The book continues the series started by a string of novellas. I have read the first two but not the two following ones. That didn’t really matter, and it was easy to get into the story straight away. Murderbot is guarding his human friends (it still has difficulties grasping that those humans don't think about it as expandable) on a mission. When they are returning, some humans and the bot are kidnapped through a wormhole. The ship they end up on is familiar; it is the same ship that Murderbot’s AI friend is controlling, or was controlling. The AI mind appears to be deleted, and the ship is controlled by strange-looking, partly humanoid, creatures. After the Murderbot takes care of the invaders (he is shot in the head at first sight, and it takes a few minutes to recuperate from that, even for a rogue Security Unit robot) he and his humans must find what is going on.
The book is in the same style as the earlier, shorter works. The Murderbot is a delightfully cynical person, who strongly believes he doesn’t understand humans and emotion, but actually understands them far better than he himself suspects. Some of that knowledge is, of course, slightly tainted by those thousands of hours of watching popular dramas he consumes - sometimes in the background while he is speaking with humans or doing other non-important things which don’t demand a lot of processing cycles.
A fun, fast-moving book with real characters with fascinating personalities - even if many of them weren’t actually persons. The Murderbot himself showed a really well-described character growth during the series and, even during this one book. Eventually, he is learning that there really is something called friendship and there really are people who are ready to take dangerous changes for his safety. The book (combined with the earlier works) would make the best action-scifi TV series ever, but the budget would surely be huge.
350 pp.
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