Last year, I mentioned how the popular Murderbot Diaries series seems to make for a fairly entertaining read but it would be too expensive to buy each novella one by one. Then I realized that the series is available for reading on Kindle Unlimited which is cheap to get so now I can finally get the whole story. This is the second of a total of four parts that I believe should round out what amounts to the first book if it were published in a more traditional format.

As a result of the events of the previous novella, Murderbot is bought and freed by Dr. Mensah’s cooperative. Instead of sticking around however, he decides to travel to the mining facility of RaviHyral where he first went rogue. The incident involved multiple SecUnits like himself massacring every human on the site but his own memory of the event has been wiped. He gets there by hacking and getting a ride on unmanned cargo ships but one such ship turns out to be controlled by a more powerful and sophisticated AI than himself. The ship AI who Murderbot dubs ART takes an interest in him and helps him disguise himself better as a human using the ship’s onboard medical bay. To actually get to the facility however Murderbot needs a permit and so his advertises his services as a security consultant. He is hired by a small group of scientists whose research has been stolen by their employer and needs some backup to negotiate the return of their files.

Maybe I should have waited until I’d finished all four parts before writing this but I felt like a lighter read after last month’s book. Plus each installment of Murderbot’s adventures are distinct enough that it would be difficult to cover it all in a single post. I found myself enjoying this a lot more than the previous book because the interactions between Murderbot and ART actually place Murderbot on the back foot. Later Murderbot also successfully deceives the humans into believing that he is a human at all and is discomfited by how much they trust and rely on him. There’s a fair amount of skullduggery and action as the fears of this new group of scientists are well-founded and Murderbot has to take action multiple times to save the humans from their own stupidity. It turns out that ART is just as much a fan of entertainment media as Murderbot so it’s great fun to see them enact plans they learned from watching human dramas.

I do note how similar this adventure is to the previous one. Once again, the AIs seem scary at first but turn out to be friendly and oddly obsessed with caring for the fragile humans. The group of humans that Murderbot devotes himself to protecting despite themselves are scientists just like Mensah. There are few worldbuilding or background detail, such as just what type of missions ART normally does for the ship to be so capable and trusted with so much autonomy. I’m still confused why the humans never assume that the AIs are as smart as or even smarter than humans and yet the AIs routinely are. The story also expends very little effort on developing the human characters: Murderbot’s clients are just his clients and their enemies are just standard evil corporate goons.

There is of course nothing wrong with liking this only for being rollicking good entertainment but I confess to being mildly puzzled by how popular this has grown to be. If being fun and fast-paced were all that mattered, there are tons of reading material available for free online. This is easy to read and entertaining enough that I will finish at least the first arc of Murderbot’s story on Kindle Unlimited but I wouldn’t rate this very high against its competition at all.