My review for the third book of The Murderbot Diaries which I finished last week. Slight spoilers from the previous books ahead.
After uncovering its past and helping some humans along the way, Murderbot decides to help out the humans from the first book, who have gotten in trouble partly because of its escape. He begins looking for clues about GrayCris’—the shady company that almost got it and its humans killed back in the first book—and any illegal activities they’ve made before. For this, Murderbot ventures into a planet that GrayCris “failed” to terraform, alongside a new group of humans with the mission to assess and try to continue the terraforming efforts.
Of course, the evil company simply wanted to do evil things and everything is going to go wrong.
This book introduces a couple of new characters that are pretty cool! And as always, Murderbot simply can’t handle how nice they are to each other because it’s used to humans being mean and treating it like a machine (and it likes it that way because it can get away with being unnoticed most of the time and just watching tv shows).
Miki is a new bot character—that is not an android— who is treated as an equal by its owner (For Murderbot it’s a pet bot) and it’s just so innocent and oblivious to how other humans are actually pretty mean and take advantage of you. The back and forth between it and Murderbot is pretty fun.
Anyway, the stakes of this book are high and there are a lot more epic action sequences. I was hooked and the setup and concepts were fun. Seeing Murderbot figure out how to deal with the problems and enemies ahead was very entertaining.
The only caveat I have to this book is that some chapters drag on for a while. I feel like it could have been split a little more evenly, but given the extended action sequences, maybe it was a necessary sacrifice to keep the flow going, although I ended up breaking it myself when I just couldn’t read a whole chapter with the free time I had at hand.
Still, great book and continuation to the story! I think that my next book will finallt be a return to The Expanse! we’ll see.
