Network Effect by Martha Wells

 just need to quit reading Murderbot books. I don’t have a single good reason for continuing to do so. I didn’t love the first one (unlike so many others) and I didn’t love any of the subsequent ones. I don’t even think I like them very much. It’s really the strangest thing, this appeal they so inexplicably exude. I mean, it’s possible I’m just really trying to get what the huge deal about them is, they are so well received, well liked, well reviewed, lavished with every possible sci fi award out there. And I’m just like…why?
But the thing is all of them until this one at least got one thing right…their length. Always a long novella length, no more. My favorite format. So when I found the latest Murderbot on Netgalley I downloaded it on a whim (who knows, maybe that’ll be the winner) only to realize that was book six. There was book five out there I didn’t read. And for some reason book five is approximately three times the normal length.
There’s really no good reason for that page count either, for me it only served to highlight all the things I don’t really enjoy about the series. Because Murderbot himself is a fun guy. It’s the books he’s in that drag. There’s something about the authors writing and plotting that just really doesn’t work for me. It’s so busy, freakishly busy, overloaded with tech, bombarded with space sh*t of all kinds that it completely buries the plot. This isn’t merely that you can’t find the forest for the trees, it’s that the trees are being launched at you so rapidly and indiscriminately that you can’t pause to even consider the forest. Which is why having read the entire book, I can barely summarize the plot, barely. Something about abandoned space colony, something about space fights. There’s a fun blast from the past, ART is back, now the epic machine/man/machine bromance can continue and that’s all warm and fuzzy, but doesn’t get nearly enough screen time, not with all the other crap going on, basically tons of mostly interchangeable characters doing busy work. But overall, what was that all about. Why did the author suddenly decide to go novel length? Obviously the experiment either didn’t work and was completely unnecessary, book six is back to novella length. And I’m probably gonna end up reading it too, bewilderingly enough.
And maybe one day Murderbot will live up to all of his acclaim, but it doesn’t seem likely. You have the entire series resting on the mechanized shoulders of a single character, whose main traits are sarcasm and tv series addiction. And his AI buddy’s fun too in a similar monotone way. The rest is muddled plotting, hectic overbusy action, nonexistent character development, one note humorous asides, and so on. It’s essentially a gimmick series that somehow found a very adoring audience. Thing is as social media, most pop culture trends, reality tv, etc. have taught the world is that popularity doesn’t necessarily correlate to quality. For me, Murderbot is a shining example of that.
Then again, mine is a dissenting opinion, so take it as such. What seems to me like a giant waste of time, might be a science fiction adventure that’ll wow you.
Oh Murderbot, you deserve more. Frankly I do too