The Murderbot Diaries season follows our favorite misanthropic cyborg as it gets pulled into another human conflict and wrestles with the annoying implications of having feelings and a moral compass. Murderbot has hitched a ride to the planet Milu in order to investigate an abandoned terraforming project run by GrayCris, the shady corporation that tried to kill Murderbots clients in the first book. Murderbot hopes to collect evidence of wrongdoing by GrayCris, both to help its friends back on Preservation Alliance, and to distract the authorities from investigating its status as a rogue SecUnit. Unfortunately, once Murderbot arrives on Milu, it realizes that this mission is going to involve an unexpected amount of danger, human interactions, and (ugh) feelings.
I felt like this was the weakest of the Murderbot books that I’ve read so far. There seemed to be even more technobabble than in the previous books, which especially made the fight scenes hard to follow. I struggled to keep track of the different human characters, as none of them were given any distinctive character traits or even physical descriptions. There was a cute new robot character introduced: Miki, a “pet robot” who is as trusting and friendly as Murderbot is grouchy and anxious. Miki serves as an interesting foil to Murderbot, but lacks the nuanced character of ART, the sentient ship computer from the previous book. Despite these weaknesses, I still enjoyed the book. Murderbot is such a fun, relatable narrator and its sarcastic and sometimes heartbreaking commentary made the reading experience worthwhile.