Space battles and Sanctuary Moon

Another day, another Murderbot novella. A mere week after starting the series I knocked out the fourth one, Martha Wells’ Exit Strategy. In this one, Murderbot’s favorite human has gone missing, most likely kidnapped by the extra-evil corporation GrayCris, and probably as a direct result of the shenanigans Murderbot had very helpfully gotten up to in the previous book. 

 

Also as a result of the prior shenanigans, Murderbot has leveled up, and can now do more difficult and fancier things with hacking and multitasking and otherwise autonomously orchestrating fun pew-pew space battles against a variety of human and machine malefactors. There’s some more metahumor about TV in this one, and a lot of complicated human-type feelings. It’s very much a fun, comfortable popcorn read for extremely genre-savvy nerds, which really does seem to be the publisher’s bread and butter these days, a thing I am not complaining about (especially given how much of it is fun competence porn/power fantasy for extremely online queer nerds, particularly). There’s jokes and some plausible-sounding technobabble. The philosophical shit about what it means to be human is usually text, rather than subtext, but I don’t mind, because the text is mostly Murderbot going “Well, that’s fucking stupid” and I enjoy being able to occasionally indulge similar feelings about this whole being human racket. I liked that Murderbot’s happy ending was just, like, some space to think, and a reasonably chill support system of people who weren’t going to tell it what to do. It’s nice to have space. Upon finishing I did immediately check the novel out of the library, and I intend to read it this week.