Murderbot Feels Your Pain

ARC Review of The Murderbot Diaries #7 - System Collapse

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Steve's Book Stuff
November 14, 2023

Murderbot is back in the seventh book in the series, and the second full-length novel - System Collapse.

The new book follows the events of book #5, Network Effect. Murderbot and the team are still on the planet to which they were hijacked in that book. The inhabitants here are survivors of a failed colonization attempt and were abandoned to their fate on a half-terraformed planet. The terraforming operation had been stalled, and the inhabitants themselves had been contaminated by alien artifacts. But thanks to the actions in Network Effect they were safe as that book wrapped up.

As book 7 opens however, they now face a new danger from the Barish-Estranza (BE) corporation. A team from BE has landed on the planet hoping to claim it, and its “assets”. In the universe of Murderbot the corporations rule, and the “assets” the BE team is referring to are the surviving inhabitants themselves, who they are hoping to trick into signing contracts, for what will effectively be slavery, on a BE owned mining colony planet.

The cover of the new Murderbot Diaries book System Collapse. Cover art by Jaime Jones

BE is a corporation, and as I said, corporations rule. So, its team is used to getting their way. They won’t hesitate to use whatever means are necessary to do so. This sets up the action between the BE forces, and Murderbot, ART and their team, who are feverishly working to counter the BE forces and convince the inhabitants to instead seek a free future with their help.

Fans of the Murderbot novellas are used to action from beginning to end. But as in Network Effect, the other full-length novel in the series, the action is more sporadic here. For the most part Wells fills the pages in-between the action scenes with Murderbot’s continued growth, and his awareness and understanding that he is more than a construct. Without the control of his governor module he is becoming more than the sum of his inorganic and cloned organic components - more than a mechanical “SecUnit”. His human side reveals itself with a bout of pain, which he won’t tell us about for a good part of the book. It’s not physical pain - he’s felt that before - but mental pain.

Murderbot experiences PTSD with a flashback so impactful that it causes his systems to do a hard reboot - the system collapse of the title. This is something that’s never happened to him before, and in the aftermath he’s confused, not understanding why sometimes he just doesn’t “want” to do the things he knows he should do. He’s experiencing real, human pain.

Yes, Murderbot feels our pain.

Martha Wells, as featured on her Amazon Author page

But he’s still the same cynically sarcastic and cranky Murderbot we’ve come to know. So he still says things like “I’m 73 percent certain that never happened to me”, and “I was paying 87 percent of my attention to Iris”, and “that’s why the stupid Barish-Estranza team and their stupid SecUnit had walked right up on me and I had no f***ing idea.” And he’s still watching soap operas and trash TV (i.e. the “entertainment feed”) in his downtime.

If there is one thing I was disappointed in with System Collapse its that Three - the SecUnit that Murderbot rescued in Network Effect - didn’t have a bigger role. He’s mostly a background character here. I had half expected some interplay between the two SecUnits that might help Murderbot deal with the pain of his journey, as Three starts down the same road that Murderbot is travelling.

Plus there’s the whole intriguing notion that Three perhaps had a “relationship” with the two SecUnits who didn’t survive when he was rescued. SecUnits aren’t supposed to have relationships. At least you get to understand, as Murderbot tells us, that SecUnits, like humans, each have their own destiny. Three may not travel the same road as Murderbot.

I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I do hope there will be a more substantial role for Three in Murderbot #8, if and when that happens.

RATING: Five Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating Comment: If you are a fan of the Murderbot series, System Collapse will not disappoint. As I said in my last post about books #5 and #6 in the series, if you are a science fiction fan who has somehow never read any of the Murderbot books my advice is to immediately do so.

NOTE: I read an advanced ebook copy courtesy of NetGalley and Tor Publishing Group. The book is available to the public today, November 14, 2023. I thoroughly enjoyed the ebook, but I did miss the narration by Kevin R. Free that made listening to the audiobook versions of the prior installments a real pleasure.

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Title: System Collapse

Author: Martha Wells

Publisher: Tor Publishing

Publish Date: November 14, 2023

ISBN-13: 9781250826978

Publisher’s List Price: $21.99 (US hardcover)

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