System Collapse

So good.

It’s been long enough between books that I looked up a recap of where we last left Murberbot. Glad I did, because then I was able to just enjoy this one. It’s more of the same, which is what it’s felt like for a while with Murderbot, but that’s OK! Very incremental character development on their part, but the character is interesting enough that I’m happy to spend more time with them.

Same Murderbot confusion about how the world works (and emotions), then same gripping action. My palms sweat when the fights start.

I think I'm going to have to binge these again because it takes me half the novella to remember who everybody is. I suppose I have that to look forward to.

Yes. It is just more Murderbot. And that is a good thing.

Murderbot just has near infinite potential as a character. It's multiprocessing nature makes the stories complex but so rich, I feel like starting the whole series again now to pick up the bits I missed.

I was excited to hear more about other SecUnits with hacked governor modules.

This was a delight, as is usual with Murderbot. I enjoyed the treatment of trauma recovery as a confusion of "why can't I just keep using my old coping mechanisms" "what the actual fuck is my brain doing, this is not helpful" "if you do not schedule time for maintenance, your systems will schedule it for you, and their timing will be antagonistic".

Noticeably less snappy than the earlier books though -- it was easy to lose focus in descriptive stretches, and I wound up reading it twice to see if I could catch the things I missed the first time around.

This will probably be the unpopular minority opinion, but here goes...

This book was still enjoyable, but the first half was extremely slow. It picked up once we got into the action, but it was somewhat more subtle this time around. There is nothing wrong with the book, but it feels like Wells thinks she needs to do more to evolve this character, but doesn't really know what, so we just get tiny bits.

I'm a sucker for Murderbot, so liking this wasn't not going to happen. I've read all the previous books and enjoyed all of them. While I liked Network Effect, Murderbot really seems to work best as a novella.

I wouldn't suggest starting with this one, as it picks up immediately after Network Effect, but the first book, All Systems Red is good too.

I will say that I read this in 94 hours, which is the fastest per capita I've read any book this year. In a year where reading has been hard for whatever reason, this book was a welcome reprieve from that.

Oh my [REDACTED] god, it was just too short.