I love Murderbot. For someone who does not consider themselves a person, our SecUnit is still very relatable. When things get stressful, they love to retreat and re-watch their favourite TV shows. When I find everything getting a bit stressful, I retreat and read Murderbot. We’re not so different, really.
System Collapse is the seventh book in the series and it directly follows the events of Network Effect—so the following review is going to be a bit spoiler-y by nature. When we were last with Muderbot and company, ART (my beloved) and the crew had been rescued from a colony planet where they were dealing with humans that had been exposed to some kind of alien remnant contamination. The ordeal was harrowing, to say the least, and by the time we check in with Muderbot at the start of System Collapse, its not doing ok. Something is affecting it rather badly, but we don’t know what it is, because it’s [redacted]. Muderbot has literally redacted it from the diaries. And it seems it would love to do that from its mind as well.
But there’s little time for Murderbot to process the issue because while the initial conflict faced in Network Effect has been resolved, new problems keep on piling up. The biggest of these is a colony of thousands of people that need to be taken care of, but not by the Berish-Estranza Corporation, thanks. ART and the crew are not big fans of the forced indenture seen across the Corporate Rim, and would rather that the colonists had control over their planet instead. Murderbot agrees with them and would like to help, but [redacted] is causing some performance issues. And Murderbot is very worried that a sudden performance drop in a perilous situation could endanger everyone.
More stress for Muderbot. The poor dear. Not exactly what I thought the title would be referencing when I picked up the book. But, of course, in typical Muderbot fashion, Murderbot does NOT want to talk about it,
It really is amazing: for a series whose protagonist is basically an introverted Terminator, the Murderbot Diaries are a standout for how very, very human our cyborg protagonist is in many respects. We feel Murderbot’s sense of helplessness and its concerns. Not only are the effects of its performance issues concerning in a practical sense, but the mental impacts are huge. Muderbot is a SecUnit. Its self-worth is heavily based on its ability to keep its humans safe.
What if it can’t do that anymore?
With regard to the broader story, much of it is quite suspenseful, especially in the latter half. But I found the first part of the book surprisingly clunky for some reason. I don’t know whether or not it was because most of the stage-setting occurred in a previous instalment that I had not read for over a year, but it was not as easy to follow as I had hoped. It was odd; the rest of the series usually handles everything so well.
But without giving too much away, the resolution is rather ingenious. And I really hope that perhaps someone could encourage Murderbot to take up something similar as a hobby. Another outlet, or another aspect to add to its identity beyond SecUnit, would probably do a world of good
Brief spoiler-y commentary: One of the things that first ‘humanised’ Murderbot or endeared them to us was, as I mentioned above, its love of immersing itself in media when times get rough. I think an outlet as a content creator and not just a content consumer would do Muderbot wonders. While I could see it taking on this role in a professional sense—there’s a SecUnit doco already in the works—part of me wants to see how prolific a cyborg could be, or how its ways of processing human interactions would change—if it wrote fanfic.
I’m not sure how the story is going to proceed from here, but I am rather excited to find out.