System Collapse

By this point, seven books into bestselling Hugo Award winner Wells’s Murderbot series (after Fugitive Telemetry), readers come mostly for more snark from Murderbot, the killer robot with a heart of gold who narrates. So, though the mission the sassy, sentient Security Unit is sent out on this time breaks no new ground, fans won’t mind. Still as brutally honest as ever, Murderbot is now inexplicably acting below performance reliability parameters. It must figure out the issue and repair itself while on a mission to rescue the human settlers of a newly colonized planet from the Barish-Estranza corporation’s attempts to exploit them as slave labor. To convince these isolated colonists to trust Murderbot’s human crew over the corporate goons, Murderbot and its frenemy ART (Asshole Research Transport) decide to create a propaganda video using all the things they’ve learned about human emotions from watching television, especially Murderbot’s favorite space soap, Sanctuary Moon. The plot feels familiar and therefore somewhat unexciting, but Wells has turned a corner in her characterization of Murderbot as its human side shows more and more. This is a solid episode for the beloved android. (Nov.)