Book Thoughts: System Collapse
I really like Murderbot. The series was a breath of fresh air when I got into it a couple years ago. The casual scifi, the sarcasm, the characters, the guy they have narrating the audiobooks -- it's all wonderful, honestly, and I've kept coming back for more. The latest entry is System Collapse.
This entry wasn't the best in the series. It's a better entry than Fugitive Telemetry was, and I'm glad they've decided to extend the story instead of whatever they were doing with that book.
All our favourite characters are in this one, and coming back after a year or so I do need to admit that it was a lot of names being thrown around. I could vaguely recall feelings for most of them but it got disorienting at times.
The story was classic Murderbot stuff: the interactions, the corpos, the protecting of one's humans. This round we spend a lot of time with MB worrying about their on state of mind. A LOT. The books always spend a lot of time in inner monologue, but I think the character interactions and overall story suffer a little for it this time around.
I really liked the portion of this one where MB was creating content. Our protagonist that spends so many countless hours consuming media made for humans making media for humans felt like a big character development and in-character. While the rest of the storyline was a little meh, this bit felt somewhat profound.
It also made me realize that Murderbot is to me what Sanctuary Moon is to Murderbot: A comforting soap opera of bots and humans in space. For all my minor quibbles I'll happily consume hundreds of hours of this stuff if Martha Wells keeps pumping them out.