Fugitive Telemetry
Book 6 of the Murderbot Diaries series
This book seemed like a snack after the meal of book 5.
This one is a short, well-written murder-mystery that keeps us on our toes. We don’t know who the culprit is until the very end.
I asked it to perform a diagnostic and after five seconds got a stream of error codes. I opened my eyes and pushed out of my chair, startling the group of humans at the opposite end of the waiting area who hadn’t known I was there. My drones dropped down from their perimeter positions and followed me through the entry gates to the transit ring.
Because this particular book can stand on it’s own apart from the other books in this series, it seems perfect for a one hour TV episode. Relatedly, Apple+ is in production to bring The Murderbot Diaries to television!
Alexander Skarsgard is signed on to play Murderbot. It’s not a bad casting (Alexander will hit the pessimism note perfectly), and Murderbot doesn’t have any gender-related physiology, but in my mind’s eye, I see Murderbot as a woman.
There were a lot of humans lying to each other on The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, and I knew outright angry denials tended to sound incredibly guilty, even though they were often an innocent human’s first impulse.
You wouldn’t think lying would be a problem for me, after 35,000 plus hours lying about not being a rogue SecUnit while on company contracts, then the whole lying about not being an augmented human and lying about being a non-rogue SecUnit with a fake human supervisor. But the last two hadn’t exactly been failure-free; what worked best was misdirection and not letting myself get caught in the wrong place at the right time, and making sure no humans ever thought about asking the wrong questions.
Less science-fictiony and more about the process and relationships involved in unraveling an isolated mystery, this book was less satisfying.
In fact, in 2022, this book was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, but the author turned them down.
Read more reviews
