However, like the deeper plot points that join it to the previous books, Fugitive Telemetry shows the android’s tentative, insecure integration into a tight-knit group of humans, doubting all the while that they really like it for who it is inside. None of this explains why everyone is catching feelings for the SecUnit. Like all the Murderbot books, the plot is fast and the dialogue punchy, a snappy vehicle to carry the bigger narrative arc of Murderbot as it emerges from its defensive psychological cocoon. Thus ensues a great noir-ish, Agatha Christie-ish murder mystery typical of the series, with far less shoot-’em-up than the series name suggests, plenty of deduction and the navigation of awkward relationships. “Murderbot is lonely because of the gap between how people see it and how it feels inside”īut before it can do much introspection, someone turns up dead. Having decamped to a faraway station whose governing principles are decidedly more communal and humane, Murderbot is trying to figure out how to relate to and live among people when none of them can tell it what to do.

(Murderbot isn’t its official name – it is how the security android, or SecUnit, wryly refers to itself in private.) This is how it lived for years before secretly hacking the module that controlled it. It has just defected from the Corporation Rim, where it was manufactured to kill people and protect others, according to the priorities of whoever purchased it. Here we find the titular android settling into the uncomfortable novelty of working with – not in the forced service of – humans. The 176-page novella is set between the five novellas of the All Systems Red series and the novel Network Effect. So why are we fawning over a grouchy, ungendered hybrid of human neural tissue and integrated AI combat weapons?įugitive Telemetry, the latest instalment, only deepens the devotion.

I have to sheepishly put my hand up as well.

“I might have a little bit of a thing for a robot,” wrote Jason Kehe, a culture critic at Wired. “I love Murderbot!” was sci-fi writer Ann Leckie’s take. Writers and reviewers are open about their feelings for the eponymous protagonist. Many of the books in Martha Wells’s series have won (or been shortlisted for) Nebula, Hugo, Locus and other awards. WHO loves Murderbot? We all love Murderbot.

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