Murderbot is at it again. Once more, he is keeping his favourite humans (or at the very least, humans that it doesn’t hate) safe as they do exploration work. On the return, though, their ship is hijacked and dragged into a wormhole by none other than ART (short for Asshole Research Transport), Murderbot’s erstwhile friend and companion. ART is a research transport with massive computational capabilities, able to outsmart virtually everyone – so why has it been hijacked by a strange lifeform? Once again, Murderbot’s plans to binge series is thwarted and he sets out to rescue his humans and the closest thing it has to a friend.
I read this Murderbot book between The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments as a palate cleanser, and it’s perfect in that regard because honestly, Murderbot is fairly adorable (you’d feel like hugging it, except it doesn’t like hugs and doesn’t know what to do with them). This novel is a bit heftier than previous installments in that it’s a full-length novel rather than a novella, and it gives the author the opportunity to flesh out the character (as it were) a bit more. Murderbot being caught in the quagmire of human emotion is nothing new, but seeing it develop its own emotions is touching.
It’s also the interactions with the other bots that provide a lot of entertainment. There is ART, Murderbot’s frenemy, equally glib and equally stuck with its own badly regulated emotions. There is Murderbot 2.0, Murderbot’s digital equivalent (unsurprisingly, it bickers with itself a lot), and a second Murderbot, adrift and lost now that it has hacked itself. Murderbot has little patience for them because it is a little too busy keeping the humans alive. The inevitable snark is funny and it works because it’s paired with moments of emotional connection.
The other interesting angle, not new to this novel but certainly explored in more detail, is the idea of socialist wonderland Preservation versus the Corporate Rim, where morality is something to laugh about at board meetings and where profit is the only language that counts. The idea of corporations profiting of a universe unencumbered by trivialities like human rights and labour and environmental laws is terrifying.
As always, some of the novel was fairly befuddling; I don’t consider myself a particularly stupid person but I frequently lose track of whatever Murderbot is planning, concocting or analysing. Perhaps that’s just me (Murderbot is, after all, a lot smarter than humans and it thinks far more quickly as well) but it trips me up, and it annoys me because I don’t want to have to reread each passage to see what I’m not getting or missing, so I frequently skip those parts and figure it out as i go. Perhaps I’ve just not read enough SF.
Nevertheless, these novels are a lot of fun. I have one more to go until I finish the series. I’ll be sad to see the end of it, because they’re perfect palate cleansers.