Review.

Network Effect

Martha Wells

The Murderbot Diaries #5
Pub date: 10 May 2020
Publisher: Tor
Reviewed from personal library

A little late, but if you haven’t read this one well… you are missing something.

I first encountered Martha Wells in her Rakusa series and while I enjoyed and eventually read the whole series, I wasn’t especially motivated to seek out more of her stuff. Then back in 2018, the crew over at Tor were making a big buzz about some Murderbot character and how everyone loved him. Talk about intriguing—I mean how can you “love” something called a murderbot? (Kudos to the marketing team for that one — it was a brilliant campaign for a novella. Although I suppose they knew they had more in the pipeline which made it worth the effort.)

Skip ahead to 2020 and, 4 novellas later, Wells is ready to present her delightful character in it’s first full-length novel. Network Effect begins in media res as Murderbot tries to solve the latest problem that “his” humans have gotten him into. Murderbot was/is essentially a bound security construct that naturally has, let’s say less-than-positive feelings about his servitude, and once free, starts to working on determining his place in the world and dealing the whole process of becoming “human” — despite the fact that the idea horrifies him.

In Network Effect Murderbot is soon unwillingly whisked away on yet another undertaking in order to help a “friend” rescue his humans and as the plot progresses the readers are reunited with a few old characters and introduced to a few new ones. As I have come to expect of a Murderbot story, the pace is brisk, the writing crisp and the story pretty edge-of-the-seat. Wells continues to use the unique nature of her protagonist in unexpected, yet consistent, ways and, while it may seem a bit deus ex machina sometimes, it all makes logical sense and you (at least I did) end up feeling a bit abashed you ever doubted Murderbot’s abilities. It’s one of the things I really enjoy about the series.

The novel is solid, worth the extra length and dives a bit deeper into the universe Murderbot is situated in and allows Wells to explore a bit more of the world outside of Murderbot’s own narrow POV. I enjoyed the longer story but frankly Wells has built a vehicle that works well at any length. It doesn’t hurt she has the skill to pull off the three forms she has presented Murderbot in either. (There is a free short story that is really The Murderbot Diaries #4.5 at tor.com/2021/04/19/home-habitat-range-niche-territory-martha-wells/ )

The series — and especially this novel — tackles all sorts of the issues du jour: capitalism, freedom and responsibility, nationality, gender etc. The last is interesting because while I easily identified Murderbot as male, my partner said pish-tosh to that and definitively assigned a feminine gender to her/him/it. And on reflection I can’t really argue whether I am right or not. The doubt then becomes one more intriguing aspect of Murderbot’s character.

Murderbot is simply a delight: the character and the world he inhabits. It definitely made me a Wells fan and I have slowly been working my way through her old Ile-Rein series as a result: so it’s a great marketing strategy as well.

The only thing bad I can say about Network Effect is that it really isn’t stand-alone. Sure you could read it without reading the preceding novellas but you wouldn’t' enjoy it a quarter as much. Oddly enough I felt Wells did a better job making the various novellas stand-alone than she did the novel… but I suppose that has a lot to do with the scope she was tackling. So go back and read a least one of the them — and hopefully starting at the beginning if you can.

The Novellas
All Systems Red (2018), Artificial Conditions (2018), Rogue Protocol (2018), Exit Strategy (2018), and Fugitive Telemetry (2021)