System Collapse

3.75

YES!!!

This is what I was expecting to get when I picked up

Fugitive Telemetry. We get to see Murderbot directly after the events of

Network Effect with it and its humans still stranded on the alien-remnant planet they found themselves kidnapped on previously. Murderbot is experiencing new emotions and sensations due to the repercussions of its interactions with the alien presence on this planet, and we get to see it working with some of ART's humans in a way previously unexplored.

My anticipation for the next installment of this series is at an all-time high, and I know that I'm in safe hands with Martha Wells' work!

The thick green flora waved in the slight breeze under the colony’s air bubble, and despite my scan and the drone’s scan, it was making me nervous. At least it was making me nervous for a survival-based reason instead of …

redacted.

Murderbot is always fun, and

System Collapse is one of the more successful installments in the series: not too long, not too complicated, not trying to “do” too much. I only vaguely remember specific plot points of the prior books, and Wells did a good job subtly reminding me what I needed to know in order to follow and enjoy this one.

Thematically,

System Collapse is supposed to be about

PTSD

(is that a spoiler? Not sure.). It doesn’t really go anywhere, which is probably good, because Wells trying to dig into theme can either go pretty well (social anxiety, the transformative effect of storytelling) or really badly (gender as a social construct, monogamy as a social construct). The theme is

there, but apart from being mentioned a few times as something Murderbot is worried about, it didn’t really impact the plot that much, and I didn’t feel like it gave any insights into what it feels like to live with (unlike how the first few novels really put the reader in the shoes of someone with severe social anxiety).

Otherwise, this is basically just a really solid entry in the Murderbot series. It’s maybe too quippy, too sarcastic, too cute, too convenient…but it’s a lot of fun. Wells is great at writing action scenes and integrating sci-fi terminology into the story in a way that feels organic and easy to follow. Some of the subplots didn’t quite land (I can’t really tell any of the human characters apart, or even keep their names straight), but

System Collapse was a complete page-turner that has me excited for the next in the series. Were it not for Thanksgiving, I would have easily torn through this in a couple of days.

Some favorite passages:

The original planetary survey data that still existed was corrupted and incomplete, but so far the colonists hadn’t said anything about dangerous flora or fauna. Which meant I assumed there was some because humans have a bad habit of assuming that if they know a thing, all the other humans in the vicinity know it, too. Either that or they believe none of the other humans know anything that they don’t know. It’s either one or the other and both are potentially catastrophic and really fucking annoying.

(I’m off my game, obviously, but I’m not dead.)

It sent,

ID: PSUMNT added to ContactBase. I guess machine intelligences of that era were too polite to say “that sounds fake but okay.”

Even having an emotional collapse, I knew saying that meant I’d lost the argument. Once we’d entered “this increasingly unlikely scenario which is not actually occurring in any way makes me right” territory, it was all over.

Yeah, I’ll just code a patch to stop feeling anxiety, wow, why didn’t I think of that earlier. (That was sarcasm, I have too much organic neural tissue for that to work.) (Of course I’ve already tried it.)

This was mostly reflected in a passive-aggressive competition to see who could use the most annoyingly correct comm protocol.

This is one of the best entries to the Murderbot Diaries series. If you liked Network Effect, you're going to love System Collapse. This novel starts where Network Effect left off. Murderbot and the team are dealing with the fallout of their previous adventure, and discovering a new adventure (and many many problems) along the way.

It has everything that you've loved about Murderbot books in the past: pessimism and sarcasm, our bot trying to deal with its anxiety and trauma, deadly fights, a love of media pervading the plot, and musings on what it means to be human.

The strength of this book is in how it shows Murderbot dealing with its emotional issues. For many books of this series, Murderbot has been avoiding doing just that. In this episode, we start to get some real forward momentum.

It also avoided the common pitfall of this series by narrowing down the cast somewhat. For most of the novel, we only had 3 sidekicks.

Thanks to Netgalley and Tor for a copy of this book to review. All opinions are my own.