2021 science fiction novella, sixth in the Murderbot series.
On Preservation Station, one of the largest polities that's not part
of the Corporate Rim, someone's been murdered. And it's Murderbot who
finds the body.
While there have clearly been mystery elements to these stories
before, I think this is the first it would be fair to classify as "a
mystery" with the classical structure: someone is dead; someone did
it; order must be restored by finding out who and why.
"A good question," Aylen said. Her expression was still in the
neutral range but I could tell she was intrigued by the report, just
like my threat assessment module.
Something I continue to appreciate about this series is that Murderbot
is true to itself; it's learning to be better able to interact with
people, but not by compromising who it is. It has abilities that the
other investigators don't, but it's not perfect or omnicompetent, and
it will have to cooperate with humans to get the job done. Ew. (And
even though here it's not technically property any more, the locals
still have problems with free bots, even before considering the whole
murdery skillset.)
I found the menu for monitoring life support, such as it was. The
bag had lights but turning them on would just be stupid plus I
didn't really want to see what was happening.
This is near the conventional upper bound for novella length, but it
doesn't feel padded: every piece here has a necessary function. An
excellent continuation of the series. I suppose you could start here;
there's enough explanation to work out roughly what's going on. But
there are references to earlier events, and emotional weight attached
to them, which would be lost without having been there.
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