Martha Wells is another one of the a relatively recent crop of writers whose work gets nominated for awards over and over again. This year, her latest Murderbot Diary book Network Effect was nominated so I thought I’d check the series out beginning with the first book. Unfortunately it looks like this was only a novella and while this first one is priced cheaply on Amazon, the other three ones which complete arguably the first volume are each sold as full-price books. That explains why the reviews are full of complaints about this exploitative marketing practice.

The main character is a security robot that is constructed out of both organic and inorganic parts. Such robots are supposed to be controlled by a governor module and this one has hacked its device and has secretly become self-aware. Due to an incident in its past, it calls itself Murderbot but uses its freedom to download and watch soap operas in its free time. While being assigned as security to an expedition to survey a planet, it rescues one of the team members from some dangerous wildlife and surprises the humans by showing empathy to reassure the panicking scientist. As the team tries to find out why information about the dangerous fauna is missing from their data packet, they uncover other inconsistencies suggesting a larger conspiracy. Meanwhile they also find out that Murderbot is self-aware and even refers to itself as Murderbot but the team’s leader Dr. Mensah realizes that it is friendly and genuinely trying to help.

This is a short, fast-moving action adventure story that perfectly fits the proverbial rollicking good read description. There are a lot of fight scenes as Murderbot uses both handheld and built-in weapons to deal with murderous fauna and enemy robots and plenty of clever plans as the team tries to overcome a superior enemy. What worldbuilding there is takes place in the background, as we learn how the team leases equipment and survey fight including the Murderbot from a company and apparently space travel is done through wormholes. But there is no wordy exposition to slow things down. A lot of the appeal here rests in the character of Murderbot itself, due to the comical incongruity of a heavily-armed murderous robot being actually a shy softie on the inside who feels anxiety if forced to interact with humans. It likes soap operas, wears its armor like a security blanket and prefers to keep its visor down so humans can’t see its face.

But fun as it is, it’s also pretty shallow. Apart from Murderbot’s personality, this adds little that is new to the already large corpus of stories about AI. The story skips over details about how the robot’s mind actually works and is ambiguous about whether or not all AIs in this world are actually self-aware. Given how the book keeps harping on about how the company does everything on the cheap, one wonders why the robots are equipped with processors sophisticated enough to be self-aware if it’s not necessary for their jobs. The human crew members are certainly surprised by Murderbot’s humanity but Murderbot itself has no compunctions over destroying its fellow security bots under the control of the enemy. I also feel that the reveal of the planet’s big secret feels a little underwhelming given how little the characters react to it. This is a book that really likes to keep the action moving, sometimes so much so that too little weight is accorded to important moments.

My take is that is this is fine as light science-fiction themed entertainment but it’s no more than that and I don’t think it is appreciably better than the online web fiction that you find everywhere these days. As such, its expensive pricing model is a real strike against it and so I doubt I’ll ever come back to any of the later books.