Don't mind me, just having a cry in the corner over robots.

These are starting to form an interesting bigger picture with their plots, now, but individually they are (appropriately) very much like episodes from season one of a sci fi show that's going to be really popular, but right now is mostly of the "villain of the week" format, with lots of badass action, and character development for the hero only. The novella format is perfect for this, and the writing is still very tight and very witty; Wells is excellent at sketching the supporting cast and the background settings, so that they feel fully formed in very few words really. It's very impressive.

Admittedly, very late to the party with Murderbot but picking these up is quite frankly the best decision I ever made. Murderbot is so ridiculously relatable and I love them with ever organic part of my being.

The best book in the Murderbot series by far. I really enjoy Martha Wells take on things, her perspective on different ideas is always fresh and well written, and Rogue Protocol is a crazy good page-turner. No wonder why this series has so much attention.

I received a digital ARC of this book from Netgalley.

Rogue Protocol, or The One Where Murderbot Meets a Pet Robot and Re-evaluates Its Feelings About Humans.

After last time, Murderbot parts ways with ART and discovers that GrayCris, the corporation responsible for the sabotage and murder attempts it fended off in All Systems Red is waging a suit against Murderbot's humans and the company that it originally belonged to. So the obvious thing to do is head to a planet that GrayCris abandoned under the pretense that it was a failed terraforming experiment. Murderbot suspects that GrayCris was actually illegally acquiring alien tech from the planet. Well, now another company is planning to do some survey work on the planet, which gives Murderbot an opportunity to go to the station and see if it can steal some useful info for Dr. Mensah to use in her court case.

Murderbot ends up on a ship with some hired security for the company that plans to investigate the planet. Its desire to not have to interact with humans is basically immediately thwarted, and it also has to deal with a human form bot named Miki, whose sweet naive nature gets on Murderbot's nerves. Anyway, Murderbot is eventually successful at getting the information that it needs, but it also has to save some humans and nearly get killed first. However, the way Miki and the humans interact, as well as the fact that the humans don't treat Murderbot like a killer who might go off any second leads it to ponder if it did the right thing in running away from Mensah and the others.

Until next time, when Murderbot will have to do more things it strongly dislikes, such as talking to people. I can relate, Murderbot.

I love MB so much!!! I blasted through this in one sitting and need to take a slight break before I start the next one. I was starting to think like MB as I was driving home from work (ie-eyes darting all around, perceiving the possible threat of those in the vehicles next to me cutting me off, etc.)

There aren't enough positive words in the English language for me to use to describe how much I love this series, the characters, the world, the snark, etc.

You can read this as pure entertainment, you can read this as a construct that is made to protect and kill is acting more humanely than the humans are and get all philosophical about "what is human anyway", etc. This book series will be multiple things to many people and that's the beauty of this book. It's smart and fun and action packed, with moments of down-time to think and ponder and process along with MB.

I will be pushing this onto all of our sci-fi/fantasy readers and gushing along with them when they tell me they've read it. LOVE IT! 5, love MB and ART, stars!

My thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan-Tor/Forge for an eACR copy of this book to read and review.

Review for publication elsewhere.
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Murderbot accidentally signs up for saving more humans, meets another bot and gets big jealous (and doesn't realize it), and continues their mission to really muck up GrayCris's illegal corporate activities and murdering spree, which in 2019, is mad relevant to our sociopolitical moment.

Murderbot…. Murderbot…. does whatever a Murderbot does.
Disappointed in myself for letting the last two (2) in this series slide for so long, but am excited to finish up the original set and get to Network Effect!

A fantastic addition to Murderbot's ongoing adventures. Martha Wells writes outstanding characters and well-developed plots within the restrictions of a novella format. Pick up this series - you won't be disappointed!

Murderbot continues to be the best! I'm sad that I only have one of these novellas left, but super excited that there's going to be a full novel coming out! I love seeing how Murderbot interacts with other bots, and in this book how they interact with Miki. Also nice to see Murderbot closing in on their goals.

Murderbot is seriously the best - if you need a short, sweet, sci-fi series featuring an antisocial non-murderous Murderbot, then you will love this. The writing is crisp and wonderfully snarky, I love it.

In this installment of the Murderbot series, our favourite SecUnit ends up protecting a new group of humans (at some risk to itself, as ever), finding out more conspiracies and hinky things going on, and making friends with a human-form robot who starts off too twee for words and yet somehow grows on both Murderbot and the reader. I do miss ART and dearly hope that all of Murderbot’s friends can come together somehow for Netflix and popcorn, but it’s another fun adventure all the same. The ending got to me, actually, more than I expected: Wells does a great job of making the companions of the week (so to speak!) relatable.

If you’re new to Murderbot, don’t start here. Despite the companion-of-the-week issue I slightly have with the series, the background information about SecUnits isn’t present in this book, which would make it unclear for a new reader, and Murderbot’s past is a big part of what drives it in the books too. Starting at the beginning and going through chronologically seems best to me.

I’m excited to see how the final novella wraps everything up: I have it open in my Kobo app. Here goes!

Though personally, not as enjoyable as the second entry in the Murderbot series, book three was much more revealing as to Murderbot's murky past and the very reason for their nom de guerre. Again, Martha Wells' famous accidental-hero takes readers on a ride of investigative intrigue made all the more enjoyable with Murderbot's often humorous, curmudgeonous, self-examining internal dialogue. Once again Murderbot is faced with well...murder, possible annihilation, and worst of all: emotions!

Glad to read more Murderbot's adventures...

Just as antisocial, just as funny and so much action!

The best thing about Murderbot is its thinly veiled disdain and annoyance at others. In ROGUE PROTOCOL, for someone that just wants to watch TV and get to the bottom of a corporate conspiracy, Murderbot sure does make a lot of allies.

WIth a brand new body and posing as a human, Murderbot has been stowing away on ships. It spends it’s time equally spent missing old companions and hating the stupid things that humans do. In ROGUE PROTOCOL, Murderbot spends most of her circuits interacting with Miki, a bot that feels more like a cherished pet than a robot. Miki is naive and trusted by her staff -- to the point that she refers to them as ‘friends’. Ever a loner, Murderbot never quite knows how to handle the amount of easy trust that Miki has to give.

As a downside, a lot of the plot felt like a repeat of the previous novellas. Murderbot pretends to be something else, hacks stuff, fights stuff, and gets a little too close to people. The conclusion that the first two novellas seemed to be ramping up to was postponed and pushed to the expected fourth novella. It really did feel like this should have been a short story before the next novella, or even a tie-in that featured Miki.

While I love watching Murderbot despair over making conversation and useless niceties, I kept waiting for more information in ROGUE PROTOCOL on the GrayCris conspiracy that never really came. I don’t know if Murderbot needs an overarching mystery to keep readers interested in its story. I can’t wait for the corporate conspiracy to (hopefully) wrap up in the next novella so Murderbot can do what Murderbot does best: watching tv and bonding with other robots.

Murderbot is becoming more comfortable thinking of itself as a person but being known as a security consultant means interacting with humans which is something Murderbot finds uncomfortable at best. Rogue Protocol, the third novella in the Murderbot Diaries finds the SecUnit (a robot, human hybrid) at loose ends after learning more about its past. Having uncovered the personal tragedy that haunts its’ fragmented memories, Murderbot is inclined to solve another mystery. Namely the corporate cover-up that readers first glimpsed in All Systems Red. In this novella, Murderbot impersonates both a human and a SecUnit, discovers what GrayCris Corporation has been trying so hard to hide, and finds itself hunted as humans finally notice a missing SecUnit.

I have nothing but love for this series. It is incredible how invested you can get in one SecUnit’s journey from lethal weapon to anti-social personhood. All Systems Red, the award-winning first novella in this series was one of my favorite reads of 2017 and the sequels don’t disappoint. I recommend that everyone drop what they’re doing and read these books immediately.

This third (and penultimate) entry in Martha Wells's The Murderbot Diaries picks up immediately after the prior episode Artificial Condition, setting Murderbot off a new adventure with a new group of humans and bots while continuing its search for evidence against the evil corporation, GrayCris.

Having been binge-listening to The Murderbot Diaries, I have to admit the formulaic structure of these episodes is getting a bit creaky. Both Artificial Condition and Rogue Protocol follow the exact same story beats - Murderbot sneaks aboard a ship, encounters and befriends an artificial intelligence aboard ship, then saves the humans. There's not a lot of room for surprise, and the similar length both of these entries share make these events feel very scheduled, the plot operating like clockwork in accordance to a rigorous three act structure. You could almost time the occurrence of both books' events right down the minute.

While the structure of The Murderbot Diaries is by now intimately familiar, Wells does find a few spots to make fresh. The character dynamics and personalities of Rogue Protocol are almost a direct inverse of the prior episode, with Murderbot attempting to hide from the ship's crew before facing its own natural instincts (or perhaps its base SecUnit coding is more accurate) to protect them. We get another view of human-AI interaction, helping to illustrate the diversity among even artificial man-made constructs. Some robots are forced into mortal combat for their owner's entertainment, while others are infantilized and treated more like pets. Actual equality between man and machine, though, is awfully rare and Murderbot at times struggles between its nature as a rogue unit and the expectations placed upon it by humans that view it as nothing more than a standard factory-line killing machine. This societal dimension of the story still has plenty of material left for Wells to explore, and it's been one of the highlights of the series thus far.

Kevin R. Free has settled into narrating duties, having found a comfortable style in the prior entry that he carries over to Rogue Protocol. There's perhaps little point in reinventing the wheel, narration-wise, three books into the series, and whether you dug Free's style or not thus far, you'll know exactly what to expect here. For me, it's a bit too gentle and even keel of a reading and the easy-listening nature of it makes my mind susceptible to wandering.

Rogue Protocol keeps on keeping on as the series builds towards its finale in book #4. Diving into this one right on the heels of its predecessor, though, makes the story feel a bit too repetitive as Wells eschews any narrative risks in order to deliver a safe story built in the exact same mold as book #2. If you've been enjoying this series so far, Rogue Protocol certainly isn't a deal breaker by any means, but it's not exactly fresh and exciting either.

I’m not sure what I can add to the comments of others about Martha Wells’s marvelous series of novellas about Murderbot, the security unit on a journey to humanity. This latest installment shows Murderbot posing as a human security consultant, coming into contact (and sometimes conflict) with military units and other automata, with humans both vile and admirable. I am reminded of a story I recently heard on NPR about how we humans tend to treat mechanical devices (even Roombas) as sentient. I suspect this benefits us more, through the practice of compassion, than it does our household appliances and automobiles. Slowly, Murderbot is learning to do the same.
I can’t wait for the next adventure!

Metaphorosis Reviews
3.5 stars

Summary:

A self-directed armed cyborg, finding its own way in the universe, decides to check out an abandoned terraforming station. Only the station isn’t quite as abandoned as everyone thought.

Review:

Having picked up the first in the series (All Systems Red) for free, I picked up this third on NetGalley as well. With some discomfort, I read the two in succession, despite not having the intervening book, and had no difficulty following along.

Where the first book got by with a thinly sketched plot, this third book stumbles. There’s no convincing logic for the whole setup of the book – a visit to the terraforming station. It works, but the poor foundation was a niggling irritant throughout my reading, exacerbated by an ending that screams ‘This was a discrete episode!’ (in a longer series).

That latter really is my complaint about the book and the series. There are four books planned to date, and there’s no getting away from the fact that this feels like a slightly large novel cut into four novellas. A subplot that might have worked well in a novel here feels artificial and forced. The lead-in feels authorial, and the ending is abrupt and jarring. While I can see the potential for a larger arc across the series, it feels like it should have been the plot of a single book. Unlike the first book, this book isn’t satisfying on its own.

On the plus side, the voice and character work nearly as well this time as before. There are unfortunately even more parentheticals (way too many) than before, but generally the piece moves along well.

If this piece had been the latter part of a novel, I’d have liked it better. As is, it left me dissatisfied.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[I posted a review of the first three books in the series.]

An amusing, thoughtful series of novellas

These are a lot of fun. In the first three books in Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries — All Systems Red, Artificial Condition and Rogue Protocol — we follow the adventures of a SecUnit who has hacked its governor module and, therefore, mostly autonomous. It’s a wonderful guide to this setting, and in each of these books we are given a little more detail on how the universe is set up and runs. All the while, the SecUnit (who does get a couple of personalized names in the books) struggles with its distaste and dislike of humans, and a stubborn urge to protect them. (They’re just so soft and feckless, after all…)

I don’t want to delve too deeply into the plots, as they are all quite short and it would likely throw out too many spoilers. Nevertheless, it may be helpful to provide at least one synopsis, so here’s the official one for All Systems Red:

“As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure.”

In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety.

But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern.

On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid — a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is.

But when a neighboring mission goes dark, it’s up to the scientists and their Murderbot to get to the truth.

These events kick off a journey of discovery for the Murderbot (a nickname it gave itself after a deadly event pre-All Systems Red), as it tries to carve out a space for itself in a universe that treats bots and SecUnits with disdain, as less-than-human, and yet has become almost completely dependent on them. This disdain is pretty much shared by the Murderbot, though, who oftentimes makes it clear that there is nothing more annoying in the universe than humans…

“The reason why they were trying to kill, maim, etc., each other wasn’t the SecUnit’s problem, it was for the humans’ supervisor to deal with. (Or to willfully ignore until the whole project devolved into a giant clusterfuck and your SecUnit prayed for the sweet relief of a massive accidental explosive decompression, not that I’m speaking from experience or anything.)” [Rogue Protocol]

Murderbot must navigate a series of adventures in which is unwittingly finds itself embroiled — from the investigation in the first novella; to an accidental protection detail as it investigates the events that led itself to bestow that monicker (in Artificial Condition); and then yet another surprise stint protecting a group of sketchy humans while it hunts for evidence to take down a mega-corporation (in Rogue Protocol). All of this when, really, all it wants to do is watch its favourite soap operas.

This brings me nicely on to what makes this series stand out: Murderbot itself, and its interactions with not only the various humans it comes into contact with, but also other bots/artificial intelligences. Easily my favourite was ART, in Artificial Condition. (I really don’t want to spoil who that is, because part of the joy of that character comes from learning about it as you read.) And Miki… poor, dear Miki, in the third book.

Murderbot itself is an interesting character, and especially the interplay between its ambivalence towards humans, and its persistent, frustrating desire to protect them from themselves. All of this, and Murderbot also suffers from an anxiety disorder…

“So, I’m awkward with actual humans. It’s not paranoia about my hacked governor module, and it’s not them; it’s me. I know I’m a horrifying murderbot, and they know it, and it makes both of us nervous, which makes me even more nervous. Also, if I’m not in the armor then it’s because I’m wounded and one of my organic parts may fall off and plop on the floor at any moment and no one wants to see that.” [All Systems Red]

This anxiety, combined with Murderbot’s dislike of humans and their mores makes for plenty of awkward, oft-amusing moments, whether the humans in question are hostile towards our protagonist (at which point, it frequently ponders how stupid they are when bitching out an android specifically designed to put them down); or when they are are more progressive, and believe that androids deserve certain freedoms and shouldn’t be treated as non-humans (at which point, Murderbot attempts to avoid all instances in which it will be encouraged to talk about its feelings).

Wells’s writing is fantastic, and the author keeps the story moving along at a pleasant clip — i.e., not too rushed, but nor does she get bogged down with info-dumping, etc. The books are filled with amusing asides, observations and turns of phrase (“After a subjective half hour and an objective 3.4 seconds”). For example:

“Young humans can be impulsive. The trick is keeping them around long enough to become old humans. This is what my crew tells me and my own observations seem to confirm it.” [Artificial Condition]

There’s a strong temptation to quote liberally from these three novellas, but I will resist. Needless to say, if you’re looking for a lighter science fiction adventure series, one that you can read relatively quickly, then the Murderbot Diaries should suit perfectly. Each book is interesting in itself, and I like the way a bigger picture is being unveiled over the course of the series. The humour is just right, as is the action, and neither overwhelm the conversation the books seem to be having with the reader — the classic one about A.I.s and their sense of self. Only, this time, the perspective is from that of an android. With issues.

Very highly recommended. I really enjoyed these, and can’t wait to read the final book!