Reviews and Comments

This book follows Mahit, sent as ambassador from the small space station Lsel to a large empire, in order to investigate what happened to her predecessor and to try to prevent the Teixcalaanli Empire from inevitably absorbing that home station.

As you might expect, it's a story about empires (being terrible), but what I like about this book is that it gets at reasons why empires can be dangerously appealing apart from just raw power. Mahit simultaneously wants to protect her homeland but also wishes to be part of larger Teixcalaanli culture that is eating her own. But also, no matter how much poetry she's memorized, she will never truly be a part of this culture.

The reader quickly learns that Lsel secretly has machines that implant the memories of their predecessors, and has sent Mahit off with one of these devices. The extra internal perspective of Yskander commenting or just providing emotional memory on Mahit's experiences adds a fun additional layer to all of the events.

I love the politics; I love the writing; I love the characters. Highly recommended.

This novel is always such a delight to get back to on a reread of the series. My love for ART also carries a lot of my feelings too.

I wasn't sure how Murderbot was going to stand up to the longer length the first time I read this, but I like that there's more space for side stories to develop; in particular, we get to see flashbacks to Murderbot and Amena back on Preservation, we get to see Arada grow as a leader, and we get to see Murderbot 2.0.

This novel also reprises previous parts of the series in a really satisfying way. Even more ART (and more ART snark). We get more about Mensah handling trauma. Murderbot 2.0 is an explicit parallel to Miki's death. The ending of this novel escalates the end of Exit Strategy where Murderbot doesn't know how to feel about everybody feeling protective about it or wanting to save it.

It's all just so good.

I don’t hate you. I hate that I don’t have better answers to all that’s wrong in my city. The only choices shouldn’t be bloody vengeance or doing nothing. I hate that the Codicíans’ ‘gift’ of empire is generations of trauma.

Overall, I think I'm a bit mixed on this book. I was most intrigued in the messy middle, where all of the characters are caught between competing and interesting tensions. It felt impossible for any character to do right by another while being caught in such structural traps. The focus of the book also (surprisingly?) felt firmly on these relationships between people who care about each other, and the messed up ways that colonialism warps their love.

I also quite enjoyed a character whose magic is tied to her emotions, and so she quite literally has to repress her anger and sadness in order to survive and hide.

It's also certainly a rare book where the straight relationship felt more interesting than the queer one, but maybe I just don't have much patience for religious "I can save her!!!" self-hatred stories.

#SFFBookClub

This isn't a bad Murderbot novella, but it doesn't really move enough forward enough for me to appreciate it as anything more than an action/detective side event in between the much more emotionally impactful Exit Strategy and Network Condition. I think my favorite parts of this book are Murderbot snarkily interacting with Indah and station security, where it's trying to one up them but also do its job and also (mostly) obey the rules that they've given to it.

This novella does get some more into Mensah's trauma (and avoidance) but I'm not sure this story is doing extra on top of what Home or Network Condition is doing, and her trauma is not the thematic focus of this novella either. (Although what that focus is, I'm not sure I could really pin down. Maybe that's part of the problem.)

If Murderbot was going to stick around in Preservation space and Indah was going to become a recurring character, or we were going to have ongoing themes of Murderbot trying/failing to fit into Preservation systems and culture, then maybe this could have felt more impactful in retrospect.

I have a spoiler-y offhand comment, so I'll post that separately.

This is a short story that can be read online. The most notable part about this for me is that it was the first story not from Murderbot's point of view, but from Mensah's instead.

This viewpoint shift works for me because Mensah's trauma around being abducted on TranRollinHyfa comes through much more clearly in her own voice. It functions similarly to Rapport in that getting to see the other side of a relationship strengthens your understanding of both sides.

Her feed notifies her of a message packet, addressed to her and Bharadwaj. It’s a link to some sort of catalog weapons supply service. Ayda sighs, mostly amused. “It’s listening to us right now.” It must be hard to respect other people’s privacy when you’ve had to fight and scheme for every minute of your own. Hard not to be paranoid when you remember all the times your paranoia was justified.

But I also quite enjoy seeing how (and why) Murderbot is always compulsively invading everybody's privacy. Mensah clearly understands and (mostly) feels cared for by it. And also it's awkward and invasive too, and I don't think that we'd be able to get all of that without being in Mensah's head.

Maybe that was why I had been nervous about meeting Mensah again, and not all the other dumb reasons I had come up with. I hadn’t been afraid that she wasn’t my friend, I had been afraid that she was, and what it did to me.

The band is back together. I really like the way this fourth novella comes back around back to the Preservation Alliance folks that the books started with. It's fun to see Murderbot with the same people and in a similar protection role, but having a lot more agency.

Pin-Lee groaned and rubbed her face. "I'm almost glad you're here."

This is minor, but Pin-Lee also has some amazing moments here and finally gets to pull out her scary lawyering. I love the combination of how both angry at and yet how also protective of Murderbot she is.

This is the Murderbot novella that feels the most forgettable to me. It's not bad, but partially it's that it has the most action in it, which is fine and good but isn't really what I'm here for. I do like that it establishes that there are still dangers out there for Murderbot, even as it is wildly competent in its own domain.

When I’d called it a pet robot, I honestly thought I was exaggerating. This was going to be even more annoying than I had anticipated, and I had anticipated a pretty high level of annoyance, maybe as high as 85 percent. Now I was looking at 90 percent, possibly 95 percent.

The best part of this book is Miki, the human-form bot that Murderbot can't help but be irritated by. Miki ends up being a great foil, especially around Murderbot's feelings of not-jealousy about Miki's relationship with its human Don Abene.

This short story in the Murderbot universe was released recently, and can be read online on Reactor. Delightfully, it's from Perihelion's point of view after its encounter with Murderbot in Artificial Condition.

I'm not sure that the bones of a story about sneaking into a corporate rim structure had quite enough going on for me, but the underlying delight of this story for me is getting to hear just how affected ART was by its encounter and connection with Murderbot. I think there's just such a power differential between ART and Murderbot, that I'm not sure I ever would have expected it to be so affected if you had made me guess. Getting to hear these feelings (and hear them avoided) from Perihelion's point of view is quite good.

Also, Martha Wells is here making extra sure that you know explicitly that Murderbot is a story about trauma through and through. This is maybe a snarky aside from me, but given that this story was released at the same time as the end of the first season of the television show, I wonder how much of this is a deliberate poke or a reminder to new audiences. I'm still working through the first season but this critical element seems quite sidelined.

This is my favorite Murderbot novella. What stands out the most to me is the prickly but endearing not-friendship between ART and Murderbot. I also love seeing Murderbot taking on its first clients (by choice) and feeling just as invested in doing a good job in protecting them. My delight in this book is probably why I also like the novel Network Effect so much, as it feels like a thematic expansion of all the best bits of this book (plus ART).

I think it's also easy to read this book as such a queer and trans story (only metaphorically, as it would be horrified at this comparison). It really gets into how fraught physical change for the purpose of passing is; it's something that Murderbot feels it needs to do for safety as rogue SecUnit, even as it feels emotionally unsafe to do. And also it's Murderbot having to navigate this change with the (extremely pushy but supportive) help of ART.

This book also gets into some of Murderbot's traumatic history in its investigation of Ganaka Pit. On a reread, I think I was surprised at how little reaction this gets from Murderbot in the moment once it has unraveled a core mystery of its past. But, at the same time, trauma is unevenly distributed, Murderbot is not the best at feelings, and it certainly catches up later in conversation with ART and Tapan.

I've been watching the recent tv show and thought I'd give the books a reread so I could ground myself in the text again. Also brains have been bad, and Murderbot is such short grippy comfort fiction. I think what makes me come back to this (personally) is my empathy for Murderbot's exhaustion and horror around being asked to be a person.

Murderbot also epitomizes the mortifying ordeal of being known (but simultaneously the even more mortifying ordeal of being loved). There's so much joy for me in the grumpiness of the internal monologue. If I had to come up with a one sentence emotional arc for each book, this one would be Murderbot moving past apathy and learning that it does in fact want to protect (some) humans.

Confession time: I don’t actually know where we are

On a reread, I had also forgotten the level of indifference that Murderbot has, in terms of not even knowing what planet they're on. It's an aspect that comes through so much stronger in the original text.

I didn't realize this (very) short Murderbot story existed until very recently. It's a prequel to All Systems Red and can be read online in WIRED. It reads a bit like a microcosm of the entire series, a journey from apathy to protecting humans to musing about being protected itself, but in 1000 words rather than a handful of novellas and a novel.

It’s not like I haven’t thought about killing the humans since I hacked my governor module. But then I started exploring the company servers and discovered hundreds of hours of downloadable entertainment media, and I figured, what’s the hurry? I can always kill the humans after the next series ends.

I don't want to talk about the tv show too much, but it's hard not to think about what the books are doing differently. It's really interesting to me how much the opening line of this prequel story but also the opening line of All Systems Red both having Murderbot ostensibly considering killing people. Honestly, this particular feeling lines up more closely with the opening of the first tv episode than I was willing to give it credit for at the time.

I wonder sometimes if too high expectations make me more likely to be disappointed in a book. I feel like the Mossa and Pleiti series should be my jam: it's lesbian scifi detective fiction set on an Oxford-esque Jupiter space habitats. This one was pretty good, but the first book is still my favorite.

The details of the mystery in this book are the most solid of the trilogy, and (in some ways) I like Pleiti getting a chance to try to do some investigating on her own. Unfortunately, the romance angle suffers from acute "please just talk to each other" syndrome where they each worry on their own about what the other is thinking and feeling.

This is also maybe a minor and petty opinion, but it felt like this book over-did loan words from other languages; arguably, in universe this could be part of the academic study of past earth so I can give it a little bit of a pass. However, it feels like a :chart_with_upwards_trend: from the first book which had none (to my poor memory), to the second book with a few, and this third book where it was so frequent as to almost become jarring. I could believe in the adoption of words like chisme or pues or klopt, but ... chiacchierare? chismoseando?

One might contend that things don't happen that way, that adults do not simply wake to Power. But one might consider this: adults often wake up to terrible things, like they have thrown their back out while sleeping or they have cancer or someone they know has perished in the night. Why shouldn't it be something nice for a fucking change?

This is a trans-centered magic novel about a found family of trans witches (gender inclusive) who try to help other newly awakened magic users find their way in the world; they find themselves up against a malicious AI, who feels like the embodiment of boundary trampling and privacy invasion. This book was exactly what I needed right now.

A few caveats: this story is told in the present tense, in an almost overwhelmingly omniscient perspective that dissects everybody's emotions and even the way their choices affect their potential, untaken futures. In some ways, the book feels incredibly rooted in a specific place and time, but in others ways is mostly turned inward-looking about relationships and feelings. The book's language is also quite therapy-brained, sometimes explicitly but mostly in the way that it talks about trauma and feelings and vulnerability. Mostly I leave these caveats because I know folks who would probably bounce off this story for these reasons, but for me, all of this was catnip.

A handful of incredibly small minor details that delighted me: * the trans phrase "a gentleman of alto experience" * the parallel of the fear of being unknowable and illegible to others due to magic as well as already due to gender * the first person pronoun reveal, especially the one here that also explains the present tense * the fact that all of the major characters are trans in some way * casting spells built around community and vulnerability and emotional intimacy * there is nothing like a queer guy calling a they/them person "bud" (affectionate) to make me miss Brian Jeeter from The Strange Case of the Starship Iris (edit: holy shit season 3 is here) * the antagonist texting "smile" and "no :)", which is a precise hit in my own raw spot left by shitty dudes on the internet * the magic spell to infuse a rock with love, when everybody involved doesn't believe they know what love is, in their own broken struggling way

There’s no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven’t heard its music, I haven’t seen its painting, I haven’t read its books, except for the handful I found in the refuge and of which I understood little. I know only the stony plain, wandering, and the gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct.

Highly recommended from me. This book is sort of a melancholy post-apocalyptic coming-of-age survival story, but with a dreamlike tint. It's uncompromising in not giving any pat answers to any of its questions. Why are these women here? Where has everybody else gone? Is this even earth? I feel like it explores a lot of ideas around trauma and knowledge and purpose, but at its heart I feel like it's really getting at what it means to be human when you are disconnected from past social structures but also disconnected from hope for the future.