I had this on pre-order and then scarfed it down on the day it arrived.

As always, it was fun. I loved Murderbot’s interaction with Miki, the “pet” robot that sees humans as its friends. Murderbot moves from disbelief, through disdain, on to mild jealousy followed finally by muted grief when they part.

Miki is everything that Murderbot is not: naive. optimistic, emotionally attached to humans and open to making new friends. In the same way that ART in book two showed us that Murderbot is too human to be a real AI, Miki shows us that Murderbot is too much an AI ever entirely to trust humans.

In this third part of what is now clearly one great novel being sold to us in (expensive) installments, Murderbot continues to pursue proof of the wrong-doings of the GreyCris corporation but this is really the frame for his journeying and not the focus of the novel. The focus is on how each of Murderbot’s journeys takes him on a path from I-hacked-my-governor-module-so-I-could-watch-more-space-operas to I-have-things-and-maybe-even-people-and-bots-who-matter-to-me.

In this installment, Murderbot is aware of becoming more humanlike in his behavior (although humans should never be allowed to do Security: they’re unable to keep pace with fast-changing situations, their egos get in the way and they’re allowed to give up). Murderbot is dismayed to discover there are now things s/he cares about:

“I hate caring about stuff. But apparently, once you start, you can’t just stop.”

The novella has a leisurely start but once the action begins the pace is fast and the tension is relentless.

I finished the novella with a sense of satisfaction that could only have been improved if I’d been able to continue on to part four instead of having to wait for the publishers to feed it to me later.

My only gripe about Murderbot is the pricing strategy: split a novel in four and charge the price of a full novel for each part. This is not the way to treat the fans. I moved from reading Murderbot as an ebook to listening to the audiobook, purely because the audiobook cost one credit (which translates to £3.66 or $4.71 as opposed to $9.10 for the Kindle version.

Actually, the audiobook was very well done. The voices for Murderbot and Mikki were perfect. I’m glad my miserliness financial prudence brought me to such a skilled narrator.