zoetrope

The one with the racetracks, and the titular parade.

It took me way too long to get into this because I was too busy going Tran? Bautista?? Florin??? Brittany???? every time a supporting character popped up without an adequate reminder of who they were (like, here I am picturing Florin with the head of a crocodile and nothing the book said either proved or disproved it; imagine reading anything else like that, like, yeah, iirc, Hamlet is a hammerhead shark with robotic legs)(ilu Jamal) but once I stopped caring about that, I had a lot of fun. Just as propulsive as the other books. With a couple of those sneaky big feels that occasionally ambush Carl. And a clever resolution to the eleventh floor.

Contains some actual animal harm, like to actual animals. Plus the usual gore, violence, and conspicuous adherence to a gender binary, including, at one point, the phrase "female boots," like wtf, Dinniman, fucking slap that phrase into Google and put your eyeballs on some ladies footwear and fucking describe it. But even worse is that I think they were probably motorcycle boots and did not need to be gendered at all. Which could be said of a lot of things in this series.

It's like Martha Wells heard me when I said the thing I like the least about this series is all the descriptions of walking and was like CHALLENGE ACCEPTED. This book is almost entirely one long walk. Even Murderbot was complaining about it.

A return to form, where, much like the first four books in the series, that form is a novella where Murderbot is in a situation and must get itself and its assigned humans out of it. This time the situation is an escort mission, only, unlike a video game, the people Murderbot is escorting can think for themselves and won't walk off a cliff if left alone for a second. They're interesting characters and, unlike many of the other humans Murderbot adopts, I had no trouble keeping them straight, but they're not Murderbot's main people, so despite Murderbot's increasing self-awareness of its emotional state, this book lacks a lot of the deep feels that, say, Exit Strategy or Network Effect provoke. Instead, I mainly found it interesting for the worldbuilding and the exploration of the different ways people live in the Corporate Rim.

I loved seeing Three again, but, of course, I wanted more Three, and really I missed Murderbot's interactions with the humans, augmented humans, and "bot pilot" who know it best. Because the thing I like the most about this series, and I said this too, is Murderbot and the way it's learning how to be a person and building relationships despite not knowing how to do either of those things.

Contains: child harm, the usual violence and swearing (though not as much as usual!), character using a mobility device.