Review: System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries, #7) by Martha Wells

Here I quote NPR's jacket blurb: "We are all a little bit Murderbot."

TL;DR

My personal review: 5 out of 5 stars.

Recommended if: You are a fan of Murderbot (who isn’t?) and you want to see what shenanigans it will get up to next.

Skip it if: You don’t like Murderbot (impossible), you want something that takes itself seriously, you don’t enjoy sci-fi action plots, or you don’t have much patience for the stream of consciousness style of narration.

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Man, do I love me some Murderbot.

A word for the uninitiated: Most books in this series can more or less stand alone, although I think that may be a little less true of this one than the others. While reading in order of publication is probably the best way to avoid confusion and appreciate the way characters evolve, the plot of each book is more or less self-contained. What I’m saying is, if you want to try out Murderbot and have access to the other books, maybe start elsewhere; but if it’s the only Murderbot you have access to, I think you could still read it without being too lost.

In this latest adventure featuring everyone’s favorite homicidal intelligent construct, Murderbot returns to the planet first discovered in Network Effect with its found human family as well as its best frenemy, the Asshole Research Transport (ART for short). This review contains some mild possible spoilers for Network Effect, so if you haven’t read that book yet, you may want to do so before reading on.

The plot of System Collapse revolves around the team’s attempt to save some colonists from being tricked into indentured servitude by a massive interstellar corporation on a planet where dangerous alien remains also exist (there’s a reason why Murderbot hates planets).

Like with most Murderbot books, the plot is pretty interesting on its own, but what really makes the book shine is Murderbot’s narration. Murderbot has freshly recovered from a series of traumatic events that occurred in Network Effect, and despite its protestations to the contrary, it is still deeply affected. As someone who’s been in those PTSD shoes, I really appreciated the subtlety and realism in the way that Wells related Murderbot’s struggles. We weren’t beaten over the head with retellings of the trauma, but we saw the effects it had on Murderbot— the way it avoided talking about what had happened, how it stopped wanting to do the things it enjoyed (aka watch serial entertainment) how it distanced itself from those it had grown close to, how it no longer trusted itself to do its job of protecting the humans it cared about. And then, through its efforts, how it slowly found the language to talk about what had happened, how it began trusting its friends to support it, how it finally was able to place the trauma in context and start to move forward again. A+.

Every time I read Murderbot I just think, wow. Here is an author who really knows how to show us what it means to be human. And here is a character who is more human than some actual people I know. Really, I can’t recommend this series enough, and I can’t wait for the next one.