System Collapse

Book 7 of the Murderbot Diaries series

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The final book of the series, this one begins strong, has lot of twists and turns and two good fight scenes, but it leaves a some threads hanging.

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I dug around to find out if Ms. Wells plans to add to the Murderbot Diaries, since the series has been picked up by Apple+ and is in production now for a TV series: Yes, there will be two more books. Whew!

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We had been flying over a mountain range with lots of craggy peaks and cliffs and it would be a relief to get past it. Even though this was one of ART’s long-range shuttles, not a company hopper constructed and maintained by the lowest bidder.

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It had actual working safety/emergency equipment (besides me) and behind the seating compartment were tiny secondary cabins with bunks, a small MedUnit, a small galley, plus cargo and lab sample storage space. It also had an actual shower in the restroom unit.

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But still, a small metal container filled with mushy humans hurtling over spiky rocks for long periods agitates my threat assessment module. There were so many ways to crash and die in mountain ranges, it was also making my stupid risk assessment randomly alert.

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This story sews up the plot-line of the colonists on the planet with the murderous alien remnant technology and tightens up relationships all around (bot to bot, bot to human, and human to human).

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Much of this story happens in very low lighting and is a waiting game. It’s high tension, there are some good surprises, but there isn’t much science-fiction.

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What I did like a lot is that a theme that runs through every book becomes a winning tactic in this one: the watching of media and how that can inform our behavior, create beliefs, calm nerves, and sway opinions.

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It was obvious that media could change emotions, change opinions. Visual, audio, or text media could actually rewrite organic neural processes. Bharadwaj had said that was what I’d done with Sanctuary Moon: I’d used it to reconfigure the organic part of my brain. That it could and did have similar effects on humans.

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I like the Murderbot Diary series because the bot is irreverent and often bitchy. It has just enough organic matter to make it feel things. How it deals with the feelings is endearing. Murderbot is easy to like.

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What I don’t like about the series is also a thing that is woven through every book: the way Ms. Wells describes spaces.

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Without giving an overall picture of a space, she’ll talk about specifics of that space in a way that assumes we have enough information to create a picture of it in our heads.

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I got frustrated by it in the first book and after that, just let it go because it could have really hampered my enjoyment of the series.

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Many of the fight scenes happen in a space in which I had zero spatial orientation. The hand to hand or gun to gun action was followable, but overall Ms Wells poor descriptions of the spaces are a bummer.

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