Review of Network Effect by Martha Wells

Nearly four years since my last Murderbot review, I have finally read the first complete novel in the series. Fortunately, this is the kind of series where you can go years in between books and pick up where you left off. Martha Wells delights with a full-length action mystery that has the same intensity as the novellas yet benefits from more room to breathe.

I’m reviewing this novel with spoilers because otherwise it’s tough to talk about my favourite things. Stop now if you haven’t read it and want to avoid those!

Some time after the events of Exit Strategy, Murderbot is now working a contract—of its own volition—for Preservation. After a fun action set-piece to open the novel, Wells plunges Murderbot and its clients into the real danger. We’re also reunited with ART, one of my favourite characters from earlier in the series, someone whom I hoped would return, so I was well chuffed by that—and Murderbot’s interactions with ART are everything. Anyway, there’s kidnapping and cloning and hacking and infiltration and exfiltration and … yeah, it’s an action movie set in space but a novel instead of a film.

You get it.

The novellas were great, but having a full-length novel just reaffirms how much I enjoy this form over shorter forms of literature, even something as close to a novel as a novella is. I just love how much space Wells has to explore Murderbot’s inner life. Having a first-person narrator who doesn’t really like to talk to people can be challenging proposition for both the writer and the reader—and truly, it isn’t my favourite style of narration. But Wells makes it work here, and I love spending more time with everyone’s favourite rogue SecUnit as it grows.

And Murderbot’s growth as a person is a the forefront of this story. That’s obvious from its interactions with ART. While the relationship between these two never receives a full label, it seems to be deeper than a simple friendship—perhaps queerplatonic. I think we have to be careful when applying a queer reading to these books, of course—as tempting as it is, and as much as I have done so in the past—because of the historically problematic nature of agender and asexual people being portrayed as robots. Nevertheless, I really like the sympathetic way in which Wells explores Murderbot’s utter confusion over how humans treat it.

The second development that truly elevates Murderbot’s journey is the introduction of another rogue SecUnit character. Indeed, Murderbot’s complicity in helping the SecUnit go rogue sparks so many fascinating questions in terms of Murderbot’s responsibilities as a liberator. Are we looking at the start of a robot uprising? Will Murderbot become a new messiah for SecUnits everywhere? Somehow I doubt it—Wells would never be so banal—but I'll just have to keep reading. As it is, Murderbot’s reaction to learning of the freed SecUnit is so Murderbot. It’s just so huffy sometimes; I love it.

I would have liked the bad guys to be a little more menacing. Wells isn’t afraid to beat up Murderbot, but you kind of know it will always get repaired/healed in the end. Even the threat of the alien contamination doesn’t seem that bad. The antagonists are, for much of the novel, a huge cipher and not all that directly threatening. Perhaps this is largely intentional—Murderbot’s obsession with schlocky human entertainment seems to be Wells’s way of saying she’s trying to write something different, and Murderbot even hangs a lampshade on this by commiserating with ART over wanting to watch something “totally unrealistic” to distract themselves from their situation. I suspect part of the charm of this series and its eponymous protagonist lies in how Wells writes conflict, and if she did what I asked, the series wouldn’t be as good.

Still, if this book has an Achilles heel, it’s in the main plot itself. The subplots, the character development, the way Wells moves the world forward? Amazing. No notes. The main plot, the antagonists, the stakes? Kind of dull, slightly plodding, very anticlimactic at points.

Network Effect is pretty much everything I hoped a full-length Murderbot story would be. Much like the novellas, I can’t say I unreservedly loved every moment—but I really like and appreciate these stories for what they are. And the amount of anti-corporation rhetoric here? Mmm, love that.