© James Pyles

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I’ve been reading Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries for a while now and found them to be a great science fiction series. I’ve reviewed them all on this blog if you want to do a wee search and take look.

That’s why when I read the seventh and latest edition, System Collapse (2023), I thought I’d missed a step or two.

The story started out slow and I felt like I was walking in at the middle of a movie. I read the last book only four months ago, but I still had trouble following who was who (in most cases) and what the heck was going on.

Murderbot is changing. He/she/it/they had some sort of spontaneous shutdown following a false memory where its leg was being eaten. I suspect that our protagonist is becoming a bit more human all the time whether they like it or not. This may be a setup for future stories, but given how flat most of this book was, I’m not sure I’m anxious to go on.

There was a part in the book that really dragged in the middle. Our intrepid group, in order to convince a bunch of lost colonists not to sign on for indentured service with the story’s antagonists, had to create and edit a video, sort of a docudrama for them to watch.

It was very atypical for a Murderbot story and came at me from proverbial left field.

The action picked up after that to the predictable escape/rescue.

I’m wondering if this series hasn’t played out. It had a nice run, but at this point, it seems Murderbot has pretty thoroughly exploited its potential. Might be time to move on.

Like all of the other books, it’s short enough to be a novella, but still priced like a novel. I’ve made that complaint about the publisher since day one (and I’m not the only one). That got me blocked by Wells on X (twitter). Go figure.

The only other thing that came up on my radar was a brief mention of someone’s “alternate pronouns.” It didn’t fit in with the rest of the story and contributed nothing to the plot (I know Murderbot is essentially genderless, but this wasn’t about that, it offered some sort of specific other pronouns, but the moment came and went). I guess it’s just another example of random “representation” in modern science fiction. More’s the pity.

Oh, I found a Murderbot short story Compulsory on my Kindle Fire and breezed through that. It was set prior to any of the books and didn’t really add anything interesting.

I’ve read of a possible Murderbot adaptation to a TV series, but given most of these SciFi streaming shows on lately (think “The Acolyte”), no matter how much I’ve liked most of the books, I won’t be watching.