Murderbot’s two friend groups collide over wormholes and alien remnants in this month’s book club entry: Network Effect. We have snarky teens, asshole transports, rogue SecUnits, and a lot of corpses.
As usual, spoilers ahoy.
As is tradition with Murderbot, the book begins with the action already underway. Murderbot is working security aboard a space lab with Overse, Arada, and Ratthi, as well as two new characters, Amena and Thiago (Mensah’s daughter and brother-in-law, respectively), plus assorted PresAux staff. Our trusty SecUnit handily dispatches a team of raiders, but that’s the last bit of luck they’ll have for a while. On their way home, they’re attacked again, this time by gray-skinned Targets speaking an untranslated language, using ancient tech, and wandering around in the alien-remnant-infected husk of Perihelion, aka ART the Asshole Research Transport from Artificial Condition.
Much of the story takes place on Perihelion. For the first chunk, Murderbot fears ART has been erased by the alien remnant the Targets attached to its engine, and it lets that fear and rage fuel it as it takes the Targets out and rescues its humans. “I was starting to panic,” it says, and later “But I was walking around in ART’s corpse and nothing felt reassuring.” Once Amena, Overse, Arada, Ratthi, Thiago, and Eletra (the lone survivor of a Barish-Estranza team who were also attacked by the Targets) temporarily safe, they’re able to get ART partially back online, much to SecUnit’s relief.
It takes a while for the plot to untangle, given how little information the characters have most of the time and how much guesswork they’re doing, but it all boils down to Corporate Rim Shenanigans. Barish-Estranza wants to exploit planetary resources and human labor on a lost colony and the human laborers want freedom (or a hivemind, depending on who you talk to). The Perihelion crew want to keep hacking Corporate Rim legal contracts and the Preservation Alliance crew just want to go home alive and intact. Eventually, a team of humans and Murderbot get down to the planet’s surface to rescue the last of ART’s missing humans. With the help of Murderbot 2.0—who Amena adorably describes as a baby “That you and ART made together, with code. Code with both of you are also made out of.”—and a newly governor-module-hacked SecUnit calling itself “Three,” Murderbot saves the day. Again. Barely.
Structurally, this book is different from the rest of the series in a few key ways. It has a partial flashback to a brand new scene where Mensah is attacked at Preservation Alliance HQ by drugged-up augmented human assassins hired by GrayCris. This attack and her earlier kidnapping—and some timely blackmailing/guilt tripping by SecUnit—convinced her to seek treatment for dealing with her trauma. We see this fight sequence in another new device, a story within a story. The first book, All Systems Red, was technically epistolary; it was a letter Murderbot wrote to Mensah. The rest of the books are in that same first person format (which allows Wells to keep doing the unreliable narrator thing we all love so much), but they don’t feel all that epistolary. This one has the main story interrupted with excerpts from HelpMe.file. These scenes, from Murderbot being interviewed by Bharadwaj for her documentary, are sent to SecUnit 3 as a way to convince it to help Murderbot 1.0 after it cracks Three’s governor module.
Speaking of the narrative structure, this is the only (so far?) novel in the series. Wells could have shrunk this story down to novella size either by cutting stuff out or breaking it into two separate books, but not while retaining the emotional gut-punches that are ART and Murderbot and their code baby, Amena dubbing Murderbot her “third mom,” Murderbot 2.0’s sacrifice, and the rise of Three. This is a bigger story than anything we’ve gotten so far, and I don’t just mean page length. This is a turning point for Murderbot. Everything has been leading up to this moment. It has to be big.
Identity, personhood, and trauma continue to be a major themes in the Murderbot Diaries, and they intersect in interesting ways in this novel. SecUnit is still processing learning that maybe it isn’t all that special and that its worldview was too narrow. Maybe other bots and constructs didn’t chat much with it because it didn’t chat much with them. Like Mensah, it’s also avoiding processing the trauma of the last few months. It gained its freedom, nearly died too many times to count, pushed itself way past its limits, changed its physical body, witnessed humans and constructs having meaningful and complicated relationships, and watched good people—bots, constructs, and humans alike—get killed or indentured at the behest of capitalism.
Miki’s death in particular haunts Murderbot, and I think that has a lot to do with why it freaks out so much over ART’s apparent deletion. Not only did it lose its first friend and the first person to see its true self, but it also just watched a construct sacrifice its life for the humans it cared about, something Murderbot has done several times now for Mensah. As we see in the HelpMe.file excerpts Murderbot sends to Three, Bharadwaj has already been trying to get SecUnit to start trauma recovery treatment alongside Mensah. Add to that its anxiety toward logos and knowing the company is forever burned into its body no matter how much it alters itself and you have a SecUnit on the edge. There are too many terrible things happening to and around it in too short a time. ART’s supposed death shoves Murderbot right over.
At the same time, it’s also having a lot of emotions, many of them for the first time and all of them unexpected. Murderbot has yet to reckon with its personhood. It doesn’t see itself as just a SecUnit anymore, and it doesn’t want to be human. But it also doesn’t know what that in between space looks like. “I think if I had been a normal bot, or been a normal SecUnit, just off inventory, naive and not knowing anything about how to get along in the human world or whatever… it would have been okay. But I wasn’t like that. I was me, Murderbot. So instead of Mensah having a pet bot like poor Miki, or a sad bot/human construct that needed someone to help it, she had me.” For SecUnit, that’s a negative. For Mensah, Murderbot is exactly what she wants and needs. She’d probably like it to be less touch-averse, but overall, she likes Murderbot just the way it is. She trusts it because it’s Murderbot and not some pet bot or mind-controlled construct.
Mensah doesn’t want a Miki anymore than Peri’s crew wants a thoughtless bot running their ship, but that also doesn’t mean the only other thing left is a thoughtless killing machine. When Ratthi says “[Thiago] doesn’t know you. He doesn’t know what you’re really like,” Murderbot thinks “He’d never seen me kill anyone close up and I’d like to keep it that way.” But Ratthi doesn’t stop caring about Murderbot after all the killing in this novel anymore than he did after all the killing in the previous stories with him. Like Mensah, he knows Murderbot is a person trained for a specific task making hard choices. Speaking of Ratthi, I have loved watching him grow as a character. The way Thiago treats SecUnit after Amena’s rescue is exactly the way Ratthi treated it in the first book, like a grumpy human that just needs a hug. Now Ratthi is the one keeping Thiago from pressing the point with Murderbot and warning him against apologizing, just like the others did with him in that hopper. By the end, Murderbot sees itself the way Mensah and ART do, and Wells shows us this through its HelpMe.file conversation with Three: “I’m letting you see all this because I want you to know what I am and what I can do… I want you to know if you help me, I’ll help you, and that you can trust me. Now here’s the code to disable your governor module.”
All this folds into Murderbot’s relationship with ART. It’s more than a friendship yet also not romantic or sexual. Or, as Ratthi wisely puts it, “I think that while you and Perihelion know how to have relationships with humans, neither of you is quite sure how to have a relationship with each other.” The book never uses this language, but I think of ART and Murderbot as being at the start of a queerplatonic relationship. It all feels very acespec-coded (I say as an acespec person), although I doubt that was intentional on Wells’ end. Their relationship is growing into a deep bond between two people committed to each other. ART kidnaps Murderbot not because it’s a useful tool but because it trusts Murderbot more than anything else in the universe. Murderbot wants to help ART not because its humans want it to help the other humans but because they’re ART’s humans. It’s a fraught relationship, one where both parties are emotionally constipated and oblivious, but it’s so damn charming I can’t help but sigh contentedly.
Well, now I’m a big, weepy pile of emotions. I need to go take a walk or something and calm down. Next month we’re discussing Fugitive Telemetry. It was the sixth book published, but it takes place before Network Effect and is mostly a standalone story. See you in 2026!
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Fugitive Telemetry
Perhaps because subconsciously I kept expecting the book to be done (just because of length and number of crises, I don’t know) or because my brain couldn’t track, sort, and then follow all the different directions, but in any case, I got lost after Murderbot found Central Control (was that the name? I’m not going back to look). I actually had to reread the last section—twice? three times?—and then back up AGAIN and reread the entire book before I felt like I understood what all happened. Then came Fugitive Telemetry, which seemed back to form. (But then I also had to drop System Collapse after I had started it, because I could tell I was not picking up the threads properly from where the story had left off in Network Effect.)
None of the 3 family members who read the books after the TV show started had any trouble following the original publication order and couldn’t understand why I had recommended reversing the order of the last two books. *sigh* I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I do still love these books, and they sent me looking for other books written by Martha Wells, so there’s that.
That sucks! Wells definitely jumps around more in time with this book than in the novellas. And it gets a little tricky keeping track of all the bots and who’s talking to who.
I read System Collapse while I was recovering from covid (and sliding into long covid brain fog), so I have no memory of it. I remember really liking Fugitive Telemetry, though.
Looks like I forgot to finish off something I was saying in the middle of my comment: Yes, I had to drop System Collapse but it was only while I went back to reread Network Effect yet again.
Just wanted to jump in and say I love reading these Murderbot write-ups! Thank you!
I’m so glad to hear this! Made my afternoon :)
This remains my favorite of the MurderBot stories, hands down. One of the themes that jumps out at me is the theme of parenthood, and of caring for children, of helping young minds become who they want to be. Obviously there is the very direct “baby” that is Murderbot 2.0, but there’s also Amena and iris and Three, all of whom MurderBot finds itself protecting and guiding over the course of the book. My favorite passage in the whole book is the early flashback to the festival on Preservation where MurderBot chases off Amena’s way-creepy older suitor and the very deft way Wells describes both Amena’s teenage insistence that she had everything under control and MurderBot’s strong drive to protect her. She wasn’t on the original survey mission, but Amena is one of MB’s humans by virtue of being Mensah’s family, which is an emotional jump of some significance to my mind. In this book we see MB begin to slot into a family dynamic, to care for the younger members of that family, without the previously-necessary safety blanket of them being “clients.” And then, after Wells shows us MurderBot making this step almost unintentionally, without even realizing it is doing it, she introduces that ART/Peri has an even *stronger* drive to protect children, and suddenly it just *clicks* why ART and MB are so drawn to each other.
Prior to this book, while ART kind of stole the show in the one Novella it was a major character in, it had been fairly disconnected to the rest of MB’s story – it had been able to help MB so much precisely *because* it had no real connection to the ongoing shenanigans. ART’s reappearance as a central character in this book *could* have felt contrived, but because Wells shows us the way that “Caring for others (in a blunt, assholish way)” has become central to MB’s personality, and because the first section with Amena shows that being in a parental role is a new offshoot of that task MB isn’t fully prepared for, ART returning as someone who is also in a parental-protector mode rings a perfect note in my mind.
Then later in the book we see Three and MB 2.0 each show different sides of “watching a child grow into a person” coin for MB 1.0. Three is someone who is in a very similar situation to MB back in All Systems Red, and while Three does decide to help, it also has a very distinct personality from MB that MB finds baffling. Some of that is because MB is watching Three’s journey from the far side of several emotional rubicons Three has yet to cross and so MB is having trouble thinking back to what it felt like to be *growing* instead of *more or less grown*. But some of that is because, well… Three’s a different person and makes different decisions, and that’s always baffling when you watch a younger person do different things than you would. By comparison, MB 2.0 is a different kind of mirror for MB 1.0 – being fully an offshoot of MB1.0 as it currently exists, 2.0 acts pretty much how 1.0 would given the same circumstances and limitations, and so unintentionally forces MB1.0 to confront what the whole “jump at any chance to self-sacrifice in order to save someone else” schtick looks like and feels like as the person being saved. Oooops, turns out that it actually *doesn’t* feel great to watch someone you care about die to save you, and 1.0 has been putting Mensah & Co through that trauma *regularly*!
I could go on, but suffice to say, I really love this book, in no small part because, as someone who works with teenagers on a daily basis in my library job, I have a certain strong affinity for the “Welp, this may not biologically be my kid, but I’m still gonna do everything in my power to protect and nurture them” impulse.