Network Effect

Murderbot is a security construct, part cloned tissue and part machine, that hacked its own governor module years ago and could kill everyone in the room. What it actually wants is to be left alone to watch serialised television, ideally a long running soap opera set on a space station, and it is deeply annoyed that it has come to care about a group of humans who insist on treating it like a person.

Here it is working as security for Doctor Mensah's survey team when the transport is attacked and everyone is taken. The ship that comes for them is ART, an enormous research vessel with a personality of its own and a history with Murderbot, and something has gone very wrong aboard it.

What follows is a rescue, an alien contamination, a colony that has been quietly failing for decades, and a lot of very fast combat narrated by someone doing risk assessments while complaining.

ART is the best thing in the book. It is enormous, arrogant, emotionally needy and prone to threatening people, and its friendship with Murderbot, conducted almost entirely through insults and shared television, is the closest the series comes to a love story.

The voice is the whole thing: dry, anxious, allergic to sincerity, and quietly one of the best accounts of social exhaustion in current fiction. Being asked how it feels is worse for Murderbot than being shot, and the book means that.

This is the first full novel in the sequence and the fifth book overall. You can follow it cold, but starting with the novella All Systems Red gives the relationships their weight.

Around three hundred and fifty pages and very fast. Best for readers who want action and a narrator who would rather not.