Only if it's really weird

[bloodygranuaile]

 

Upon hearing my complaints that there was a six-month wait on Fugitive Telemetry, Martha Wells’ newest Murderbot novella, at the BPL, a friend very kindly bought be a copy from Porter Square Books, which is very exciting because now I have on in hard copy, with the spiffy cover art an everything, and not just in ebook. In a daring adventure of my own I managed to swing by PSB to pick it up before my second vaccination appointment yesterday and still squeaked into Hynes just in time to get jabbed a few minutes before my 5 o’clock appointment. I do not particularly recommend this course of action, especially not the part where I got stuck going four miles an hour behind the world’s slowest kombucha truck in Inman Square, but I do not regret it. 

With no side effects in the hours immediately following the shot except my left arm feeling a little weird and some satisfyingly dismal rain outside, I was happy to curl up last night with some tea and read the entire novella in one sitting. 

This one takes place on Preservation Station, sometime between the events of Exit Strategy and Network Effect. The plot of this one is a murder mystery, which is very exciting for everyone except Murderbot, since Preservation is pretty low on murders. (Murderbot, of course, would rather watch TV.) There is a lot of petty bullshit because Murderbot and Preservation’s security division do not get along real well, which is why it is so emotionally satisfying when they have to work together on solving this murder until they all grudgingly learn to respect each other and start getting along, but not in a touchy-feely sort of way. Murderbot is a big asset on this team because it can talk computer-to-computer with bots, who are consistently the best and funniest characters. 

It’s also nice to see more of Preservation Station, which, while not precisely being a socialist utopia, is at least a very marked social-democratic contrast to the corporatist hellscape of the Corporation Rim. Like, it provides free food and healthcare, and slavery is illegal, which don’t sound like very high bars but the Corporation Rim is, you know, a technofeudal corporate dystopia. Another interesting thing about Preservation is that it is not an all-seeing corporate surveillance state, which provides some interesting challenges for Murderbot as it attempts to figure out what’s going on without being able to just rewind and watch every single second of everything on camera. It was a very good storytelling use of putting constraints on a character, and I would love to see more of that type of thing. 

Anyway, I heard recently that Martha Wells has been contracted to write three more Murderbot novellas, and I cannot wait!