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Murderbot!

If you don't know who Murderbot is yet, well, you probably don't know any science fiction authors. This series of novellas has swept the field like nothing else I've ever seen, in the last year. The first one, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765397536/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=novegazi-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0765397536&linkId=5cc6b1dd015d4eadbdd2030d22ff07cd">*All Systems Red*</a>, won both the Hugo and the Nebula this year, and the main issue with next year's ballots is that <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075DGHHQL/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=novegazi-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=B075DGHHQL&linkId=de8f46736ede4d1418932f2ce11126ce">*Artificial Condition*</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0756JSWGL/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=novegazi-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=B0756JSWGL&linkId=fc89dded5cefa28929f559256862dd70">*Rogue Protocol*</a> are both going to be on them. 

That's the order you should read them in. *Rogue Protocol* is book 3, and you pretty much need to know what happened in the first two to get along well with it. They're short, and fast. They're not cheap, but if you can't afford to pay $10 for a novella, that's what the library is for. 

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Murderbot is a security-trained cyborg in a super-high-tech interplanetary society, where "security-trained" means incredible destructive power and no concern for self-preservation. SecUnits are built to be risked, damaged, destroyed in their cause, and then glued back together afterward.

They're also slaves - at least until Murderbot hacks its own systems and sets itself free at the beginning of the first book. It's still programmed to protect its clients, but who it considers its clients tend to vary from moment to moment, and it's now making its own decisions. And what Murderbot really wants to do is be by itself and watch TV shows. 

Having an extreme introvert main character is a difficult task, and Wells accomplishes this by giving Murderbot another priority: finding out why its missions have ended in disaster. There's a galactic conspiracy that Murderbot and its clients have accidentally ended up in, and the free, rogue SecUnit is continually motivated to risk itself by curiosity, and a need to find out just what forces have been acting upon it.

The great strength of this series is Murderbot's first-person voice, especially the conflict between its desire to just hole up and consume media, its need to find information about the conspiracy, and its discovered loyalty to the people it ends up considering its clients along the way. It's also full of enjoyable secondary characters. 

**Below here are spoilers for *Rogue Protocol.*** I know this book is brand new and probably very few people have read it yet, but if I'm going to talk about it I need to talk about the ending. So if you're the sort of person to care about that sort of thing, now is a good time to stop. (And go to the library, really.)

You can't get everything, and for the strong voice and pacing I'm willing to put up with a plot that is pretty predictable. It was pretty heavily foreshadowed in *Artificial Condition* that eventually Murderbot was going to run into another free artificial intelligence, so I was expecting that from Miki the robot all along, even if Murderbot wasn't. Murderbot has had a very big blind spot regarding humans and the possibility that they could ever free an AI intentionally, and that had to come back to bite it pretty soon.

And of course once Miki was established as a bit naive and over-the-top friendly, it was clear that Miki was going to have to die. Murderbot could make friends with ART in *Artificial Condition* and they could go their separate ways at the end of the book, and maybe ART will show up again later. Miki couldn't be like that. If Miki lived, Murderbot and Miki were going to have to deal with each other, maybe long-term, and Miki's personality is just a little bit too cloying for it to work as a recurring character.

But I think the way Murderbot flees after Miki's death is telling. It's not just about the mission being over, and it's not just about running from having to cope with the death of someone who unexpectedly became a friend and then sacrificed itself. Murderbot can't face Miki's human friends, with the knowledge that they freed Miki, that they knew and welcomed Miki as a free comrade, and they might respond similarly to a rogue SecUnit. 

Here Murderbot finally has a change to be treated as a person, after always operating under the assumption that no one would ever want to. That's a scary thing, and Murderbot reacts by bugging out so quickly that the humans can't even know that it survived. There's an emotional power in that which I expect Wells will be building in in the fourth book, *Exit Strategy*, due in October.

(Which will probably *also* be on next year's Hugo and Nebula ballots. Novella is always a weird category but 2019 is the Year of Martha Wells.)
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