TBR Pile Review: System Collapse, by Martha Wells

Description

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.

Yeah, this plan is… not going to work.

My Review

I had this book on pre-order because I love the MurderBot Diaries. I’ve been reading it over the last few days and today I read the second half. I’ve had a busy few days, and this is the first chance I’ve had to have a proper reading session. This book went by so fast!

It picks up immediately after Network Effect. MurderBot isn’t feeling so great. Trauma is finally catching up with it, and that adventure, in which it nearly got killed several times, really did a number on it’s biological neural networks.

In this instalment, trauma and its effects on MurderBot as it goes into a blackout area searching for a potential second colony, are the main focus of MurderBot’s narrative. That and getting its Preservation humans out alive and uncaptured by a corporation that wants to enslave the colonists on the planet.

The relationship between ART and MurderBot continues to develop and strengthen, as does its relationship with humans. It’s rather moving to read about MurderBot feeling things, because it very definitely doesn’t like feeling big emotions and doesn’t know how to process them (that sounds familiar). ART, even in drone or pilot form, remains a sarcastic, interfering dick, but MurderBot very much loves ART. I adore the relationship between ART and MurderBot and the relationship MuderBot has with its Preservation humans.

Wells uses MurderBot to explore human feelings and reactions to traumatic events by transferring them to a human-analogue and writing from its perspective. We can sense some of the thoughts and emotions of those with trauma while having the distance of a construct as POV.

The use of 1st person POV normally gives us a very limited perspective, here we are seeing everything through MurderBot’s eyes, and drones, and ART-drone, because they feed into it. The use of technology to explain how MurderBot has more of an omniscient POV – drones, feeds, extra senses, talking to the local computer system – gets around a lot of the limitations usually found in first person POV, and adds extra dimensions to the plot and narrative. There are a lot of sentient AI systems in this universe, apparently.

MurderBot’s unofficial mission to free all other SecBots advances once more, after the failures and successes in Network Effect. They’re still working on Three, who likes non-fiction and is still very limited in understanding free will. The Preservation humans are developing treatments for trauma in freed SecBots and other constructs by the end of the book.

Wells expands the scope of the universe created in earlier MurderBot Diaries books and deepens relationships already developed. The surrounding milieu of Corporation Rim and Independent planets is suggested at, including a possible break-up of corporations and increasing instability, as work on the true conditions of life for indentured workers in the Corporation Rim gets out and unrest becomes more common.

The writing is gripping and the narrative action packed, as always. MurderBot is sarcastic, sensitive and lethal. I can’t wait to read the next instalment of The MurderBot Diaries.