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Nebula Review: Network Effect by Martha Wells
Have you met Murderbot yet? If not…why not?
The six book series (so far) by Martha Wells stars Murderbot (except don’t call it that), perhaps one of the best AI characters in the history of AI characters. And I’m including characters like R. Daneel Olivaw, Data, K-9, etc.
Massive spoilers follow for most of the books in the series. The nominated novel, Network Effect is the first full-length novel…the series started as a novella series, but Wells appears to have found this story got too long for that.
Meet Murderbot
Imagine a sapient cyborg robot (Murderbot is put together much like the original Terminator) that provides security to clients. To make sure it doesn’t go rogue like in all the novels it has a governor module to stop it from killing its clients, abandoning...
Now imagine that it hacks its governor module and the first thing it does is…
…watch futuristic soap operas.
Addictively watch futuristic soap operas.
Murderbot doesn’t have a name other than that. It doesn’t have a gender. What it does have, whether it admits it or not, is a heart (and not in the stupid sense of that one Terminator movie).