It's about time I dived into the full length 'Murderbot' novel, 'Network Effect', which has sat on my shelf for too long. I've read and reviewed the four novellas that kicked off the series in 2017 and 2018, with both individual stories and a series arc. This comes next in publication order, as it hit shelves in 2020, but I believe the fifth and sixth novellas, released in 2021 and 2023 may count as a prequel and a sequel to this. Therefore, I'm not sure whether I should be tackling 'Fugitive Telemetry' now, to preserve the chronological order, or 'Network Effect', to go with publication order. I'm erring on the side of caution with the latter.

And I've been looking forward to this for multiple reasons. One is that I want more 'Murderbot'. Like so many other people, including the folk who vote for Hugos, I absolutely adore this snarky SecUnit who's a non-human AI character among humans, but somehow ends up seeming like the most human of them all. That continues here but with greater depth and with the addition of a few other AI characters that both serve the story at hand and highlight just how far Murderbot has come thus far.

That's because the crucial second reason is that this is a full-length novel, clocking in at a decent three-hundred and fifty pages, and that ought to give author Martha Wells time to develop her characters. And I mean all of them, not just Murderbot, who was wonderfully drawn during the first four novellas but inherently got the lion's share of attention during them. The worst thing about them was that they ended and the next worst is that the human characters never got to grow, serving mostly as props for Murderbot to protect, rescue and attempt to understand.

The good news is that that's exactly what happens. Murderbot is deeper than ever here and I'm ecstatic about that, but the various human characters finally start to develop. Going into this, I would have considered the entire human cast of the series Dr. Mensah plus assorted cardboard cutouts. After this book, I can feel the extended family that surrounds Dr. Ayda Mensah, leader of Preservation Alliance, outside the Corporation Rim, many of whom are working the planetary survey expedition in which we begin.

Dr. Arada is the survey lead, working alongside her marital partner, Dr. Overse, and a bunch of others. Dr. Mensah's linguist brother-in-law, Dr. Thiago, is there too, soon delineating himself by being annoying to Murderbot. Her eldest daughter, Amena, is on board, who's therefore Dr. Thiago's niece. And then there's Dr. Ratthi, who I initially thought was related in some fashion but isn't. They're all close, though, so they feel even more like a single family than they are, an emotional connection that's firmly extending to Murderbot, as many of the emotional scenes here underline.

Of course, Murderbot is there as well, doing her level best to protect them, even though they're clearly their worst enemies. The early scenes involve them not taking her warnings seriously, so she has to put down a hijacking. During the first of a handful of excerpts from a helpme.file, she also saves Amena from a young man who's clearly a sexual predator to her, if not to the teenage girl who doesn't initially appreciate the help. And this is a great point to mention, as I have to in every review, that I still see Murderbot as female, so think of her as a she. Saving young women from sexual predators doesn't change my mind, but technically, she has no gender and so ought to be considered it until such time as it chooses a gender for itself.

It doesn't take long for circumstances to escalate to the point where their ship is attacked and Murderbot and Amena are pulled onto an enemy vessel by tractor, which then dives back into a wormhole. Unbeknownst to them at the time, the others are mostly safe inside their baseship that's now attached to the outside of this vessel, so they go along for the ride too. The story is starting to shape up during that wormhole journey but it clears up once they arrive in a system that hosts a lost colony, one that was rediscovered by one company that was then taken over in hostile fashion by another, leading to more corporate politics.

The most important detail here is that Murderbot recognises this enemy vessel. It's the one on which she travelled in 'Artificial Condition', a deep-space research ship run by an AI or bot-pilot called Perihelion, or, as Murderbot dubbed her, ART for Asshole Research Transport. This ought to seem ridiculously convenient, given that there's no logical reason for such a connection to be here, until the point we discover that ART set the whole thing up, specifically to get Murderbot on board, initially to save ART from those who have taken over the ship but also to save ART’s crew who were taken and ought to be found. Needless to say, Murderbot is royally pissed at ART for putting her humans at risk.

While I'm very happy to see the human characters grown and developed to the point that they can play a much larger role in the story than just damsels in distress, the best aspect to this for me was the interaction between AIs. For the longest time, that means a relationship between Murderbot and ART, which evolves gloriously. However, that expands later to encompass a pair of others: the self-dubbed Murderbot 2.0, a copy of Murderbot's core configured as killware, or, in generic terms, a sentient virus; and Three, an enemy SecUnit that Murderbot 2.0 encounters and frees from its governance module. Every interaction, in every permutation, is wonderful.

It's here that that question of gender pops back up again. Murderbot doesn't specifically think about gender here per se, perhaps content to let the question lie for a while, but it's brought up in surprising ways, especially by Amena. She already has two mothers, Farai her First Mom and Mensah her Second Mom; once she comes to terms with what Murderbot did by saving her from a likely unwelcome sexual experience, she specifically considers her to be Third Mom. Later, as Murderbot and ART deploy Murderbot 2.0, Amena specifically compares the act to them having a baby. While Murderbot itself hasn't chosen a gender yet, Amena clearly sees her as female.

I'm focusing on character here because that's most of the point in any 'Murderbot' story, Wells using science fiction to do what it's done so well and for so long, to explore what it means to be human through the eyes of something that isn't. However, there is a story behind all that. This time, it has to do with that lost colony, located on a planet that I don't believe is ever named.

The key term is Pre-Corporation Rim, meaning that it's old, founded before the corporations took over this particular region of space. This one was located on a planet with alien remnants, a detail that plays an important part here. Its location was lost, back in the days before tech to navigate wormholes was mastered, but it was rediscovered by Adamantine Explorations, which restarted colonisation, only to be lost again through data purges during a hostile takeover by Barish-Estranza, who have now rediscovered it once more. I can't really say much more without venturing into spoiler territory because the plot isn't that complex, just mysterious.

I wonder how much of that is due to Wells's strong focus on character over plot and how much is due to the ongoing comparisons that Murderbot makes between her reality and the shows she watches avidly. For instance, much of her medical knowledge is sourced from such a show, called ‘Med Center Argala’, even though it got its details horribly wrong so she's only watched it once. Of course, she watches more 'Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon' here, along with ART, but there are a string of others too: 'Lineages of the Sun', 'Farland Star Roads', 'Timestream Defenders Orion', 'World Hoppers' and 'Valorous Defenders', which she actually quotes. "I am functioning optimally," she says, in the absence of anything better.

I liked this a lot, which shouldn't shock anyone given that I've been a 'Murderbot' fan from the first novella. It's told as they are, with all the snark we expect from Murderbot, along with all her lists and bracketed asides, both of which are occasionally nested so they become sublists and asides within asides. However, the greater length is much appreciated, because it allows the human characters to evolve and the story to become more patient and mysterious. Oddly, given that this won most of the awards for Best Novel, Wells hasn't written another novel yet. Next up is 'Fugitive Telemetry', a prequel to this, and then 'System Collapse', which is a sequel, but both are novellas. I'll dive into those next month. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Martha Wells click here