Sophia Rose Reviews: System Collapse by Martha Wells

Today Sophia Rose returns with #7 in Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries series, System Collapse
Sit back and blast off with her!

System Collapse by Martha Wells

#7 The Murderbot Diaries

Sci-Fi

Publisher: Tordotcom

Published:  11.14.23

Pages: 256

Rating: 4.5 stars

Format: eARC

Source: NetGalley

Sellers: Amazon

ADD TO: GoodReads

GoodReads Blurb:

The million-copy, New York Times bestselling Murderbot series is back in another full-length novel adventure!

Am I making it worse? I think I'm making it worse.

Everyone's favorite lethal SecUnit is back.

Following the events in Network Effect, the Barish-Estranza corporation has sent rescue ships to a newly-colonized planet in peril, as well as additional SecUnits. But if there’s an ethical corporation out there, Murderbot has yet to find it, and if Barish-Estranza can’t have the planet, they’re sure as hell not leaving without something. If that something just happens to be an entire colony of humans, well, a free workforce is a decent runner-up prize.

But there’s something wrong with Murderbot; it isn’t running within normal operational parameters. ART’s crew and the humans from Preservation are doing everything they can to protect the colonists, but with Barish-Estranza’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams, they’re going to have to hope Murderbot figures out what’s wrong with itself, and fast!

Sophia Rose's Review:

Murderbot is right where it doesn’t want to be- on a planet that has a weird alien contamination, dealing with a grabby-hands corporation, and corralling humans.  Fun times jumping right back in and reading the next installment in the addicting series.

 

System Collapse is the seventh installment in The Murderbot Diaries series.  The series novellas and books are closely linked so it must be read in order for optimum understanding.  No worries, it reads quickly.

 

The storyline is tightly connected to, Network Effect, the fifth book in the series as a continuation so it opens to a scene not days later from the conclusion of that book.  Murderbot is physically recovered from that adventure and is now planet side once again acting as security for one group of the combined Preservation and University of Mihira-New Tideland team who are trying to help the colonists repair their broken or outdated equipment and, most of all, keep them from getting carted off as slave labor by the also present Barish-Estranza corporation.

 

Murderbot is not up to hundred percent, though.  He’s experiencing the fallout from what happened to him.  Even if he wasn’t needed out in the field to protect the humans with the assistance of one of ART’s bots, he has no plans to undergo a trauma treatment because that’s for humans, right?  But, he’s struggling to keep it together and ART and the humans know it.  It was interesting seeing him have to handle this aspect of being a bot-human construct who doesn’t like his human parts like this weird emotional weakness that is interfering with his functionality.

 

System Collapse is introspective through the first half and takes the time to build the pace and tension steadily to a big, satisfying climax of action.  I enjoy Murderbot, or SecUnit as the others call it, as the central figure, but the surrounding cast of recurring characters are pretty sensational, too.  I was glad my favorite ART was right in the thick of it.  ART is the university’s powerful ship bot and SecUnit’s “don’t-call-it-friendship-grrr-or-relationship-ewww” who transferred part of himself into one of its away bots is there giving orders and niggling SecUnit.  The lone Preservation member on the team is faithful Ratthi who is a trouble magnet that SecUnit is determined to keep safe.  And, a new pair who SecUnit is still warming to (and it takes a long time to warm to new humans if it ever does) are ART’s university humans, Iris, who is team leader and Tarek a specialist with a surprising past. 

 

Side note, there is a romantic skirmish for a brief moment involving Ratthi and someone that was amusing because of how riled easygoing Ratthi got.

 

The twists and turns building in the action to a stellar finish were all I could have wanted.  Some good surprises mixed in there.  Things ended at a good place to lead forward to more adventures in the series.  If you’re a futuristic sci-fi fan who is open to a bot construct as the lead character, you really must read this series.

Author Bio:

Martha Wells has been a science fiction and fantasy author since her first fantasy novel was published in 1993. Her New York Times Bestselling series The Murderbot Diaries has won Nebula Awards, Hugo Awards, Locus Awards, and an American Library Association/YALSA Alex Award. Her work also includes The Books of the Raksura series, the Ile-Rien series, and several other fantasy novels, most recently Witch King (Tordotcom, 2023), as well as short fiction, non-fiction, and media tie-ins for Star Wars, Stargate: Atlantis, and Magic: The Gathering. Her work has also appeared on the Philip K. Dick Award ballot, the British Science Fiction Association Award ballot, the USA Today Bestseller List, and has been translated into twenty-four languages.

https://www.marthawells.com/