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.

The Book of Ile-Rien by Martha Wells: review

5/5 stars on Goodreads

The Book of Ile-Rien by Martha Wells

This is a combined edition of the first two books in Ile-Rien series, The Element of Fire and The Death of the Necromancer. Both were originally published in the 90s, and were received well. They’ve been revised here and are the author’s preferred edition.

First book is set in a renaissance or baroque type of royal court of Ile-Rien where tensions are high between the dowager queen, her rather useless son the king, the current queen, and the king’s favourite courtier. That alone would’ve made an interesting story of palace intrigue, but added to it are a conspiracy by a sorcerer, attack by the unseelie court of fayres, and the illegitimate daughter of the previous king by the fayre queen of Air and Darkness who returns after several years of exile. And at the centre of everything is the captain of the Queen’s Guard, Thomas Boniface, whose job it is to maintain order and keep both queens safe.

Kade’s return pushes several conflicts and conspiracies to light, and before anyone realises, there’s a battle for life and death going on. The enemy is rather vague and changes constantly, as the conspirators betray each other for their own gain, keeping the reader guessing as much as Boniface. When the dust settles, things have changed for everyone, and not always for the better.

This was a good and compact stand-alone story with high stakes, interesting characters and a bit of romance which I didn’t entirely feel. It’s a May-December one between Kade and Boniface that felt slightly icky even though she’s 24, mostly because Kade behaved like a capricious child. Luckily it was left to the end of the book, so I could let it go.

The second book takes place a century later in the same city. The world has advanced in leaps, and this one is a Gaslamp novel with gothic vibes and aesthetics, complete with séances and rambling manors. It doesn’t really build on the first book, even the magic has changed, and the focus is on the world of demimonde as much as the aristocracy.

Nicholas Valiarde is a successful thief and man of mystery posing as an art dealer. He’s lost his foster father to a conspiracy, and has spent the years since planning a revenge against the man he thinks is responsible for it. With his team, he’s worked hard and everything is ready for the final act in his revenge. And then things start to go wrong.

A man arrives who claims to know who Nicholas is. Even worse, he has items Nicholas’s father has invented that should’ve been destroyed. Nicholas has no choice but to go after the man. What should’ve been a quick kill turns into a full-blown investigation into necromancy and other forbidden arts that is as ghoulish as it’s difficult to solve. And to make matters worse, Nicholas himself is being hunted by an investigator.

This too was a compact, standalone story with great characters and an intriguing story. Interestingly enough, I’d tried to read The Death of the Necromancer years ago and hadn’t managed more than three chapters before giving up. Mostly, if I recall, because I couldn’t get into the world at all. Reading the books back-to-back, it was easier to understand the second book too, even though the worlds are completely different, and I rushed through it.

I would give the first book four stars (it was a tad confusing with too large a cast) and the latter five stars. As a whole, they get five stars for being well-written, imaginative and able to tell their stories in a concise manner that didn’t leave anything out and didn’t have anything unnecessary either. The characters were great and the world was interesting. There are other Ile-Rien books too, and I’ll have to give them a try after this.

I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

System Collapse by Martha Wells: review

5/5 stars on Goodreads

System Collapse by Martha Wells

System Collapse is the seventh MurderBot diaries book and it continues right after the events of the fifth book, Network Effect (book six, Fugitive Telemetry, was a skip back in time). SecUnit, ART the highly autonomic AI ship (or Asshole Research Transport), and their humans are still orbiting the planet that suffered from alien contamination. This time they’re trying to convince the colonists to evacuate—or at least not to accept the offer made by one of the horrid corporations, Barish-Estranza, as that would lead to slavery for them.

The story starts with SecUnit being in a funk of some sort, but it keeps redacting the explanation, like it often does with memory files it doesn’t want to handle. But the reader soon figures out it’s suffering from some sort of episode that is compromising it and its ability to make decisions, which isn’t good in a highly volatile situation where everyone relies on its ability to react fast. It takes a while before it’s ready to share with the reader what’s wrong with it.

SecUnit needs to pull itself together though, when it accompanies two of ART’s humans and Ratthi to an isolated colony they knew nothing about, hoping they get there before Barish-Estranza. They don’t. It’s time for SecUnit to save the day again, with the most SecUnit way so far.

This was a great book. SecUnit’s struggle to understand what is going on with its systems was real and relatable. The cast was small and things were kept tight, and while there were some action scenes, they didn’t take over. I had some trouble remembering who was who at the beginning, as no handy hints were given to the reader; I especially struggled to remember who Three was. But it didn’t matter for long. The ending was good, as SecUnit finally figured out what it wants to do next and who with. I simply must have more.

I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.  

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells: review

4/5 stars on Goodreads

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells

Murderbot is back in Fugitive Telemetry, the sixth book in The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. After the previous book, I assumed the life of the rogue SecUnit would take a new turn, but instead the latest book steps back in time and takes place between Exit Strategy and Network Effect.

Murderbot has settled—sort of—on Preservation space station, a safe haven for all refuges from the Corporate Rim, even for security constructs (part organic, part cyborg) and bots. It fills its days trying to prevent its favourite human, Dr Mensah, the leader of Preservation from being killed by GrayCris Corporation, watching its shows, and getting annoyed by humans who fear it for being a SecUnit. When a murdered body is found, Murderbot is convinced GrayCris is responsible and gets involved in the investigation.

Fugitive Telemetry is a surprisingly traditional whodunit. Murderbot follows the clues, in its own way, which leads it to a different mystery entirely than it had assumed. But since it’s taken to solve the mystery, it’ll see it through, even though it doesn’t have anything to do with Dr Mensah. There aren’t nearly as much explosions, hacking on-the-fly, and fight scenes than in these books usually, but the mystery is interesting and the identity of the culprit surprising. And Murderbot manages to make new friendlies (not friends—never friends) in the process too.

If you haven’t read Network Effect yet, it’s perfectly possible to read this one first. It’s maybe even better if you do. It’s a good book, but I do hope the next one will pick up where Network Effect left Murderbot. Maybe in another full-length book even.

I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Network Effect by Martha Wells: review

5/5 stars on Goodreads

Network Effect by Martha Wells

Network Effect is the fifth book in Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries sci-fi series of a rogue security construct, SecUnit (part organic, part mechanical, all sarcastic). It’s also the first full-length one.

I was really eager to read a longer Murderbot book, and it didn’t disappoint. Murderbot, the SecUnit who has freed itself from its governor module that can kill it, finds itself—for the first time—in a fairly good place. The threat to Dr. Mensah by GrayCris Corporation is practically over and it can choose what it wants to do. It wants to provide security for a science expedition by its favourite humans and Dr. Mensah’s daughter Amena.

Everything is going fairly well, when they’re attacked by a ship Murderbot knows very well, the one powered by ART (asshole research transport), as Murderbot calls the AI. ART has been compromised by alien looking creatures and is effectively dead. So Murderbot sets out to save ART—not its friend, no matter what Amena says—whilst keeping its humans safe.

The plot is constant action and involves abandoned colonies, hostile corporations, cyber-attacks, and explosions. But for the first time, there’s also a lot of room for Murderbot to reflect its existence, concept of friendship, and what it wants to do with its freedom. It does all this in a very Murderbot fashion by denying everything and being grumpy and sarcastic. But it also grows a lot as a person.

The book ends at a crossroads for Murderbot. But instead of revealing where it’ll go from here, the next book goes back in time to events before Network Effect. It’s again a shorter one, but hopefully we’ll get another full-length book after that. Murderbot has a lot to offer us yet.

 

Books I hope to read in 2019

It’s been five years since I’ve posted on this blog, and I think it’s time to revive it. I haven’t stopped reading, or reviewing books; I just published the reviews on my other blog, Susanna Writes. I’m not entirely sure writing two blogs is sensible, but I’m about to give it a go—again—anyway. It’s one of those things that make sense at the beginning of a new year. So here goes.

It’s been my habit for the past couple of years to write a list of books that I hope to read at the beginning of the year. There are so many books being published, that it’s hard to keep track of them all. With a list, I’ll at least remember the most interesting ones. So far, I haven’t once read everything on the list, as I keep reading outside it, but it’s worked well otherwise. If you want to know what I read last year, here’s a post I wrote on my other blog (although, in hindsight, I should probably have published it on this one).

This year, I pledged to read sixty books in Goodreads Reading Challenge, meaning that I should read five books a month. For the past two years, I’ve read fifty-five books a year, so I’m not entirely hopeful that I’ll be able to do it, but it won’t be for the lack of reading if I don’t.

The list for 2019 has sixty-nine books. Fifteen are transfers from the previous list, eight of which were already on the list before that one. Only the books that I really think I want to read, even if I didn’t find time for them before, made it to this year’s list too. Thirteen books are published this year, and they mostly belong to ongoing series by my favourite authors. The rest are mostly books that I already own, but haven’t got around reading, or belong to series that I haven’t managed to catch up with yet. I even went through my Kindle to see what gems I had hidden there, and added them on the list.

My list is heavy on urban fantasy and fantasy: thirty UF books and nineteen fantasy books. That pretty much reflects my reading habits in general. Everything else is genre fiction too; it’s seldom that I read literary fiction these days. There are ten sci-fi books that I want to read, but only one contemporary romance, which is odd, considering that I write them myself, but those tend to be the books that I add on my list as I come across them. Here are some of the books that I’m especially eager to read this year, in no particular order.

Summoned to the Thirteenth Grave by Darynda Jones. This is the last book in her Charley Davidson UF series of a grim reaper that I absolutely love, so it’s with part eagerness and part dread that I wait for it to come out. The publication date is January 15, so not long to wait anymore. And then it will be over. Forever.

Vicious and Vengeful by V.E. Schwab. I love everything she writes, and I expect to find these two books exciting too. I got the first as a birthday present last year, but then waited to read it until I had the second book too, which I got for a Christmas present. So those go to the top of my reading pile.

Wolf Rain by Nalini Singh is the latest in her long Psy-Changeling paranormal romance series. There hasn’t been a weak book yet, so when it comes out in June, I’ll be reading it instantly. And she’ll probably publish other books this year too that aren’t on my list, and I’ll be reading all of them too. This one doesn’t have a cover yet.

The Savior by J.R. Ward is another auto-buy. It’s the book seventeen in her Black Dagger Brotherhood UF series of vampire warriors, and each book has been excellent. She’s publishing other books this year too, and all will go on my list. The first of those is Prisoner of Night, which is set in the same BDB world, and is published next week.

The Wicked King by Holly Black is the second book in her Folk of the Air series of fairies and humans living among them, and it’s published January 8. The first book was exciting, and I expect the follow up to live up to its predecessor.

Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone is a space opera published in June. I’d hoped there would be a new Craft Sequence book, because the next one can’t come fast enough, but I’m sure this will be great too. Another book by him that I’m waiting for, written with Amal El-Mohtar, is This is How You Lose the Time War that comes out in July. I’m not exactly sure what genre that one belongs to, but it has everything, spies, time-travel, and love.

Brave the Tempest by Karen Chance is the latest in Cassandra Palmer UF series. It’s been too long since the previous book and this one can’t come fast enough. Until then, I can return to her UF world with Siren’s Song, a shorter story, which doesn’t have a publication date yet, but should come out soon.

That’s just a small sample of what’s to come. I also look forward to reading Atlas Alone by Emma Newman, fourth book in her Planetfall series, Exit Strategy and Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells, which belong to her Murderbot Diaries series, and Raven Tower, the new Ann Leckie book. And, truly, all books on my list are those that I want to read. It’s just that occasionally I have to prioritise.

The first book of the year has been selected already too. That’s The Mortal Word by Genevieve Cogman. It’s the fifth book in her Invisible Library series, and so far it’s very good. I’ll write a review once I’m finished. Until then, let me know what you’ll be reading this year.