★★★★☆ Murderbot is a mom

Network Effect

Martha Wells

Network Effect is the fifth book in the Murderbot Diaries. But it is the first full-length novel -- the previous four books were delicious little bite-size novellas. This one, in contrast, is a full-sized Thanksgiving dinner.

All the Murderbot books have dazzlingly complex action plots. That's partly because they are told by Murderbot herself. As a SecBot, Murderbot can pay attention to multiple things at the same time. What's more, she (on pronouns, see my review of All Systems Red) routinely has a small army of drones reporting from every nearby location, and some not so nearby. She has millisecond responses and can follow the details of a fight with better time resolution than a slo-mo movie camera. She offers author Martha Wells an interesting and conveniently flexible combination of the first-person and omniscient narrator perspectives. Murderbot usually knows everything that's going on. (Except inside other people's heads. But she can often guess that, too, based on monitoring minute changes in facial expressions and physiology.) She can be conveniently ignorant when she loses key drones. Three hundred forty-six pages of that means a LOT of action.

The publisher's blurb includes this sentence, "Come for the pew-pew space battles, stay for the most relatable A.I. you’ll read this century". I'm going to ignore the pew-pew space battles, except to tell you that they're exciting and you'll have fun reading about them, and focus on what I think is the best part of the Murderbot Diaries -- Murderbot as a person.

Murderbot is not good at (Ugh) personal relationships (ugh, ugh, ugh). She is repulsed by the very thought that she has them at all. As a Company SecBot, she did not. She was forbidden to talk to other SecBots (who in any case were probably not the sparkling conversationalists that Murderbot herself is), and to the humans, she was just an appliance, a scary and unwelcome one at that. All she really wanted to do was watch TV. However, in The Future of Work: Compulsory she acquired a nasty habit: saving stupid humans. In All Systems Red she saved a bunch of humans, and they, especially Murderbot's favorite human, Dr Mensah, have sort of adopted her. In my review of Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory, I wrote that Murderbot "has sympathy for humans, but not empathy".

In Network Effect Murderbot describes how she refrained from doing something she knew Mensah would not approve of, because if she did it she would either have to admit it or tell Mensah a transparent lie, and Mensah would cease to trust her, which would pain Murderbot. This is not quite empathy, but it is Theory of Mind, a baby step in the direction of empathy. In Network Effect, Murderbot sidles up to the threshold of admitting that working with humans is sometimes rewarding.

Confession time: that moment, when the humans or augmented humans realize you’re really here to help them. I don’t hate that moment.

Murderbot spends much of Network Effect taking care of Mensah's daughter Amena. The title of my review comes from a conversation Murderbot has with Amena which, to prevent spoiling, I will present with minimal context,

From her expression, she was either falling asleep or deep in thought. Or possibly both. I said, “You need to sleep.”
She yawned. “Okay, third mom.”

("Second mom" is Mensah; "first mom" is Mensah's wife Farai.)

Although she resolutely refuses the word, it is clear that Murderbot is somehow making friends. As the publisher's blurb hints, another not friend from the past shows up. It's ART. Of course it's ART.

So, yeah, good science fiction action story, and Murderbot's personality as the leader she is assuredly born (or manufactured) to be continues coming slowly into view. A thoroughly enjoyable novel.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

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