Fugitive Telemetry
Gurathin sighed and rubbed his face and looked off into the distance, like he regretted all his life choices that had led to him standing here right now.
― Martha Wells, Fugitive Telemetry
I read these books one after the other. Even after reading them both, I’m not sure which is the correct order since I read Network Effect first, followed by Fugitive Telemetry. I think perhaps I should have read Fugitive Telemetry first, but reading it after Network Effect didn’t spoil anything.
Fugitive Telemetry is a murder mystery that takes place on Preservation station over the course of about seventy-two hours. SecUnit is pulled into the investigation at the strong urging of Doctor Mensah, explaining that partnering with station security is a smart political move even if the thought of interacting with even more humans, humans who are suspicious of SecUnits, let alone rogue ones, is unappealing. SecUnit agrees to do it because it believes that Mensah is correct and also because it rightfully thinks that it can solve the mystery without more weak, vulnerable humans getting injured or killed.
I enjoyed Network Effect more, and I’ll explain why in a moment. Murder mysteries are not so interesting to me, and the overly-complicated logistics of the Murderbot books felt unnecessary in this type of story. However, as all of the action took place in a single location, SecUnit needed something to do and letting them manipulate systems in a port and in various ships docked there kept the action moving without having to keep track of which station or planet to or from which it was traveling.
My favorite parts were the interactions with Ratthi and Gurathin, who at this point are very much Team SecUnit (although Gurathin will be the last to admit it).
Network Effect
She meant hopefully we’d be able to find them alive. Ugh, my humans are optimists. But this was the first time we’d had a real trail of evidence to follow, and right now it was hard to cling to the comfort of bitterness and pessimism.
― Martha Wells, Network EffectIt’s nice to be right, when you’re leaking and parts of you have fallen off.
― Martha Wells, Network Effect
In Network Effect, SecUnit is on a rescue mission. It starts out with SecUnit getting trapped with one of its Preservation crew members. But instead of having to fight its way out while keeping the fragile human alive, it realizes that it wasn’t trapped on accident. It was kidnapped.
Network Effect is the first full-length Murderbot novel. The structure of this book is similar to the other Murderbot novellas, however each complication, escalation, and solution exists within an ongoing mystery. I see how this could be broken up into multiple novellas, but I’m glad it was extended so as to provide compelling character arcs for SecUnit and the other members of Preservation crew.
My review contains mild spoilers. Proceed with caution.
In the first four novellas, Artificial Condition was my favorite by far, and that had everything to do with SecUnit’s friend and partner-in-crime also known as Asshole Research Transport or ART. ART was the best and also the worst, and I think I audibly squeaked when I realized that ART had gone in search of SecUnit to help it solve a mystery of its own.
ART’s crew was kidnapped and it needed SecUnit to rescue them. ART was very, very attached to its crew and it cares deeply about humans. It is emotional and brilliant and reactive and incredibly powerful and dangerous and the fact that it needs SecUnit’s help at all means that the situation must have been very dire indeed.
While this book dragged in some places, such as what the hell happened to the missing crew, I was so happy to get pulled along on the continuing adventures of SecUnit and ART. SecUnit was NOT happy with ART, and their arguments and silent treatments were extremely well-written and empathetic. I adore SecUnit and SecUnit + ART was so much damn fun, even when they were too angry to “speak” with one another.
