Soh Kam Yung reviewed Platform Decay by Martha Wells
Murderbot doing what it does best; rescuing people, with hilarious commentary on humans.
3 stars
The next instalment in the Murderbot Diaries, this one has Murderbot running a mission. We learn that Mensah's family have been kidnapped and the purpose of the mission is to rescue them. But for Murderbot to successfully get them to the rendezvous point, he'll have to run a side-mission and rescue yet more people.
Mensah's family are being held captive on an orbital platform that forms a ring around a planet. This means lots of living space, many of which are rented out to various corporations, including one corporation that has reasons to hold the family captive. Murderbot has to travel from space to space, each one with its own habitat quirks and are sometimes active hostile areas (due takeover attempts or disputes between corporations). With occasional aid from Mensah's family, Murderbot manages to rescue them, and gets them to safety, with some help from Three, the SecUnit that …
The next instalment in the Murderbot Diaries, this one has Murderbot running a mission. We learn that Mensah's family have been kidnapped and the purpose of the mission is to rescue them. But for Murderbot to successfully get them to the rendezvous point, he'll have to run a side-mission and rescue yet more people.
Mensah's family are being held captive on an orbital platform that forms a ring around a planet. This means lots of living space, many of which are rented out to various corporations, including one corporation that has reasons to hold the family captive. Murderbot has to travel from space to space, each one with its own habitat quirks and are sometimes active hostile areas (due takeover attempts or disputes between corporations). With occasional aid from Mensah's family, Murderbot manages to rescue them, and gets them to safety, with some help from Three, the SecUnit that Murderbot recruited from a previous story.
The story also shows how life is in this part of space that is occupied by various corporations, and it is not a nice one. People are indentured and families can be ripped apart on the whims of corporations that only want to protect their bottom line. Even people that should be high up in the management hierarchy of the corporations can be powerless when it comes to protecting their family members from others in the same corporation.
As with previous books, Murderbot makes more internal commentary about strange human behaviour and his general disgust with corporations. Murderbot also makes an unexpected brief encounter that hints of possible changes taking place that could feature prominently in future books.
