SecUnit Murderbot, the security android with a mind of its own, returns in SYSTEM COLLAPSE which picks up directly after the end of the brilliant NETWORK EFFECT. If you have not read any of the earlier books in the Murderbot Diaries series, you will get the picture starting with this one, but the characters and setup will be unfamiliar. So just go with each scene and you’ll find it’s not as complicated as it looks.
Ratthi, Iris, Tarik, and Karime from the University of Mihira and New Tideland have arrived at a lost colony planet in far space. Following a scattering of the original colonists, who were trying to terraform an inhospitable surface, some kind of alien virus infected the machinery programming. The first thing Murderbot needs to do is neutralise a giant agricultural bot that is terrorising the team. After that, presuming they survive, they’ll try negotiating with the various tribes.
The amoral Barish-Estranza corporation is here, too, and wants to make profits. Whether that’s salvaging machine parts or strip-mining, or enslaving inhabitants for mining other worlds. The university folks are bringing information and help to the abandoned colonists on the planet, who might have alien contamination. Situation difficult, as always.
After a while, I realised that I was reading Pandemic literature. The SecBot is wandering a dark lonely enclosed space with no outside views and a fear of viral contamination. Few characters other than the team are present, and they don’t seem talkative. The outdoors is uninhabitable and dangerous. Murderbot is suffering from delayed shock due to prior adventures and keeps almost shutting down or blanking out, with only a minimal drone feed (the best part of NETWORK EFFECT, in my opinion) and no communications with ART, the AI running the transport ship Perihelion. I had to wait a while, but the SecUnit got back to doing what it needed to do to protect its humans.
The autonomous robot, which likes to focus on media entertainment while humans are busy doing human stuff, is not conversational but still manages to swear a lot. Fans of the multi-award-winning Murderbot Diaries have been following its progress since overriding its governor module and starting to make choices. Martha Wells seems to be making the bot more human, by giving it new failings and new reactions to stress. SYSTEM COLLAPSE is a worthy addition to the series, with some lighter moments to balance the SecBot’s useful paranoia.
Martha Wells's million-copy, New York Times bestselling Murderbot series is back in another full-length novel adventure!
Am I making it worse? I think I'm making it worse.
Everyone's favorite lethal SecUnit is back.
Following the events in Network Effect, the Barish-Estranza corporation has sent rescue ships to a newly-colonized planet in peril, as well as additional SecUnits. But if there’s an ethical corporation out there, Murderbot has yet to find it, and if Barish-Estranza can’t have the planet, they’re sure as hell not leaving without something. If that something just happens to be an entire colony of humans, well, a free workforce is a decent runner-up prize.
But there’s something wrong with Murderbot; it isn’t running within normal operational parameters. ART’s crew and the humans from Preservation are doing everything they can to protect the colonists, but with Barish-Estranza’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams, they’re going to have to hope Murderbot figures out what’s wrong with itself, and fast!
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