I read all of the series in one go, so they are blended together in my mind! I remember the kidnapping and the habitat ring thing. Cool setting
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Recently read this one and enjoyed it. The torus setting and world building was done well and created both a new type of space habitat while creating obstacles and story conflicts.
I thought the bits about the emotional status checks could have been explained better. If I recall correctly, Murderbot is more cyborg than robot, and has some vestigial human traits. And so the emotional status checks are to deal with those human impulses, rather than the old trope of all robots really just want to be a ”real boy”. And this book doesn’t go over that, unless I skimmed that part haha.
Overall, I found it fun and a quick read.
For sure it was related to his meat brain, which has been part of the story in prior books.
The setting was interesting and the setup was interesting enough, it just felt superficial to me. If you were going to rank all of the eight books in the series, where would this one fall?
Ooh I don’t know. I’ve read them over the past few years, but don’t recall all the story lines as individual, separate stories. As for story arcs, I like the interactions with other bots the best and think that’s where the storytelling is most inventive. The friendship with Art and mentoring of Three bring a lightness but also unique elements that are different from other sci fi. I would rather have more books about Murderbot and Art‘s adventures than about the Preservation family.
To be fair, they’re all novellas, even when longer. Lite and fun; I enjoyed it, but yeah, it seemed Like a series of vignettes that eventually tie together.
I couldn’t finish it. It felt like it was written by a ghost writer or AI. I really enjoyed the first few books, but I think I’m giving up on this series at this point.
I can understand that. Did you read the other recent entry, Rapport? It was actually interesting, but doesn't even have SecUnit in it and doesn't even take an hour to read - very short. Wells is a great writer, but if she can't invest enough into the series she should mothball it.
I don’t think I’ve read Rapport yet. I might give it a try.
I believe it's set somewhere between books 2 and 5, and is very much a side story, so can be read whenever chronologically.
Read it. Now i have a question — What was the team looking for? Seemed like they were documenting lost knowledge from pre-corporation times. Is this discussed in one of the other books and I missed it?
Do you mean, what were the family members who were taken hostage doing on the torus in the first place? I don't remember it ever saying. It did say that they were held under fictitious papers charges, or something like that - the charges weren't legitimate. I just took it that they were traveling. I don't think what they were doing was anything tied to another story line, as far as I know.
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