Book Review: Platform Decay by Martha Wells

Pros: entertaining new characters, snarky commentary, excellent world-building

Cons: muted action

Murderbot and Three break onto a gigantic planetary torus so Murderbot can rescue several humans important to Mensah. But their escape is complicated by the unforseen need to rescue more humans and navigate the surprisingly complex torus.

This is a much quieter adventure for Murderbot. While there are some fights, due to the nature of the mission and the presence of kids, it needs to keep the killing and mayhem to a minimum. Instead, there are a lot of quick decisions, directed hacking, and clever manoeuvres. The new humans are interesting and their interactions with Murderbot entertaining. The book has a number of unexpected twists.

The world-building is fantastic as each zone in the torus is run by a different group and so has its own transportation, feed, security, etc. None of which Murderbot knows in advance. It’s ability to plan on the fly has greatly improved.

A new feature in this book is Murderbot’s attempts to deal with its trauma by running occasional (and sometimes frequent) ‘emotion checks’. These provide some nice comedic asides as well as showing Murderbot’s growth as it realizes things about itself and the humans.

It’s an enjoyable read.