Platform Decay
by Martha Wells
Genres: Science FictionPages: 256
Series: Murderbot Diaries #8
Rating:
Synopsis:Everyone's favorite lethal SecUnit is back in the next installment in Martha Wells' bestselling and award-winning Murderbot Diaries series.
Having someone else support your bad decision feels kind of good.
Having volunteered to run a rescue mission, Murderbot realises 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—)
I received a copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Platform Decay is the latest of Martha Wells’ Murderbot books, and it has the usual ingredients: a Murderbot who’s very done with humans (but not so done it’s actually going to murder them, at least not unless you provoke it), stupid corporates being broadly horrifying, and a bunch of humans who need protecting from the latter by the former. In addition, this one includes a torus station, which Murderbot didn’t know it’d hate so much until it was trying to traverse it.
I have to admit, I’m starting to think if Murderbot needs a break, or the feeling of a tighter narrative arc, or something: this book felt like essentially more of the same. It’s fun because Murderbot’s narrative voice is fun (mostly; caveat below), and because we care about Murderbot, but there’s much that feels like the status quo. Maybe there’s more coming due to Three’s actions in this book? There are some developments (Murderbot’s got a therapy module! and it felt like it was trying way harder to avoid lethal violence than before; Three’s getting itself involved)… but it’s hard to be sure whether we’re going somewhere specific or whether we’re just riding shotgun on Murderbot’s mission of the week, and this felt a bit more like the latter.
In addition, the narrative voice in the first chapter was too Murderbot. There were three or four parenthetical thoughts per paragraph, and it really stuttered the action and made it almost unintelligible to read at times. That’s partly because of how the book starts, and the fact that Wells seems to have wanted to make a certain aspect of the situation unclear until Murderbot’s “oh, by the way” (which failed for me, it was completely obvious).
I did enjoy the story once I got into it, but it has lost some of the freshness, and it feels like maybe it needs a heavier edit or something to rein in some of the inclination toward wordiness: yes, that’s the way Murderbot is, but it still needs to be readable. Or maybe I just need a longer break from Murderbot — that’s possible too.
Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)
I sort of felt this way about System Collapse, and was disappointed in myself for not loving it?
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Apparently I was a bit meh on that too (review) so… at least we’re not alone?!
I was starting wondering about the same thing with last book. Still, I think I’ll try to listen to it when it’s available through my library
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It’s still fun, particularly after the first chapter, but it doesn’t feel as fresh and exciting as it did, I’d say.
I can’t wait to try this. But it’s disappointing to hear about the narrative/structure choices, sounds like it tried a “gotcha” and it didn’t quite work and that would drive me nuts too. And there is such a thing of a series wearing out its welcome, I hope this isn’t starting to happen.
To be honest, that wasn’t a huge part of the story, but it did make the first chapter feel unnecessarily disjointed (in my opinion anyway). I really hope Murderbot can freshen up and grab me more again, because I do love it a lot.
I have loved all of the Murderbot stories, but looking back over them I think the ones I have loved the most are the novellas. I think that Murderbot works best in the short format, where everything has to be tighter. (That said, I’ve given all the books 4.5-5 stars, so I’m absolutely going to keep buying and reading these books. The only installment in this series that I gave a lower rating was one of the short stories, which I still rated at 4 stars.)
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I feel like this could’ve gone up a star for me if it were more in the 200 page range… I feel like it’s just getting a touch too indulgent with Murderbot’s ramblings and slowing things down.