In which Murderbot meets some old not-friends

 More Murderbot! I knew I had to get through the one full-length novel in the series, Network Effect, within a week or so, since Fugitive Telemetry comes out today. 

 

As a full-length novel, this book contains even more pew-pew space battles and even more feelings than the other installments, as well as additional doses of everything else that goes into Murderbot stories--sarcastic parentheticals, getting shot at, hacking, drone surveillance, existential debates with other robots, and time spent watching episodes of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. Although there’s not nearly as much time for watching TV as Murderbot wants, since it has to do all sorts of exciting things like rescue kidnapped humans, fight off deranged people who are contaminated with alien remnants, fight off deranged software that may or may not be contaminated with alien remnants, argue with everybody including itself, and write lots and lots of code. The plot features appearances from several characters from earlier books, including Dr. Mensah and the wonderful bot pilot ART, with whom Murderbot has a very emotionally complicated relationship that it nevertheless insists upon referring to as “mutual administrative assistance” because human words like “friend” and “relationship” give it the wiggins. I may have found this extremely, extremely funny and Murderbot and ART are now my new favorite platonic literary pairing. (I am assuming this ship is named MurderbART and nobody can tell me otherwise.) 

 

By this point I as a reader have been immersed in the Murderbot universe for long enough to really get a huge amount of enjoyment out of various little emotionally charged tidbits. My favorite of these is the realization that Murderbot’s company is not named “the company,” Murderbot just refuses to use its name and, in fact, edits it name out of the transcripts it gives when recording its story. And it’s not just the specific company it has a problem with, either; Murderbot has what appears to be a pretty significant trauma response around logos. Like, it really, really hates logos and refuses to wear them if it doesn’t absolutely have to; it doesn’t even like the uniforms with ART’s university seal on it and that’s not even a corporate. I also hate logos (not due to any particular trauma with having them tattooed onto me, I’m just a cranky lefty) so I adored Murderbot’s commitment to having nothing to do with them. I also enjoyed the bit when ART went into a stress-cleaning spree when Dr. Mensah came to visit; ART and Murderbot are like, so married, even though saying that would probably instigate another forced restart in our sex-repulsed, romance-repulsed, touch-repulsed, and generally feelings-repulsed quadruple-A protagonist (the A stands for asexual, aromantic, agender, and android) (and angry, probably). 

 

Anyway all the people who told me that if I liked Gideon the Ninth I would probably like Murderbot were one hundred thousand percent correct, give me hypercompetent loners who are also complete dumbasses awkwardly learning how to make friends by doing badass shit together and making stupid snarky comments all day, I will eat that stuff up with a spoon and sprinkles on top.