★★★★☆ Murderbot distracted by shiny object

Rogue Protocol

Martha Wells

I was a little disappointed by this installment of the Murderbot Diaries. The main reason for that was something that I don't usually complain about: too much action. The main thing I like about the Murderbot books is Murderbot. She (on the issue of pronouns, see my review of All Systems Red) is paradoxically, so very, very human. Well, to be honest, what I really mean by that is, "She's just like me" (except much more competent). Here is a very on-brand remark from Murderbot:

They were all annoying and deeply inadequate humans, but I didn’t want to kill them. Okay, maybe a little.

Yes, Murderbot, we've all been there!

High-grade snark like this is why I read Murderbot. Another Murderbot perquisite is the guarantee that she never gets personally sucked into tedious romances. (If this somehow changes in future installments, I don't want to know, so, you folks who've already read all the books, please keep your lips zipped.)

In Rogue Protocol Murderbot gets sucked into trying to keep a bunch of fragile, squishy humans intact, as always seems to happen. This involves a lot of shooting and fighting and things going boom. In fact, there is so much nonstop action that Murderbot's sparkling personality is muted by her being too busy to snark.

That was disappointment number one. Disappointment number two was that the plot seemed to me to get a little derailed. There are at this point two mysteries in Murderbot's world. Mystery number 1 concerns what I take to be the central event in Murderbot's life so far: the event at the RaviHyral facility, when she supposedly went berserk and murdered a bunch of humans (hence her name for herself). In Artificial Condition we learned that that isn't what happened -- she seems to have been framed to cover a mysterious catastrophe of different nature.

The other mystery concerns an organization called GrayCris, who showed up as the bad guys in All Systems Red. There's not really a lot of mystery about GrayCris -- they're a criminal organization that exists to exploit illegal mining opportunities. The only mystery about them, really, is in the details of how they get away with it.

Rogue Protocol is all about Murderbot trying to chase down admissible evidence against GrayCris. To me this seemed like a distraction from the more central RaviHyral question. Now, Martha Wells is obviously a more-than-competent plotter. I have little doubt that she will somehow tie the GrayCris and RaviHyral mysteries together, and that in the fullness of time it will be seen that Rogue Protocol is not actually the distraction it appears to be.

However, seen by itself, Rogue Protocol is a little less fun than All Systems Red and Artificial Condition were. We have less of Murderbot being the adorably cuddly ball of barbed-wire that she naturally is, and instead seeming to allow herself to be distracted from her central mission of self-discovery by a shiny object.

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