My life in books

Martha Wells’ fourth Murderbot novella, Exit Strategy, brings Murderbot back into the world of corporations it was seeking to avoid. Murderbot’s last client as a corporate SecUnit, Dr. Mensah, is being held against her will by GreyCris, the corporation that’s been behind so much of the violence and skullduggery that Murderbot has been dealing with in its quest to discover what enabled it to become self-governing, and what nearly destroyed Dr. Mensah’s expedition.

Murderbot deduces that GreyCris has captured Mensah because they believe that Mensah has been co-ordinating Murderbot’s activities, which have been highly detrimental to GreyCris’ plans. A logical assumption, perhaps, since by Corporation space law, Mensah is Murderbot’s owner.

Murderbot decides to make the attempt to free Mensah from GreyCris’ clutches, and to bring GreyCris down with the evidence of their actions it has gathered.

What follows is another tightly plotted adventure story, which serves as the background for further development of Murderbot’s ethical and emotional understanding of its own self, and of its social interactions with human who have at least some small understanding of what it is.

The novella ends with Murderbot in a temporary state of safety, contemplating its future, having for the first time a choice of options and the freedom to choose openly.

I hear that Wells is working on a Murderbot novel. That’s very exciting news.

Martha Wells’ fantasy The Cloud Roads, the first volume of the Books of the Raksura series, introduces a complex, long-lived species with multiple forms, some of whom can fly, all of whom have certain shapeshifting abilities. Through the protagonist, Moon, a youngish male Raksura orphaned young and left to survive among “groundlings” - non aerial humanoid species - who is reunited with other members of his species after years of knowing nothing of who and what he is, Wells is able to explain her creations without needless exposition. And the Raksura are a fascinating creation indeed. The worldbuilding here is deep and satisfying, both in the nature of the Raksura, and in the richness and sometimes strangeness of the world they live in.

Learning about the Raksura, their society and way of life, and their enemies, the vicious Fell, is probably the best part of the first volume. The rest of it is a not unfamiliar story about the outsider that virtually no one trusts until he saves the people who weren’t sure they wanted them, at which point he ends up respected and granted some high status. In this particular story, the people who don’t trust him are part of a “court,” as Raksura communities are called, that has been dwindling for years, through a combination of ill-luck, illness, and attack from outside, that has left many wondering if there’s a curse on the place they settled in, or some other evil stalking their community. But Moon is a fertile winged male, or consort, and few such are born in any community of Raksura, and this community, Indigo Cloud Court, has lost all but one of its consorts to illness or injury, and the remaining consort, Stone, is old. Moon may be an outsider, of unknown history and bloodlines, but he is a consort. And it is his past, his experiences with other peoples, that hold the key to survival when the ancient enemy of the Raksura attack the court and take many of its members prisoner.

It’s very well told, suspenseful, with lots of action, touches of humour, and great characterisation. A well-crafted story, fun to read, and thoroughly engaging.

After finishing The Cloud Roads, I was curious enough to discover what would happen next to Moon, Jade - his mate and the secondary queen of Indigo Cloud Court - and their community, driven from their home by the attack of the Fell. So I started reading The Serpent Sea on the same day I finished The Cloud Roads.

Stone, the old consort and line-grandfather of Indigo Cloud Court, leads the survivors to the Reach, a vast forested land, home to a species of gigantic mountain-trees, each one large enough to shelter a community several times the size of the remnants of Indigo Cloud Court. Here they find the empty mountain-tree where their ancestors had lived when Stone was still a child, a home that, by Raksura custom, they still held claim to. But once they arrive, they make a terrible discovery - the magical heartseed which allows the giant trees to be shaped into a vast, living habitation has been stolen, and without it, the tree that was their ancestral home is dying.

Once more faced with a fight for survival, Moon, Jade and Stone lead a party of Raksura on the trail of the thieves, hoping to find and reclaim the heartseed and heal the mountain-tree so they may begin the slow process of rebuilding their court in a safe home.

Again, the twin delights of the story are its fast-moving plot, and its formidable worldbuilding. We learn more about the Raksura, their history, and how different courts interact, the politics and rituals of greater Raksura society. And we see more of this fantastic and complex world that Wells has created.

The third volume of the Books of the Raksura, The Siren Depths, begins shortly after the conclusion of The Serpent Sea. With their home tree healing, and the community settling into their new life in the Reaches, Moon and Jade decide it’s time for her to being their first clutch - but before they can conceive, news that may imperil their future together arrives. The story of Moon’s early life has spread among the other courts of the Reach, and a formal embassy arrives to deliver a message on behalf of distant Onyx Night Court. Moon, it seems, is the survivor of a Fell attack on a small court that had fissioned off from Onyx Night - and there are other survivors, including one of the queens, who claims Moon as a member of her court, and refuses to acknowledge the union between Moon and Jade. Without the consent of his home court’s queen, Moon cannot, by Raksuran custom, contract a union, and must return to Onyx Night Court.

Jade is unwilling to give up her relationship with Moon, and, with Stone and a few other members of Indigo Cloud Court, follows Moon to Onyx Night to claim her mate from his queen - who, he learns, is also his birthmother. As Moon begins to piece together the story of his childhood, and Jade struggles to convince his mother, Malachite, that Moon belongs to her, an old enemy resurfaces. Both Onyx Night Court and Indigo Cloud Court have suffered deep wounds at the hands of the Fell, and their reappearance brings about an uneasy truce as members of both courts unite to foil the long-laid plans of the Fell.

Again the story Wells tells is tightly plotted, full of action and suspense, reversals and revelations. We learn more about the linked history of Raksura and Fell, but at the end of the novel, we are left still in the dark about much that has gone before. Fortunately, there are more Raksura novels to read.

Martha Wells’ novella All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries is the story of a cybernetic Security Unit that has hacked into its own programming, rendering it capable of autonomous thought and decision-making, although it has most definitely not entertained the notion of letting its employers know about that.

It’s designed to be a killing machine, and we see just how good it is at its function in the opening sequence, in which it saves teo human scientists from something large and nasty that attacks them. But what it really enjoys is consuming entertainment media - films, books, music.

It’s current contract is to provide security for a group of scientists surveying an uninhabited planet. As contracts go, it’s not a bad one. The scientists are a reasonably compatible group who have worked together before, and after sll, it’s not as if they want to socislise with their SecUnit - and their SecUnit definitely does not want to socialise with them. But after the incident with the large and aggressive lifeform, the SecUnit and the survey team have a serious problem. There’s no mention of the lifeform in the official papers on the planet - and closer inspection shows that those documents have been altered. And that’s just the beginning of the problems.

This could have been your standard semi-milsf mystery thriller, and it certainly has all the elements necessary for that, but the unique voice of the narrator transforms it into something rather more interesting, a speculation on the nature of choice, responsibility and autonomy. The self-named “murderbot” has free will, and is not particularly fond of human beings. Yet it risks itself to save its employers, repeatedly. A sense of duty? The need to hide its ability to make decisions, a sort if ironic self-preservation? A sense of right snd wrong?

All Systems Red is entertaining as an action-adventure style sf story, but it’s also an interesting turn on the classic AI examination. What is self-awareness? What is free will? What does an autonomous being that has none of the human drives do when it’s left to its own choices? Wells has more stories in the Murderbot series planned, and I’ll be interesting in seeing where she takes this.