Having someone else support your bad decision feels kind of good.

After volunteering to run a rescue mission, Murderbot realizes that it will have to spend significant time with a bunch of humans it doesn’t know.

Including human children. Ugh.

This may well call for… eye contact!

(Emotion check: Oh, for f—)

Platform Decay is due for publication on 16th July from Tor – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org

The iconic status of Martha Wells’ Murderbot invention has been confirmed and amplified by the excellent TV adaptation staring Alexander Skarsgård and with even the comically awful soap opera Sanctuary Moon rendered with lovingly detailed extracts. This added to my anticipation of the next book (#8) in the series and I will confess that – at first – I found it a little harder to dive into than I had hoped. I sort of bounced off the first 20% like a space capsule failing to re-enter the atmosphere and turned to other books for a while, but then, on a long plane ride back from Corfu I found the time and opportunity to dive back in and thoroughly enjoyed the whole rest of the book and appreciated a little more some of the complex set-up that had made the opening drag a little more than I was used to.

In that experience I think I identified what, for me, is the essence of Murderbot and also why the transition from the initial novellas to full length novels can be a tricky one.

The format of Murderbot’s openings always seem to have been an ‘in media res’ crisis point where (1) laconic observations and (2) incidental world/character building merge with (3) immersive technical details. It’s a sound story telling strategy and the backstory of what brought us to this crisis point can always be dripped in later. However, in this case the third element seemed to have dominated at the start. As the blurb says, this is a rescue mission. We have a sense of complexity as Murderbot is  breaking into a massive world of a torus shaped Larry Niven style Ring World with huge zones of habitation jostling more or less neighbourly along a ravaged planet’s artificial ring system. The opening break in, with Murderbot being assisted by his newly liberated mentee the ex-secunit named Three, does gone on rather long without me really understanding what’s going on or – more importantly – why I should care.

The story took off for me (literally as I was on a plane at the time) when Murderbot moved beyond the technical intro and started interacting idiosyncratically with humans again – that after all is where the magic of the situation and the character lies. It is something too, that the TV adaptation has understood so well in fleshing out the characters and personas of the humans of the Preservation Alliance so they enhance the strangeness of Murderbot itself.

The plot of Platform Decay feels a bit like the Sam Hargrave movie Extraction (2020) starring Chris Hemsworth – which was itself based on a 2014 graphic novel Ciudad.  Murderbot is charged with tracking down and retrieving a party of humans who have by some mischance, ended up on the Torus world. To be fair the complexity of the opening may just be a reflection of the complexity of the setting, but once humans and Murderbot meet it all gets quite deliciously entertaining. Of course there is, or was, a plan of escape, and of course – as Field Marshall Moltke is reputed to have said, “no plan survives first contact with the enemy.”

There is the familiar pacey technology augmented action as Murderbot’s drones and ability to hack into almost any system give it an edge of perception to set against the fact that it is always horrendously outnumbered.  There are the conversations with its human companions, conducted in different feeds like the different family chat groups we all have on messenger and WhatsApp, that lead to some tense moments of decision. There is the fact that, unlike humans in stressed situations, Murderbot has the processing capacity to indulge in some simultaneous self-examination with multipley parenthesised reflections and asides.

I sighed (internally, because if there aren’t any humans to see it and be annoyed by it there’s no point).

Scoutdrone1 arrived at a marker point running up the wall and cozied ip against it. I directed it to discharge its reserve power intro the paint on my signal. It’s not a lot of power, these are tiny drones and their batteries are even tinier. You can’t even electrocute a human with it. (I only tried the once.) (They provoked it.)

Murderbot’s impatience with human beings and disdain for the inherent messiness of the human condition pokes through the narrative.

I had a map but I could have followed the smell of human sweat and old socks to the nearest locker room. There were no cubbies or partitions or anything, which was normal. Usual, anyway. I had heard a lot of humans comment adversely on it over the years. The word “perverted” often came up. Which I totally understood. Bare human parts are disgusting, no-one should have to look at them.

The torus makes for an interesting setting with a variety of relatively autonomous regions, some with vast sea spaces, that Murderbot and its companions have to navigate a path through. It’s a bit like the TV show Race Across the World only with a smaller support team and more people trying to shoot at you. However, it does mean that the Barish-Estranza corporation – which is of course at the root of Murderbot’s problems – does not have the entire run of every sector. There is scope for locals to become embroiled in the action in a world where protest and strike action seem at least possible, if not always effective.

Transport across what must be huge distances – for the Torus, in its totality, is like a continuous bracelet of Moons occupying the orbit around our Earth – is possible through the rather hazardous framework of a transport tube around the planetside inner track of the Torus. The vision that Wells has of the future is a significantly dystopian one with runaway corporate power leading vast numbers of people into indentured servitude. The flip side of exploiting people is exploiting resources, and I find it ironic that I was reading this section on the view of the planet shortly after finishing Kalili Laleh’s excellent collection of essays on Extractive Capitalism.

You could see that there was nothing on the land masses, no green, no blue, no red, and no visual indicators of atmosphere left. There were deep dark gouges, chunks missing from the curve of what should have been its horizon. The planet had been mined to extinction, mined nearly to pieces. It was awful.

Echoing that destruction Laleh cited the grim quote by Cecil Rhodes – the mining magnet and Musk’s ideological antecedent – “To think of the stars that you see overhead, those vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”

Where the future depicted in Star Trek: The Original Series was in many ways utopian and egalitarian (much to the annoyance of right wingers who are blind to the series deliberate diversity), Wells gives us a starker warning, but in an entertaining package. Like Spock, Data and SevenOfNine, Murderbot is the outsider on the edge of humanity who gives us a better understanding of what it means to be human.

And it seems that it is not just Three who has been given a new life of independence by Murderbot’s governor hacking routine. Although Three as mentee (and maybe Murderbot as mentor) still have a lot to learn.

Three looked at me and said, “Perihelion-drone is angry that I didn’t follow the plan.”

Yeah, I bet. “You know that’s a you problem.”

“Oh.” Three was disconcerted. Welcome to the consequences of your actions, Three. It said hopefully, “It can’t be a we problem?”

Platform Decay is due for publication on 16th July from Tor – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org