skybridge

babewiththepower.bsky.social · @babewiththepower.bsky.social@bridge.neodb.net

Rated System Collapse 6/10

Considering this book 7 picks up where book 5 left off, it's a good thing I'm reading these back to back in a fairly short time. However, if I was reading these as they were published, I think I wouldn't have been happy about the way this was done.<br/><br/>I was pleased to start book 5 and find the return of ART just like I'd wished, but at first was a little annoyed at how that started off with Perihelion without ART. Of course, once that worked out I understood the need for that dramatic lack. Eventually, I was just slightly miffed at the time "lost" of interactions like those I'd so enjoyed in book 2. Understandable, I just wanted more.<br/><br/>Which is to explain that returning to the endpoint of 5 and then spending almost the entire book with not-ART again was annoying. Yes, I know it's just another copy of ART, but it's not the same. Just like 2.0 wasn't Murderbot, the drone wasn't quite ART.<br/><br/>Then, as I mentioned after reading book 5, I never found the whole "alien contamination" particularly threatening or interesting nor the humans who were threatened or changed by it either. Throw in all the time spent poking around, above, and inside caves/underground hallways and at times I just skimmed.<br/><br/>Finally, spending 40% of the book repeatedly referring to some event but only halfway before truncating details with a "redacted" was frustrating and at first confusing. Because of the out-of-chronology book 6, at first I thought I'd forgotten something from book 5 that Murderbot was choosing to not talk about by doing that. What a relief to finally get an explanation which for me was pretty anticlimactic. It never felt like something that would actually happen throughout all the running around to save all the humans.<br/><br/>At least the relationships with other humans continue to be satisfying with an ever-increasing number of "its humans." Amusing for it to mention how weird it is to have accumulated so many that it thinks of in this way that it was having to refer to/think of them as separate groups. The rest of the planetary humans? Meh. It was nice and all that the Perihelion humans pulled together some documentary to persuade them to not become indentured/enslaved to corporates, but as abovementioned, it didn't seem that high stakes. It somehow lacked tension.<br/><br/>And once again Murderbot is the cause for yet another SecUnit to break free. Thanks to 2.0 again! There's several now just running around the universe and I would find THAT much more interesting than the time spent on whether some humans will get some sort of ultimately-unthreatening "contamination" or enslaved.<br/><br/>Overall, while I enjoyed Murderbot's internal dialogue and creep towards further evolution, all the abovementioned things reduced my enjoyment because of a collection of somewhat minor frustrations. "The internet" claims there's a contract for a total of 9 Murderbot books, so if so, I hope there's less frustrations than in this one.

#book

Published 2026-08-18 17:59 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere