Platform Decay by Martha Wells: review

4/5 stars on Goodreads

Platform Decay by Martha Wells

Platform Decay is book 8 in the Murderbot Diaries. Like most books in the series, it’s more a long novella that only took four hours to read, but it’s a complete and satisfying story, with no cliffhanger ending.

Murderbot has arrived on a humongous planet-circling torus to free Dr Mensah’s family members Farai, Sofi and Naja, who have been captured by Barish-Estranza corporation in retaliation to events in the previous book. They’re already in a safehouse. Murderbot simply has to get there and take them safely back to their escape shuttle. But things get immediately complicated, because the person who has been helping them wants Murderbot to save other people too, and they’re in a completely different part of the torus, to a wrong direction from the shuttle.

The rescue mission takes them through different zones of the huge torus, some of which are civilised and some that are more like the Wild West. Some zones belong to B-E, others don’t, but that doesn’t stop the corporation from chasing them. Transportation turns out to be the greatest problem though. Murderbot isn’t happy with having clingy humans and their emotions to account for. It’s even less thrilled with its own new emotion module that keeps interrupting at worst possible moments.

This was an exciting flight through imaginative environments. Murderbot was mostly its sarcastic self again, with no imminent mental breakdowns anymore, as the emotion module did its job. It was trying new things like direct communication, which went about as well as one can imagine. And it realises that having some emotions isn’t all that bad, and sometimes it’s nice to be thanked and praised. Especially if it comes from small children.

The story isn’t entirely satisfying emotionally though. The setting is new, and the characters are again people the reader hasn’t really met before. They turn out to be nice additions, but the emotional connection isn’t there, like with Mensah, Amena or ART. Their interactions with Murderbot weren’t as funny or poignant either, though an understanding formed between them in the end. But there was Three, the SecUnit Murderbot freed, exercising its free will with unpredictable results. It was nice to follow the bond between the two. And the ending was satisfying, leaving everyone in a good place. I hope we’ll get more books soon.