Reading roundup: mostly Murderbot (+ Unspoken Name)
Reading is still going pretty well! I'm about a month behind, on book count, where I was last year, but catching up from being about two months behind, so not too bad. Currently reading The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry by C.M.Waggoner (loose sequel to one of the most enjoyable books I read last year and really fun in its own right), which is a digital library loan, so it's taking priority over things that won't just disappear off my Kindle app, and then the other day my digital hold on A Desolation Called Peace came in, so that will be next. I'm also still reading Master of One and A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking in hard copy, and just got my hands on a copy of the Abigail novella in the RoL-verse (thanks much, meathiel! <3), so I'm set for the next little a while, I think :)
6. K.A.Larkwood, The Unspoken Name -- I wrote last time that I went "fully expecting [it] to belong to the class of modern fantasy books that I think of as 'bisexual mermaids are valid', which tend to really not work for me, but it's actually not at all that vibe and I'm really enjoying it so far (25% in) -- the characters are great, the worldbuilding feels like a fully-baked fantasy world, the writing is really lovely, and it's funny and thoughtful and just... good. I'm honestly impressed this is a first novel." Having finished, I'm still impressed and still liked it a whole lot. Really liked the worldbuilding all the way through (it's high fantasy with elves and orcs and gods but with a weirdly sci-fi feel that made me crave science fiction once the book was done, as you'll see). Continued to like all the characters, including the ones I never expected to get a POV. Continued to really like the writing, which does this thing I really like of navigating smoothly between high-flown poetic language and simple, crass speech, and used it to really nice comedic and/or character effect (e.g. Csorwe's line, "Before the earthly throne and mansion of the Lady of Fuck Knows"). I think the plot maybe didn't feel terribly coherent, but out of the plot, character, setting, and language "doorways", plot is the one I care about the least, and anyway, stuff happened and was interesting on the immediate level, so it's not like the plot is bad -- it just didn't feel terribly novel-shaped to me. About the only thing that didn't work for me was the romance, which I think is just confirmation that I'm pretty much not interested in F/F as a thin (I can certainly enjoy stories where the F/F is one of the things happening, and I can (and occasionally do) ship F/F couples, but even when I like both characters (as I did here) and the tropes (as I also did here), the relationship itself just doesn't do anything extra for me? Like, I don't seem to like them more as a couple than I do as individuals, and in fact am less interested in them as a couple than in them individually (or than in their relationships with other people) -- it's downright weird how little I care about the relationship, but there you go.
When I started the book, a good chunk of what I knew was "something something Orc girlfriends", and it was one of the reasons I was not too enthused, because I've tried a couple of high fantasy books with Orcs as protagonists and they all seemed to be about deconstructing Tolkienesque high fantasy in ways that don't appeal to me at all. But this is nothing like that -- Csorwe is presumably an Orc (although that word is never used -- only Oshaaru, their own name for themselves), and she has tusks and gray skin and black blood and yellow eyes, but the Oshaaru seem to be people like any other, not misunderstood or reviled or whatever, just people, with their own traditions and beauty standards, and her being Oshaaru is not any kind of statement, just a worldbuilding detail. Similarly, the ~Elves have a range of personalities and professions and are just people, too -- people who happen to have elongated ears which tend to betray their emotions and be on the tall side. The other societies are no less cool -- I loved the giant snake-person, Atharaisse, and wish she'd been around more than she was. Spoilers from here And even the Qarsazhi are not just a bunch of religious nutcases who oppress their mages (although they probably come the closest to being not very nuanced in this book, since the only POV we get from there is an antagonist) -- you get some sympathetic characters with them, in addition to Shuthmili -- Dr Aritsa and Malkhaya the Warden.
In addition to the high fantasy cultures worldbuilding, the magic in this series is very interesting -- the ideas individually are not unique: magic that destroys the wielder, magic that comes from the gods, magic that is tightly controlled because it is believed to come from something evil, mages that work in coteries like the Quincuriate -- but the specifics of how everything is put together is not something I've ever seen before. And I like that, basically, magic is a destructive force in all cases, but the ways of dealing with that are different in each culture / for the different practitioners -- Sethennai and his "prophylactic" gloves, the human sacrifice of the Unspoken, the tether of the Quincuriate which sacrificed autonomy/personality for power and a longer life (even a kind of immortality). I also liked that each option was something a magical practitioner could consider a worthwhile trade-off -- Csorwe is horrified by the idea of the tether, and Shuthmili comes to choose a different thing, but Oranna and Sethennai are both intrigued/a lot less horrified by the trade-offs (or at least claim to be).
Finally, I quite liked the idea of the Maze and the overall feel it gave the worldbuilding. It's just magical portal travel between worlds, really, but the Maze itself feels like a thing, rather than just a way to whisk people from one world to the next -- and there are ships and stations and the Maze reclaiming dead worlds -- all of which gave the setting a science-fiction-y feel. I don't think I've come across that before, either.
But, OK, while the worldbuilding was the first thing that jumped out at me, I also really liked the characters. Sethennai, naturally, is very much the kind of character I gravitate towards, and I was really interested in his relationship with Csorwe and with Tal, as unequal as it was, and even in his past with Oranna (though Oranna herself was not very interesting to me). I liked Csorwe a lot as a POV character, and also for her own sake, and was surprised by how much I ended up liking Tal after we got some POV segments from him (though overall, I'm not at all sure we needed quite so many POVs). I also ended up really liking Shuthmili, who is very much my kind of character, too. It was also really enjoyable to get a view of Csorwe and of Shuthmili from Tal, and of Tal from Csorwe and from inside his own head; in fact, Csorwe and Tal's very dysfunctionally siblingy relatipnship of petty bickering and one-upmanship ended up being my favorite character-related thing in the book.
I feel like, more than a coherent plot, the book is held together thematically -- and, actually, now that I look back on it, it's not just that the worldbuilding left me craving sci-fi that drove me to read all the Murderbots I hadn't yet read after this -- there are a lot of similar themes of self-determination, personhood and privacy, what you owe (and don't owe) the person who rescues you -- that kind of echo across the two. They are not themes that resonate with me personally, and I felt like this book hit them a little too head on, a bit on the nose, but they are good, broad, deep themes, so it's not something I would even quibble about.
The writing worked for me really well on the whole, with the very minor exception that sometimes we would get scene-setting detail that did not -- I think there were small patches of description that felt like the author describing stuff they wanted to get across, rather than the characters noticing the things they would specifically notice, and those were the bits I was tempted to skim. But they were very brief and more than made up for by internal monologue and great lines. I marked down A LOT of quotes:
Quotes:
Csorwe walking to her sacrifice: "She tried not to think about the flowers. They were scentless. She had seen them so many times. She had seen as many flowers as she needed to see. She had eaten enough cabbage soup."
"Nothing in this world or any other deserved her fear. That was all very well, but there was a great difference between climbing the steps to the Shrine of the Unspoken and going out to buy groceries. Csorwe had spent a lifetime readying herself to die, not to talk to strangers."
"she was educated in the threat, the promise, and the scientific accomplishment of violence."
General Psang: "The second sure thing is the first and most favoured of my wives. She is swift. She is terrible. And she is as loyal in her way as the hunger of the desert. Atharaisse! Sand-wife! Come up!"
Csorwe, to Atharaisse: Ma'am... are your fangs poisonous?
Atharaisse: Ahh. The sacred terror. The blessing of Iriskavaal. The kind death, the cold fire, the destroying sweetness... they are venomous, little hatchling.
The Siren: "It was incongruous. More than incongruous. This was something that had pierced through into the ordinary world."
"He gave her an uncertain smile; Aritsa was not a smiling man, so this made him look like someone trying to pronounce a foreign language for the first time."
Csorwe looking at a Qarsazh painting: "a young man with sword and shield trampling on a dragon. He had an intensely distant expression, as though conjugating verbs in his head."
"Talasseres introduced them both, perhaps hoping he could coax someone else into mispronouncing her name"
Csorwe: "'I think... if Sethennai ever encounters a higher power, I'll wait and see who blinks first.' [...] Sethennai regarded the Siren as a powerful older woman capable of being charmed. Women of a certain age loved Sethennai, even when they were giant snakes or evil rocks."
Oranna: But please understand that I do not have the time to navigate around your self-regard.
"Got time to navigate around my dick," said Tal.
Malkhaya, summoned back from the dead: "He remembered the man he had been as though they had been to school together, and not seen one another since."
Shuthmili's Inquisitor aunt: "She looked as though she had been cut out carefully with scissors." (There are a lot of similes and metaphors in this book -- dense enough that I found them really noticeable, but they're also for the most part really neat similes/metaphors, so while I think there probably could've been fewer of them, I didn't mind.
Csorwe, playing a thug: "It was wonderful what you could achieve by acting dense and looking violent."
"What does Archer do?"
"It's more about what it doesn't do," said Shuthmili. "For instance, it doesn't turn forests to ash. It doesn't boil rivers dry. It doesn't reduce cities to puddles of glass. If you're a neighbour of Aqrsazh and we've taken advantage of you in some way, and you don't feel friendly towards us, and you're thinking of getting back at us, you might first think carefully about how much you enjoy it when Archer doesn't do anything."
"Csorwe wanted to know how Shuthmili had ended up so strange and entertianing, when she'd grown up with a bunch of pencil-sharpening wankers who probably alphabetised their thumbscrews."
About Sethennai: "He had a good way of holding himself apart, as if he was a passing visitor in the world, amused by the locals but ultimately not involved. Frictionless. The mistake people made was trying to stick to him."
"Oranna rose up from where she was standing like something returning from the grave: bent and boneless, remembering in slow sequence how to operate the pulleys and counterweights of her sinews."
Csorwe (re: Oranna): She killed almost everyone-- Should she go back to the House of Silence to--to--uh, to face justice?
Sethennai (laughing): Exalted Sages, Csorwe. If there ever comes a day when anyone faces justice, then you and I had better hope we're both far, far away.
Re: Sethennai: "He never lost his temper, which made it so easy to believe that he was being reasonable and you were a petulant child."
"It couldn't really be so easy to do this. If it had been, she could have left any time. There must be something she had forgotten, some unscalable invisible wall. She couldn't believe the whole natural world was going to let this happen."
Oranna on Qarsazh: "Warm weather, wonderful food, art, fashion, music... just a shame about all the Qarsazhi, really."
"There was no sound here at all, just the buzzin of the seals, like dust made audible."
Shuthmili's expression: "a waxen mask of distaste, belonging to someone who had not only seen a maggot, but who was resigned to seeing maggots every day, and had begun to be disappointed in their quality."
Re: Sethennai: "The man would have looked sleepily amused at a wake."
"[Tal] realised that he missed Csorwe. She was both the most boring and the most unfriendly person he had ever met, with all the personality of a prison shiv, but he wanted to get drunk and pick a fight with someone."
So, anyway -- this was a good book, and I'm looking forward to more in this series (pushed back to next year, I guess) and more from this author, because that was a very impressive debut (apparently Larkwood is eligible for the Campbell Astounding, and if I end up getting a supporting membership this year, and Larkwood ends up getting nominated, I expect I'd be voting for her).
7. Martha Wells, Rogue Protocol (Murderbot 3) -- So back in 2017, along with everyone else, I read the first Murderbot novella and really enjoyed it (although I was also in the presumed minority who was reminded by it of a different rogue-cyborg-gets-adopted-by-humans book, Gromyko's Kosmo~luhi). Then in 2018 I read the sequel and LOVED the ART & Murderbot buddy duo. I had a copy of Rogue Protocol then, too, started reading it hoping to finish by Worldcon, but got bored at the one-third mark and wandered away... for two and a half years XD But once I went back to it, it turned out that it's not that I didn't like this third novella, it's that there was a specific, fairly short stretch, the abandoned space station gothic-feeling one, before the shooting starts, that I found boring, and once I was past that specific bit, I liked it again just fine. (I'd also liked the first part, while Murderbot is traveling, but it feels kind of disconnected from the rest of the book -- except thematically, I mean, the way all the novellas are linked.) It still ended up being my least favorite of the Murderbot stories so far, but I did still enjoy it overall. Spoilers from here
I never did warm up to poor Miki, really, but I did like Don Abene, and I liked Murderbot feeling a sense of professional superiority over the human security team (before they turned out to be assassins, anyway). I think my favorite part was actually the first bit, while Murderbot was being Security Consultant Rin and helping a bunch of hapless and mostly-doomed humans navigate their various petty problems while aggressively not-caring about them, look how much it doesn't care. I still find Murderbot's not-threats great: "If you bother her again I will break every individual bone in your hand and arm. It will take about an hour." and still enjoy it using lines from Sanctuary Moon at dramatic moments.
Quote:
"The only way out of this was to kill them. If I did that, I'd have to kill all of them. Including Miki. Including Abene. Her still-attached head was resting against my collabrone and her hair was all warm and soft where it was in contact with my human skin. Right, so the only smart way out of this was to kill all of them. I was going to have to take the dumb way out of this."
8. Martha Wells, Exit Strategy (Murderbot 4) -- This one I liked more, though certainly not as much as the one with ART present. Spoilers from here It was nice to be back with the original set of humans, and to have Murderbot finally reconnect with them, on its own terms. I had not expected them to all apologize to him for their error in how they dealt with it previously, even when they were acting out of best intentions, and how accommodating they were being of Murderbot's preferences to look at them with drones and not to be touched. It felt a little too accessibility wish-fulfillment to be believable, to be honest, but I like Murderbot and want it to get what it wants, so it's not like I mind. And I guess after it ran away once when well-meaning humans tried to do what they thought was best for it, it makes sense that they would be extra-careful the next time. And it made sense to me how Murderbot chose to stay on Preservation this time -- with a purchased ticket to leave, waiting for alarms to go off, making the choice to stay only once it has proven to itself that it is truly a choice.
My favorite scene was the moment with Dr Mensah after Murderbot rescues her: "I was the only one here, so I braced myself and made the ultimate sacrifice. 'Uh, you can hug me if you need to.' [...] I upped the temperature in my chest and told myself it was like first aid." It was also very aww that Mensah had watched Sanctuary Moon to see what Rathi and Murderbot were talking about and then got hooked.
Murderbot crashing and needing to recover its memories (via Sanctuary Moon, of course) was, mmm, I didn't think necessary (I guess I'm not a fan of amnesia tropes even in AIs) but nicely done and did not take too long. There was also the very interesting tidbit that Murderbot's previous adventures have not only made it learn new skills, they've increased its processing power ("all this coding and working with different systems on the fly had opened up some new neural pathways and processing space"), which is really cool! I also feel like Murderbot is leveling up in self-confidence over the course of the books (which makes sense), and I really enjoyed it saying, "I have extracted living clients from situations that were less than nine percent survivable. I'm more than qualified to make that call." -- because I feel like between these two novellas we've gone from Murderbot just kind of going, "ugh, human security is so dumb, let me just take care of it", to, like, some feeling of professional pride.
I was happy to see a thread sort of wrapping up the previous novella, too -- Murderbot receiving a job offer from GoodNightLander Independent: "It's illegal to own a SecUnit [in GNL territory]. They want to hire someone who may or may not be called Rin, who they suspect is based somewhere in the Preservation Alliance, whose citizenship status will be considered immaterial.[...] They want to hire the person who saved their assessment team from combat bots and contract killers, and they don't care what that person is."
Quotes:
"Humans never think to tell their bots things like, say, don't respond to random individuals wandering the outside of the station." (lol, bot stranger danger XD)
"I had been running possible scenarios, partly to drown out the sound of humans making stupid suggestions. (Not that I don't like that sound; it's sort of comforting and familiar, in an annoying way.)"
Bad guys: "A rogue unit would have left a trail of dead bodies across this station."
Murderbot: "Maybe I wanted the trail to start here."
"What I was mostly thinking was that there wasn't going to be one dead SecUnit on this embarkation floor, there were going to be four." (There's something about the way Murderbot thinks about death and self-sacrifice, in very simple words and simple numbers, that really gets me -- this line was a gut-punch, similar to how I felt about Murderbot reviewing the records of the ComfortUnits sacrificing themselves to try to protect the humans when it had gone rogue.)
"Then Shuttle's sensors picked up the energy signature that meant the gunship was powering up primary weapons. Oh yeah, they were communicating all right."
"'It's very dramatic,' Rathi added. 'The crew think you're a special security agent who betrayed the company to save us.'
It was very dramatic, like something out of a historical adventure serial. Also correct in every aspect except for all the facts, like something out of a historical adventure serial."
Also, I had to snicker at the one second delay idea (to prevent itself from saying things it later regrets), but apparently never does get around to it.
All in all, I very much agree that this fourth novella wrapped up the first arc of Murderbot's development very nicely, while also being a good story on its own. It might be recency bias, but I think this is my second-favorite of the novella's, after Artificial Condition.
9. Martha Wells, Network Effect (Murderbot 5) -- This one was GREAT, because SPOILER! ART was in it, and how! I knew that going in, actually, (well, that we were going to see ART again, not how central it was to the plot), and it was the main reason I wanted to get through the two novellas so I could read this one, and it didn't disappoint. (I was also very glad to know ART was not actually dead while Murderbot was mourning it and having an emotional breakdown over it, so I was able to properly enjoy those scenes, without my own worry.)
But, yeah, ART, very effectively playing a holodrama villain for effect ("You don't want to meet me in person") and being absolutely prepared to bomb a colony into oblivion to get Murderbot back! ("You require proof of intent" OMG XD) -- and apparently just being generally terrifying to anyone who can perceive his processing power, like poor Three. ART, the magnifiscent Slytherin who sends the hostiles who have taken over it after Murderbot, promising them a weapon, so that Murderbot can help rescue ART's crew, and sends a distress beacon through a wormhole so that Preservation ships would know to come after, but does not tell anyone, to keep them properly motivated and focused on the rescue. ART and Murderbot having a fight (Rathi: "Anyone who thinks machine intelligences don't have emotions needs to be in this very uncomfortable room right now."), bickering like five-year-olds/not speaking to each other ("I said, 'Stop talking to my human.' ART said, Make me." and "Trusted friend? 'Oh, fuck you.' That still counts as speaking." and "Now I was sitting with my boots on the polished counter surface. I hoped it was annoying ART.") and making up (Amena: "Are you fighting again or are you making up? Because it looks exactly the same from the outside."). Also, Murderbot and ART both using Amena as mutual emotional leverage against each other because ART likes adolescents, and ART giving Murderbot advice on how to talk to humans in pedagogically sound ways ("Tell her you care about her. use those words, don't tell her you'll eviscerate anything that tries to hurt her. [...] Tell her. It's true. Just say it. Human adolescents need to hear it from their caretakers", and stopping Murderbot from violating Mensah's privacy about the PTSD/treatment because ART's MedSystem is certified in emotional support and trauma recovery -- handy for fic writers, I bet!). Murderbot wanting to do a mission with ART on a trial basis, to see if it can get along with ART's crew, and ART cleaning frantically when Dr Mensah is coming aboard ("the idea of Dr Mensah coming aboard made it weirdly excited and it had its drones clean its whole interior again and was doing things like yelling at Turi to put their laundry in the recycler" XD), and just so much adorable goodness of the two of them. I was very amused how horrified/disgusted Murderbot was at the intimation that it and ART had a "relationship", and at Amena's baby metaphor for 2.0, but, like. They are taking steps towards a long-term committed partnership as of the end of this. And for all its hatred of logos, Murderbot doesn't hate wearing ART's uniform. And ART having told its humans about its SecUnit friend, and said humans realizing Murderbot knows the real ART once Murderbot explains what the anagram acronym stands for. Amena getting permission to call ART "ART" (while the other Preservation humans carefully don't/correct themselves to Perihelion) while ART's crew calls it Peri ("Oh, ART's humans had a cute pet name for it. I saved that to permanent archive immediately.") -- speaking of which, I also really liked Perihelion as the ship's full name, all lofty and scientific and with, like, a touch of hubris to it, because it makes me think of flying too close to the sun, when it's an object that doesn't actually have a natural orbit. Basically, I loved every moment ART was onscreen, or Murderbot was thinking about ART, and that was a much larger chunk of this book than I'd expected, so I was very happy. (Randomly, it also occurred to me, seeing ART with its humans, that ART totally gives me Temeraire!dragon-vibes -- immense power and an alien intelligence focused on the preservation of humans it feels quite proprietary about.)
OK, there were things in this book besides ART and Murderot's relationship with ART, and I liked them too. A list, in no particular order, of those things I liked: 2.0's code bundle names made me laugh out loud (CodeBundle.FuckThem and CodeBundle.FuckThisToo XD XD). Getting to meet another SecUnit with a personality (and apparently quite a different personality from Murderbot). Amena calling Murderbot "third mom". I also enjoyed learning more about Preservation's history and society; the communist utopia of theirs feels a little too pointedly the very opposite of the corporations' capitalism nightmare, but it makes sense for them to be the opposite, narratively speaking, and the historical explanation for it, and the way they view offering help in need as, like, a sacred duty, made sense.
I don't really have any strong feelings about any humans except Dr Mensah, and even she is considerably farther down the list than the AIs, but I liked watching ART interact with its humans and Murderbot with its coworkers, and both of them with Amena. I do like the odd, kind of codependent-but-not-the-way-you'd-expect-and-growing-beyond relationship that Murderbot and Dr Mensah have at this point, where he "blackmails" her into getting therapy for her PTSD and manages to ask her how she's doing ("But humans asked each other about their current status all the time, so how hard could it be? It was a request for information, that was all. I went with, 'What's wrong?' She was surprised, then gave me a sideways look. 'Don't you start.'") -- and it just really lies her! (not in a weird way XD) And Murderbot's first meeting exchange with Iris was pure gold: "I'm not going to turn around and show you my neck, strange person I just met on a hostile planet." "That's what someone with an implant would say, strange person I just met on a hostile planet who I am trying to rescue."
The alien remnant stuff was nicely creepy, especially TargetContact, although this book really drove home that I find it harder to follow action in Murderbot's POV than in a normal book, between so many different angles on the action, and its different ways of processing info, and also the way it refers to other actors -- like I had to backtrack to fully understand that the EB captives were different people from the hostiles in the scene where Murderbot and Amena first meet both, and to figure out what was going on with the different drones, and so on.
Also, this book was just really funny -- it made me snicker out loud several times, and note down many, many quotes that made me grin.
Speaking of writing, though, there was one thing that tripped me up a couple of times -- Murderbot's narration (and 2.0's) is in past tense, unlike Three's, whose POV is in present. But there are some lines in Murderbot's POV that read present-tense to me, which I found mildly jarring -- it's always just one sentence or two, with verbs like "I am" and "I see", but they did ping me as tense changes while I read and I found them disorienting. I don't remember that tripping me up in the novellas, and I wonder if the novel underwent a tense change for Murderbot? Anyway, it was odd...
Quotes:
"'You didn't have to shoot anyone.' Heat crept into Thiago's voice. 'If you needed supplies, we would have given them to you.'
Don't worry, the 'anyone' who got shot was me."
"'SecUnit, you need to get to Medical!'
[...] 'What happened in Medical?'
'You happened, you got shot.'
Oh, right, that."
"Amena is on the survey because her education requires an internship in almost getting killed, I guess."
Murderbot, while he thinks ART is dead: "I designated the intruder as targetControlSystem. I hoped it was sentient enough to hurt when I killed it."
"I see I have some operational parameters to establish.
I crossed the room, grabbed Ras by the front of his uniform jacket and slammed him down on the med platform. I said, 'Answer my question.'"
"The good thing about being a construct is that you can't reproduce and create children to argue with you." -- which was a really funny line when Murderbot was just griping about Amena, but! Then he and ART make 2.0, who comes to hang out inside Murderbot's head and argues with it ALL THE TIME, so now this line is 1000% more hilarious :D
"Amena demanded, 'If you're not angry, then what's wrong?'
'How do you want the list sorted? By time stamp or degree of survivability?'"
"And ART's feed filled the ship. In the pleasant neutral voice that systems use to address humans, it whispered, Reload in progress. Please stand by. [...] Then ART's voice, ART's real voice, filled the feed. It said, Drop the weapon. -- the exerpts like this don't give the sense of how triumphant that difference felt, even knowing ART couldn't really be dead.
ART: "The University has the means to produce the colony's original charter documents, which often contain clauses specifying that if the originating corporate body has ceased operations, then ownership of the planet is ceded to the colonists or their issue" -- a very nice way of not-admitting the University is forging documents to liberate colonies from being "salvaged".
"I could play it back to listen in on the whole conversation but I could also punch myself in the head with a sampling drill and I was not going to do that, either."
Murderbot: "And you thought of it first, you said we needed killware with a variable component."
"ART said, I didn't mean you.
That sounds mild, putting it like that, like something ART would say in a normal tone. But it said it with so much force in the feed I sat down hard on the bunk. I said, 'Stop yelling at me.'
ART didn't respond. It just existed there, glaring at me invisibly in the feed."
(I love this passage so much, because it manages to convey emotion in a medium which really can't express emotion, and the dynamic between the two of them is so wonderfully them, and also the last sentence is just objectively funny in a way that doesn't detract from the emotional core -- it's a great little distillation of what I love best about this series.)
"I know, it's a logo, but I hate it when humans and augmented humans ruin thngs for no reason. Maybe because I was a thing before I was a person and if I'm not careful I could be a thing again."
"Overse added, 'Just remember you're not alone here.'
I never know what to say to that. I am actually alone in my head, and that's where 90 plus percent of my problems are."
"On a contract, I could say, Please don't be alarmed, I'm your contracted SecUnit. you are in a dangerous sistuation. Please stop doing :insert stupid thing here: immediately."
"That was ART, and my humans, and humans I had known for maybe five minutes, and a Barish-Estranza SecUnit that 2.0 had randomly found, all cooperating to retrieve me." <33
Anyway, this was great! I'm just bummed that the next Murderbook book -- a longish novella, apparently -- which is coming out in late April, will be a prequel to Network Effect and thus won't have all the things I loved about this one.
*
Speaking of Murderbot:
minutia_r's Poetry Fest is running again --
-- and there are lots of intriguing Murderbot prompts (among others), and some very cool fills (including Original Work poetry).
There is this absolutely amazing Murderbot & ART sonnet: Inheritance (spoilers for Network Effect! but if you've read the book, seriously, go read it right now!), and after kicking around thoughts for about 48 hours, I also wrote a Murderbot poem:
This was written for
kiraly's prompt, Murderbot Diaries, Murderbot, no emotions just a poem
For some reason it wanted to be ruba'iyat. (I don't mean ruba'iyat, I mean the other thing.)
Bored, greedy humans and augmented humans --
I've had my fill of dumb, demented humans.
I'd rather ride the cargo hold -- it isn't
Chock full of dirty-sock-smell-scented humans.
Minute by minute, I steal time to savor
Bright nonsense plots with represented humans.
At every turn, new imminently eaten-
By-hostile-fauna, airlock-vented humans.
So many used-up, scrapped, and left for salvage,
Ground under, doomed and unlamented humans.
Someone needs to look after all these likely-
To-get-selves-killed-unless-prevented humans.
Talking to Murderbot about its feelings --
Ridiculous (hopeful, contented) humans.
(Also here on AO3)
[Blathering]
I don't know why a ghazal, but a character-voice poem always starts with the form for me, and with Murderbot it was just... the ghazal for some reason. Originally not even for this prompt, which was not up yet at the time I started playing around with the form -- I was initially thinking of writing something for the earlier "new season just dropped" prompt, with something like "Sanctuary Moon" being the refrain, but after poking at it and reading some ghazals, concluded that the refrain was too long -- the rhyme got lost, and it made the full line too long to really sound like poetry. But by the time I gave up on the Sanctuary Moon idea (especially as a perfectly adorable limerick fill had already been written for the prompt), this new prompt had gone up, and I was like, oh, that's actually probably a better match for a ghazal anyway. I still wasn't sure what to do about a refrain, but then I read some Murderbot fic, and the line "humans and augmented humans" jumped out at me, the same way it had done throughout Network Effect, and then it seemed obvious that "humans" would make a very logical refrain for a ghazal about not having emotions.
I've written a ghazal only once before, for NaPoWriMo, and it was a neat challenge, but I actually didn't like the form that much. It's one of those weird things where, if you do it properly (i.e. with the rhyme in addition to the refrain, and keeping all the couplets self-contained, and keeping line length the same) it's actually really hard! Harder than it looks, I think, because it doesn't sound that intricate, but it's actually a really constrained form. And also I think it self-assembled in a very weird way -- I forget if I had the same struggle with the original one I wrote, but with this one, I was casting about wildly until I'd anchored it at two ends -- knowing the "augmented" in "augmented humans" was going to drive the rhyme scheme and the 'signature' of "Talk[] to Murderbot about its feelings" (one of my favorite lines from the first book) in the last couplet. Once I had both, I got the last couplet in full, and then what became couplets 2 and 6 (at this point I actually got up to write them down, because the other thing about ghazals is they don't have much of an internal structure, so I find the lines really hard to remember -- words don't really prompt each other as they go along, the way they do in normal rhymed poems), then 3 (as I was falling asleep), 4, 1, and finally (after debating whether I was done already or not) 5. Which is kind of a crazy way to assemble a poem, compared to how I normally do it (straight through).
And ghazals are such a weird form, because the couplets are so distinct, that it wasn't until I was 2/3 through that I felt any sense of what it was doing (at which point I moved the couplets around until I got a kind of progression out of them). And once I had them sort of in place, I could see that I did want couplet 5 in there after all -- couplet 4 was kind of functioning as a bridge, because the imperilled humans could be either characters in a show (leading on from the previous couplet) or real people, and I wanted something else for further development before Murderbot accepted voluntarily shepherding around too-stupid-to-live humans, so I added a couplet of empathy for the poor human schmucks as screwed by the system as it is (this is the "part 1 of Rogue Protocol" couplet, essentially) and called it a day.
Even having finished it, I'm still not really sure why a ghazal. The poets.org write-up talks about the form "traditionally invoking melancholy, love, longing, and metaphysical questions", which seems fairly apt -- but also, the format itself makes it sound both fairly repetitive (which Murderbot's narration often is -- stock phrases it uses a lot, canned responses from its buffer, and also stylistic repetition for effect), and, like, obscure? oblique? Even if one wanted to talk about emotions openly in a ghazal, I think it would be very hard -- the form keeps bringing you around to the same word -- it's hard to get too deep except, like, allusively? And the distinct couplets force short sentences, too, which also felt fitting for the narration/POV. Anyway, it felt right on the whole, and I also like the idea of having a signature in there, with Murderbot's private name -- the, like, self- I dunno, self-something, just, like, a clear statement of self-hood in a much more direct way than you find in, I think, any other kind of poem?
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1147977.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
6. K.A.Larkwood, The Unspoken Name -- I wrote last time that I went "fully expecting [it] to belong to the class of modern fantasy books that I think of as 'bisexual mermaids are valid', which tend to really not work for me, but it's actually not at all that vibe and I'm really enjoying it so far (25% in) -- the characters are great, the worldbuilding feels like a fully-baked fantasy world, the writing is really lovely, and it's funny and thoughtful and just... good. I'm honestly impressed this is a first novel." Having finished, I'm still impressed and still liked it a whole lot. Really liked the worldbuilding all the way through (it's high fantasy with elves and orcs and gods but with a weirdly sci-fi feel that made me crave science fiction once the book was done, as you'll see). Continued to like all the characters, including the ones I never expected to get a POV. Continued to really like the writing, which does this thing I really like of navigating smoothly between high-flown poetic language and simple, crass speech, and used it to really nice comedic and/or character effect (e.g. Csorwe's line, "Before the earthly throne and mansion of the Lady of Fuck Knows"). I think the plot maybe didn't feel terribly coherent, but out of the plot, character, setting, and language "doorways", plot is the one I care about the least, and anyway, stuff happened and was interesting on the immediate level, so it's not like the plot is bad -- it just didn't feel terribly novel-shaped to me. About the only thing that didn't work for me was the romance, which I think is just confirmation that I'm pretty much not interested in F/F as a thin (I can certainly enjoy stories where the F/F is one of the things happening, and I can (and occasionally do) ship F/F couples, but even when I like both characters (as I did here) and the tropes (as I also did here), the relationship itself just doesn't do anything extra for me? Like, I don't seem to like them more as a couple than I do as individuals, and in fact am less interested in them as a couple than in them individually (or than in their relationships with other people) -- it's downright weird how little I care about the relationship, but there you go.
When I started the book, a good chunk of what I knew was "something something Orc girlfriends", and it was one of the reasons I was not too enthused, because I've tried a couple of high fantasy books with Orcs as protagonists and they all seemed to be about deconstructing Tolkienesque high fantasy in ways that don't appeal to me at all. But this is nothing like that -- Csorwe is presumably an Orc (although that word is never used -- only Oshaaru, their own name for themselves), and she has tusks and gray skin and black blood and yellow eyes, but the Oshaaru seem to be people like any other, not misunderstood or reviled or whatever, just people, with their own traditions and beauty standards, and her being Oshaaru is not any kind of statement, just a worldbuilding detail. Similarly, the ~Elves have a range of personalities and professions and are just people, too -- people who happen to have elongated ears which tend to betray their emotions and be on the tall side. The other societies are no less cool -- I loved the giant snake-person, Atharaisse, and wish she'd been around more than she was. Spoilers from here And even the Qarsazhi are not just a bunch of religious nutcases who oppress their mages (although they probably come the closest to being not very nuanced in this book, since the only POV we get from there is an antagonist) -- you get some sympathetic characters with them, in addition to Shuthmili -- Dr Aritsa and Malkhaya the Warden.
In addition to the high fantasy cultures worldbuilding, the magic in this series is very interesting -- the ideas individually are not unique: magic that destroys the wielder, magic that comes from the gods, magic that is tightly controlled because it is believed to come from something evil, mages that work in coteries like the Quincuriate -- but the specifics of how everything is put together is not something I've ever seen before. And I like that, basically, magic is a destructive force in all cases, but the ways of dealing with that are different in each culture / for the different practitioners -- Sethennai and his "prophylactic" gloves, the human sacrifice of the Unspoken, the tether of the Quincuriate which sacrificed autonomy/personality for power and a longer life (even a kind of immortality). I also liked that each option was something a magical practitioner could consider a worthwhile trade-off -- Csorwe is horrified by the idea of the tether, and Shuthmili comes to choose a different thing, but Oranna and Sethennai are both intrigued/a lot less horrified by the trade-offs (or at least claim to be).
Finally, I quite liked the idea of the Maze and the overall feel it gave the worldbuilding. It's just magical portal travel between worlds, really, but the Maze itself feels like a thing, rather than just a way to whisk people from one world to the next -- and there are ships and stations and the Maze reclaiming dead worlds -- all of which gave the setting a science-fiction-y feel. I don't think I've come across that before, either.
But, OK, while the worldbuilding was the first thing that jumped out at me, I also really liked the characters. Sethennai, naturally, is very much the kind of character I gravitate towards, and I was really interested in his relationship with Csorwe and with Tal, as unequal as it was, and even in his past with Oranna (though Oranna herself was not very interesting to me). I liked Csorwe a lot as a POV character, and also for her own sake, and was surprised by how much I ended up liking Tal after we got some POV segments from him (though overall, I'm not at all sure we needed quite so many POVs). I also ended up really liking Shuthmili, who is very much my kind of character, too. It was also really enjoyable to get a view of Csorwe and of Shuthmili from Tal, and of Tal from Csorwe and from inside his own head; in fact, Csorwe and Tal's very dysfunctionally siblingy relatipnship of petty bickering and one-upmanship ended up being my favorite character-related thing in the book.
I feel like, more than a coherent plot, the book is held together thematically -- and, actually, now that I look back on it, it's not just that the worldbuilding left me craving sci-fi that drove me to read all the Murderbots I hadn't yet read after this -- there are a lot of similar themes of self-determination, personhood and privacy, what you owe (and don't owe) the person who rescues you -- that kind of echo across the two. They are not themes that resonate with me personally, and I felt like this book hit them a little too head on, a bit on the nose, but they are good, broad, deep themes, so it's not something I would even quibble about.
The writing worked for me really well on the whole, with the very minor exception that sometimes we would get scene-setting detail that did not -- I think there were small patches of description that felt like the author describing stuff they wanted to get across, rather than the characters noticing the things they would specifically notice, and those were the bits I was tempted to skim. But they were very brief and more than made up for by internal monologue and great lines. I marked down A LOT of quotes:
Quotes:
Csorwe walking to her sacrifice: "She tried not to think about the flowers. They were scentless. She had seen them so many times. She had seen as many flowers as she needed to see. She had eaten enough cabbage soup."
"Nothing in this world or any other deserved her fear. That was all very well, but there was a great difference between climbing the steps to the Shrine of the Unspoken and going out to buy groceries. Csorwe had spent a lifetime readying herself to die, not to talk to strangers."
"she was educated in the threat, the promise, and the scientific accomplishment of violence."
General Psang: "The second sure thing is the first and most favoured of my wives. She is swift. She is terrible. And she is as loyal in her way as the hunger of the desert. Atharaisse! Sand-wife! Come up!"
Csorwe, to Atharaisse: Ma'am... are your fangs poisonous?
Atharaisse: Ahh. The sacred terror. The blessing of Iriskavaal. The kind death, the cold fire, the destroying sweetness... they are venomous, little hatchling.
The Siren: "It was incongruous. More than incongruous. This was something that had pierced through into the ordinary world."
"He gave her an uncertain smile; Aritsa was not a smiling man, so this made him look like someone trying to pronounce a foreign language for the first time."
Csorwe looking at a Qarsazh painting: "a young man with sword and shield trampling on a dragon. He had an intensely distant expression, as though conjugating verbs in his head."
"Talasseres introduced them both, perhaps hoping he could coax someone else into mispronouncing her name"
Csorwe: "'I think... if Sethennai ever encounters a higher power, I'll wait and see who blinks first.' [...] Sethennai regarded the Siren as a powerful older woman capable of being charmed. Women of a certain age loved Sethennai, even when they were giant snakes or evil rocks."
Oranna: But please understand that I do not have the time to navigate around your self-regard.
"Got time to navigate around my dick," said Tal.
Malkhaya, summoned back from the dead: "He remembered the man he had been as though they had been to school together, and not seen one another since."
Shuthmili's Inquisitor aunt: "She looked as though she had been cut out carefully with scissors." (There are a lot of similes and metaphors in this book -- dense enough that I found them really noticeable, but they're also for the most part really neat similes/metaphors, so while I think there probably could've been fewer of them, I didn't mind.
Csorwe, playing a thug: "It was wonderful what you could achieve by acting dense and looking violent."
"What does Archer do?"
"It's more about what it doesn't do," said Shuthmili. "For instance, it doesn't turn forests to ash. It doesn't boil rivers dry. It doesn't reduce cities to puddles of glass. If you're a neighbour of Aqrsazh and we've taken advantage of you in some way, and you don't feel friendly towards us, and you're thinking of getting back at us, you might first think carefully about how much you enjoy it when Archer doesn't do anything."
"Csorwe wanted to know how Shuthmili had ended up so strange and entertianing, when she'd grown up with a bunch of pencil-sharpening wankers who probably alphabetised their thumbscrews."
About Sethennai: "He had a good way of holding himself apart, as if he was a passing visitor in the world, amused by the locals but ultimately not involved. Frictionless. The mistake people made was trying to stick to him."
"Oranna rose up from where she was standing like something returning from the grave: bent and boneless, remembering in slow sequence how to operate the pulleys and counterweights of her sinews."
Csorwe (re: Oranna): She killed almost everyone-- Should she go back to the House of Silence to--to--uh, to face justice?
Sethennai (laughing): Exalted Sages, Csorwe. If there ever comes a day when anyone faces justice, then you and I had better hope we're both far, far away.
Re: Sethennai: "He never lost his temper, which made it so easy to believe that he was being reasonable and you were a petulant child."
"It couldn't really be so easy to do this. If it had been, she could have left any time. There must be something she had forgotten, some unscalable invisible wall. She couldn't believe the whole natural world was going to let this happen."
Oranna on Qarsazh: "Warm weather, wonderful food, art, fashion, music... just a shame about all the Qarsazhi, really."
"There was no sound here at all, just the buzzin of the seals, like dust made audible."
Shuthmili's expression: "a waxen mask of distaste, belonging to someone who had not only seen a maggot, but who was resigned to seeing maggots every day, and had begun to be disappointed in their quality."
Re: Sethennai: "The man would have looked sleepily amused at a wake."
"[Tal] realised that he missed Csorwe. She was both the most boring and the most unfriendly person he had ever met, with all the personality of a prison shiv, but he wanted to get drunk and pick a fight with someone."
So, anyway -- this was a good book, and I'm looking forward to more in this series (pushed back to next year, I guess) and more from this author, because that was a very impressive debut (apparently Larkwood is eligible for the Campbell Astounding, and if I end up getting a supporting membership this year, and Larkwood ends up getting nominated, I expect I'd be voting for her).
7. Martha Wells, Rogue Protocol (Murderbot 3) -- So back in 2017, along with everyone else, I read the first Murderbot novella and really enjoyed it (although I was also in the presumed minority who was reminded by it of a different rogue-cyborg-gets-adopted-by-humans book, Gromyko's Kosmo~luhi). Then in 2018 I read the sequel and LOVED the ART & Murderbot buddy duo. I had a copy of Rogue Protocol then, too, started reading it hoping to finish by Worldcon, but got bored at the one-third mark and wandered away... for two and a half years XD But once I went back to it, it turned out that it's not that I didn't like this third novella, it's that there was a specific, fairly short stretch, the abandoned space station gothic-feeling one, before the shooting starts, that I found boring, and once I was past that specific bit, I liked it again just fine. (I'd also liked the first part, while Murderbot is traveling, but it feels kind of disconnected from the rest of the book -- except thematically, I mean, the way all the novellas are linked.) It still ended up being my least favorite of the Murderbot stories so far, but I did still enjoy it overall. Spoilers from here
I never did warm up to poor Miki, really, but I did like Don Abene, and I liked Murderbot feeling a sense of professional superiority over the human security team (before they turned out to be assassins, anyway). I think my favorite part was actually the first bit, while Murderbot was being Security Consultant Rin and helping a bunch of hapless and mostly-doomed humans navigate their various petty problems while aggressively not-caring about them, look how much it doesn't care. I still find Murderbot's not-threats great: "If you bother her again I will break every individual bone in your hand and arm. It will take about an hour." and still enjoy it using lines from Sanctuary Moon at dramatic moments.
Quote:
"The only way out of this was to kill them. If I did that, I'd have to kill all of them. Including Miki. Including Abene. Her still-attached head was resting against my collabrone and her hair was all warm and soft where it was in contact with my human skin. Right, so the only smart way out of this was to kill all of them. I was going to have to take the dumb way out of this."
8. Martha Wells, Exit Strategy (Murderbot 4) -- This one I liked more, though certainly not as much as the one with ART present. Spoilers from here It was nice to be back with the original set of humans, and to have Murderbot finally reconnect with them, on its own terms. I had not expected them to all apologize to him for their error in how they dealt with it previously, even when they were acting out of best intentions, and how accommodating they were being of Murderbot's preferences to look at them with drones and not to be touched. It felt a little too accessibility wish-fulfillment to be believable, to be honest, but I like Murderbot and want it to get what it wants, so it's not like I mind. And I guess after it ran away once when well-meaning humans tried to do what they thought was best for it, it makes sense that they would be extra-careful the next time. And it made sense to me how Murderbot chose to stay on Preservation this time -- with a purchased ticket to leave, waiting for alarms to go off, making the choice to stay only once it has proven to itself that it is truly a choice.
My favorite scene was the moment with Dr Mensah after Murderbot rescues her: "I was the only one here, so I braced myself and made the ultimate sacrifice. 'Uh, you can hug me if you need to.' [...] I upped the temperature in my chest and told myself it was like first aid." It was also very aww that Mensah had watched Sanctuary Moon to see what Rathi and Murderbot were talking about and then got hooked.
Murderbot crashing and needing to recover its memories (via Sanctuary Moon, of course) was, mmm, I didn't think necessary (I guess I'm not a fan of amnesia tropes even in AIs) but nicely done and did not take too long. There was also the very interesting tidbit that Murderbot's previous adventures have not only made it learn new skills, they've increased its processing power ("all this coding and working with different systems on the fly had opened up some new neural pathways and processing space"), which is really cool! I also feel like Murderbot is leveling up in self-confidence over the course of the books (which makes sense), and I really enjoyed it saying, "I have extracted living clients from situations that were less than nine percent survivable. I'm more than qualified to make that call." -- because I feel like between these two novellas we've gone from Murderbot just kind of going, "ugh, human security is so dumb, let me just take care of it", to, like, some feeling of professional pride.
I was happy to see a thread sort of wrapping up the previous novella, too -- Murderbot receiving a job offer from GoodNightLander Independent: "It's illegal to own a SecUnit [in GNL territory]. They want to hire someone who may or may not be called Rin, who they suspect is based somewhere in the Preservation Alliance, whose citizenship status will be considered immaterial.[...] They want to hire the person who saved their assessment team from combat bots and contract killers, and they don't care what that person is."
Quotes:
"Humans never think to tell their bots things like, say, don't respond to random individuals wandering the outside of the station." (lol, bot stranger danger XD)
"I had been running possible scenarios, partly to drown out the sound of humans making stupid suggestions. (Not that I don't like that sound; it's sort of comforting and familiar, in an annoying way.)"
Bad guys: "A rogue unit would have left a trail of dead bodies across this station."
Murderbot: "Maybe I wanted the trail to start here."
"What I was mostly thinking was that there wasn't going to be one dead SecUnit on this embarkation floor, there were going to be four." (There's something about the way Murderbot thinks about death and self-sacrifice, in very simple words and simple numbers, that really gets me -- this line was a gut-punch, similar to how I felt about Murderbot reviewing the records of the ComfortUnits sacrificing themselves to try to protect the humans when it had gone rogue.)
"Then Shuttle's sensors picked up the energy signature that meant the gunship was powering up primary weapons. Oh yeah, they were communicating all right."
"'It's very dramatic,' Rathi added. 'The crew think you're a special security agent who betrayed the company to save us.'
It was very dramatic, like something out of a historical adventure serial. Also correct in every aspect except for all the facts, like something out of a historical adventure serial."
Also, I had to snicker at the one second delay idea (to prevent itself from saying things it later regrets), but apparently never does get around to it.
All in all, I very much agree that this fourth novella wrapped up the first arc of Murderbot's development very nicely, while also being a good story on its own. It might be recency bias, but I think this is my second-favorite of the novella's, after Artificial Condition.
9. Martha Wells, Network Effect (Murderbot 5) -- This one was GREAT, because SPOILER! ART was in it, and how! I knew that going in, actually, (well, that we were going to see ART again, not how central it was to the plot), and it was the main reason I wanted to get through the two novellas so I could read this one, and it didn't disappoint. (I was also very glad to know ART was not actually dead while Murderbot was mourning it and having an emotional breakdown over it, so I was able to properly enjoy those scenes, without my own worry.)
But, yeah, ART, very effectively playing a holodrama villain for effect ("You don't want to meet me in person") and being absolutely prepared to bomb a colony into oblivion to get Murderbot back! ("You require proof of intent" OMG XD) -- and apparently just being generally terrifying to anyone who can perceive his processing power, like poor Three. ART, the magnifiscent Slytherin who sends the hostiles who have taken over it after Murderbot, promising them a weapon, so that Murderbot can help rescue ART's crew, and sends a distress beacon through a wormhole so that Preservation ships would know to come after, but does not tell anyone, to keep them properly motivated and focused on the rescue. ART and Murderbot having a fight (Rathi: "Anyone who thinks machine intelligences don't have emotions needs to be in this very uncomfortable room right now."), bickering like five-year-olds/not speaking to each other ("I said, 'Stop talking to my human.' ART said, Make me." and "Trusted friend? 'Oh, fuck you.' That still counts as speaking." and "Now I was sitting with my boots on the polished counter surface. I hoped it was annoying ART.") and making up (Amena: "Are you fighting again or are you making up? Because it looks exactly the same from the outside."). Also, Murderbot and ART both using Amena as mutual emotional leverage against each other because ART likes adolescents, and ART giving Murderbot advice on how to talk to humans in pedagogically sound ways ("Tell her you care about her. use those words, don't tell her you'll eviscerate anything that tries to hurt her. [...] Tell her. It's true. Just say it. Human adolescents need to hear it from their caretakers", and stopping Murderbot from violating Mensah's privacy about the PTSD/treatment because ART's MedSystem is certified in emotional support and trauma recovery -- handy for fic writers, I bet!). Murderbot wanting to do a mission with ART on a trial basis, to see if it can get along with ART's crew, and ART cleaning frantically when Dr Mensah is coming aboard ("the idea of Dr Mensah coming aboard made it weirdly excited and it had its drones clean its whole interior again and was doing things like yelling at Turi to put their laundry in the recycler" XD), and just so much adorable goodness of the two of them. I was very amused how horrified/disgusted Murderbot was at the intimation that it and ART had a "relationship", and at Amena's baby metaphor for 2.0, but, like. They are taking steps towards a long-term committed partnership as of the end of this. And for all its hatred of logos, Murderbot doesn't hate wearing ART's uniform. And ART having told its humans about its SecUnit friend, and said humans realizing Murderbot knows the real ART once Murderbot explains what the anagram acronym stands for. Amena getting permission to call ART "ART" (while the other Preservation humans carefully don't/correct themselves to Perihelion) while ART's crew calls it Peri ("Oh, ART's humans had a cute pet name for it. I saved that to permanent archive immediately.") -- speaking of which, I also really liked Perihelion as the ship's full name, all lofty and scientific and with, like, a touch of hubris to it, because it makes me think of flying too close to the sun, when it's an object that doesn't actually have a natural orbit. Basically, I loved every moment ART was onscreen, or Murderbot was thinking about ART, and that was a much larger chunk of this book than I'd expected, so I was very happy. (Randomly, it also occurred to me, seeing ART with its humans, that ART totally gives me Temeraire!dragon-vibes -- immense power and an alien intelligence focused on the preservation of humans it feels quite proprietary about.)
OK, there were things in this book besides ART and Murderot's relationship with ART, and I liked them too. A list, in no particular order, of those things I liked: 2.0's code bundle names made me laugh out loud (CodeBundle.FuckThem and CodeBundle.FuckThisToo XD XD). Getting to meet another SecUnit with a personality (and apparently quite a different personality from Murderbot). Amena calling Murderbot "third mom". I also enjoyed learning more about Preservation's history and society; the communist utopia of theirs feels a little too pointedly the very opposite of the corporations' capitalism nightmare, but it makes sense for them to be the opposite, narratively speaking, and the historical explanation for it, and the way they view offering help in need as, like, a sacred duty, made sense.
I don't really have any strong feelings about any humans except Dr Mensah, and even she is considerably farther down the list than the AIs, but I liked watching ART interact with its humans and Murderbot with its coworkers, and both of them with Amena. I do like the odd, kind of codependent-but-not-the-way-you'd-expect-and-growing-beyond relationship that Murderbot and Dr Mensah have at this point, where he "blackmails" her into getting therapy for her PTSD and manages to ask her how she's doing ("But humans asked each other about their current status all the time, so how hard could it be? It was a request for information, that was all. I went with, 'What's wrong?' She was surprised, then gave me a sideways look. 'Don't you start.'") -- and it just really lies her! (not in a weird way XD) And Murderbot's first meeting exchange with Iris was pure gold: "I'm not going to turn around and show you my neck, strange person I just met on a hostile planet." "That's what someone with an implant would say, strange person I just met on a hostile planet who I am trying to rescue."
The alien remnant stuff was nicely creepy, especially TargetContact, although this book really drove home that I find it harder to follow action in Murderbot's POV than in a normal book, between so many different angles on the action, and its different ways of processing info, and also the way it refers to other actors -- like I had to backtrack to fully understand that the EB captives were different people from the hostiles in the scene where Murderbot and Amena first meet both, and to figure out what was going on with the different drones, and so on.
Also, this book was just really funny -- it made me snicker out loud several times, and note down many, many quotes that made me grin.
Speaking of writing, though, there was one thing that tripped me up a couple of times -- Murderbot's narration (and 2.0's) is in past tense, unlike Three's, whose POV is in present. But there are some lines in Murderbot's POV that read present-tense to me, which I found mildly jarring -- it's always just one sentence or two, with verbs like "I am" and "I see", but they did ping me as tense changes while I read and I found them disorienting. I don't remember that tripping me up in the novellas, and I wonder if the novel underwent a tense change for Murderbot? Anyway, it was odd...
Quotes:
"'You didn't have to shoot anyone.' Heat crept into Thiago's voice. 'If you needed supplies, we would have given them to you.'
Don't worry, the 'anyone' who got shot was me."
"'SecUnit, you need to get to Medical!'
[...] 'What happened in Medical?'
'You happened, you got shot.'
Oh, right, that."
"Amena is on the survey because her education requires an internship in almost getting killed, I guess."
Murderbot, while he thinks ART is dead: "I designated the intruder as targetControlSystem. I hoped it was sentient enough to hurt when I killed it."
"I see I have some operational parameters to establish.
I crossed the room, grabbed Ras by the front of his uniform jacket and slammed him down on the med platform. I said, 'Answer my question.'"
"The good thing about being a construct is that you can't reproduce and create children to argue with you." -- which was a really funny line when Murderbot was just griping about Amena, but! Then he and ART make 2.0, who comes to hang out inside Murderbot's head and argues with it ALL THE TIME, so now this line is 1000% more hilarious :D
"Amena demanded, 'If you're not angry, then what's wrong?'
'How do you want the list sorted? By time stamp or degree of survivability?'"
"And ART's feed filled the ship. In the pleasant neutral voice that systems use to address humans, it whispered, Reload in progress. Please stand by. [...] Then ART's voice, ART's real voice, filled the feed. It said, Drop the weapon. -- the exerpts like this don't give the sense of how triumphant that difference felt, even knowing ART couldn't really be dead.
ART: "The University has the means to produce the colony's original charter documents, which often contain clauses specifying that if the originating corporate body has ceased operations, then ownership of the planet is ceded to the colonists or their issue" -- a very nice way of not-admitting the University is forging documents to liberate colonies from being "salvaged".
"I could play it back to listen in on the whole conversation but I could also punch myself in the head with a sampling drill and I was not going to do that, either."
Murderbot: "And you thought of it first, you said we needed killware with a variable component."
"ART said, I didn't mean you.
That sounds mild, putting it like that, like something ART would say in a normal tone. But it said it with so much force in the feed I sat down hard on the bunk. I said, 'Stop yelling at me.'
ART didn't respond. It just existed there, glaring at me invisibly in the feed."
(I love this passage so much, because it manages to convey emotion in a medium which really can't express emotion, and the dynamic between the two of them is so wonderfully them, and also the last sentence is just objectively funny in a way that doesn't detract from the emotional core -- it's a great little distillation of what I love best about this series.)
"I know, it's a logo, but I hate it when humans and augmented humans ruin thngs for no reason. Maybe because I was a thing before I was a person and if I'm not careful I could be a thing again."
"Overse added, 'Just remember you're not alone here.'
I never know what to say to that. I am actually alone in my head, and that's where 90 plus percent of my problems are."
"On a contract, I could say, Please don't be alarmed, I'm your contracted SecUnit. you are in a dangerous sistuation. Please stop doing :insert stupid thing here: immediately."
"That was ART, and my humans, and humans I had known for maybe five minutes, and a Barish-Estranza SecUnit that 2.0 had randomly found, all cooperating to retrieve me." <33
Anyway, this was great! I'm just bummed that the next Murderbook book -- a longish novella, apparently -- which is coming out in late April, will be a prequel to Network Effect and thus won't have all the things I loved about this one.
*
Speaking of Murderbot:
minutia_r's Poetry Fest is running again --
-- and there are lots of intriguing Murderbot prompts (among others), and some very cool fills (including Original Work poetry).
There is this absolutely amazing Murderbot & ART sonnet: Inheritance (spoilers for Network Effect! but if you've read the book, seriously, go read it right now!), and after kicking around thoughts for about 48 hours, I also wrote a Murderbot poem:
This was written for
kiraly's prompt, Murderbot Diaries, Murderbot, no emotions just a poem
For some reason it wanted to be ruba'iyat. (I don't mean ruba'iyat, I mean the other thing.)
Bored, greedy humans and augmented humans --
I've had my fill of dumb, demented humans.
I'd rather ride the cargo hold -- it isn't
Chock full of dirty-sock-smell-scented humans.
Minute by minute, I steal time to savor
Bright nonsense plots with represented humans.
At every turn, new imminently eaten-
By-hostile-fauna, airlock-vented humans.
So many used-up, scrapped, and left for salvage,
Ground under, doomed and unlamented humans.
Someone needs to look after all these likely-
To-get-selves-killed-unless-prevented humans.
Talking to Murderbot about its feelings --
Ridiculous (hopeful, contented) humans.
(Also here on AO3)
[Blathering]
I don't know why a ghazal, but a character-voice poem always starts with the form for me, and with Murderbot it was just... the ghazal for some reason. Originally not even for this prompt, which was not up yet at the time I started playing around with the form -- I was initially thinking of writing something for the earlier "new season just dropped" prompt, with something like "Sanctuary Moon" being the refrain, but after poking at it and reading some ghazals, concluded that the refrain was too long -- the rhyme got lost, and it made the full line too long to really sound like poetry. But by the time I gave up on the Sanctuary Moon idea (especially as a perfectly adorable limerick fill had already been written for the prompt), this new prompt had gone up, and I was like, oh, that's actually probably a better match for a ghazal anyway. I still wasn't sure what to do about a refrain, but then I read some Murderbot fic, and the line "humans and augmented humans" jumped out at me, the same way it had done throughout Network Effect, and then it seemed obvious that "humans" would make a very logical refrain for a ghazal about not having emotions.
I've written a ghazal only once before, for NaPoWriMo, and it was a neat challenge, but I actually didn't like the form that much. It's one of those weird things where, if you do it properly (i.e. with the rhyme in addition to the refrain, and keeping all the couplets self-contained, and keeping line length the same) it's actually really hard! Harder than it looks, I think, because it doesn't sound that intricate, but it's actually a really constrained form. And also I think it self-assembled in a very weird way -- I forget if I had the same struggle with the original one I wrote, but with this one, I was casting about wildly until I'd anchored it at two ends -- knowing the "augmented" in "augmented humans" was going to drive the rhyme scheme and the 'signature' of "Talk[] to Murderbot about its feelings" (one of my favorite lines from the first book) in the last couplet. Once I had both, I got the last couplet in full, and then what became couplets 2 and 6 (at this point I actually got up to write them down, because the other thing about ghazals is they don't have much of an internal structure, so I find the lines really hard to remember -- words don't really prompt each other as they go along, the way they do in normal rhymed poems), then 3 (as I was falling asleep), 4, 1, and finally (after debating whether I was done already or not) 5. Which is kind of a crazy way to assemble a poem, compared to how I normally do it (straight through).
And ghazals are such a weird form, because the couplets are so distinct, that it wasn't until I was 2/3 through that I felt any sense of what it was doing (at which point I moved the couplets around until I got a kind of progression out of them). And once I had them sort of in place, I could see that I did want couplet 5 in there after all -- couplet 4 was kind of functioning as a bridge, because the imperilled humans could be either characters in a show (leading on from the previous couplet) or real people, and I wanted something else for further development before Murderbot accepted voluntarily shepherding around too-stupid-to-live humans, so I added a couplet of empathy for the poor human schmucks as screwed by the system as it is (this is the "part 1 of Rogue Protocol" couplet, essentially) and called it a day.
Even having finished it, I'm still not really sure why a ghazal. The poets.org write-up talks about the form "traditionally invoking melancholy, love, longing, and metaphysical questions", which seems fairly apt -- but also, the format itself makes it sound both fairly repetitive (which Murderbot's narration often is -- stock phrases it uses a lot, canned responses from its buffer, and also stylistic repetition for effect), and, like, obscure? oblique? Even if one wanted to talk about emotions openly in a ghazal, I think it would be very hard -- the form keeps bringing you around to the same word -- it's hard to get too deep except, like, allusively? And the distinct couplets force short sentences, too, which also felt fitting for the narration/POV. Anyway, it felt right on the whole, and I also like the idea of having a signature in there, with Murderbot's private name -- the, like, self- I dunno, self-something, just, like, a clear statement of self-hood in a much more direct way than you find in, I think, any other kind of poem?
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1147977.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).