technicat reviewed Network Effect by Martha Wells (The Murderbot Diaries, #5)
long form murderbot
4 stars
As other reviews here have noted, this is the first murderbot installment that's long, qualifying it for space opera designation (is that an award category?), so it's the first one that I had to, I don't want to say slog, but put some muscle into finishing. It's no thousand-page Ken Liu steampunk novel, but long enough that the publishers didn't bundle it in a two-book volume, so it comes between books 3-4 in Volume 2 and 6-7 in Volume 3 (I wonder if the author wrote a long one just to mess them up).
But I kept at it because still, it's murderbot, and the action never stops, except when it does stop and murderbot thinks about its (their?) feelings, which, percentage-wise compared to the other books, isn't that much time (still a fraction of the time spent watching Sanctuary Moon and other titles from future netflixes). I don't want …
As other reviews here have noted, this is the first murderbot installment that's long, qualifying it for space opera designation (is that an award category?), so it's the first one that I had to, I don't want to say slog, but put some muscle into finishing. It's no thousand-page Ken Liu steampunk novel, but long enough that the publishers didn't bundle it in a two-book volume, so it comes between books 3-4 in Volume 2 and 6-7 in Volume 3 (I wonder if the author wrote a long one just to mess them up).
But I kept at it because still, it's murderbot, and the action never stops, except when it does stop and murderbot thinks about its (their?) feelings, which, percentage-wise compared to the other books, isn't that much time (still a fraction of the time spent watching Sanctuary Moon and other titles from future netflixes). I don't want to give anything away, so I'll just say there's more of everything here, and I've lost track of all the humans (do they even have names?). Bad murderbot!
