Platform Decay by Martha Wells

Platform Decay

4/5. A good outing. Murderbot does a complex rescue in corporate space, and there are juveniles, terrible.

Things I like:

• Getting a nuanced and varied look at just what life in corporate space looks like, particularly for average people. And how those people deal with the various kinds of violence and oppression that surround them. A lot of this was extremely sketchy and gestural before, but this book does a huge amount of background work on adding texture to the world.


• Wells playing out some of the consequences of the governor module hack code being out there now in ways that the fandom has been chewing on for a while.


• Murderbot getting to snark a bit on the ways that Preservation’s utopia is also sometimes really full of itself and incorrect about its own righteousness, as utopias do.


• Emotional self-awareness (oh no, terrible, how could a murderbot have a worse fate).

So yeah, pretty good, even with the tragic absence of most of the usual main cast and crew.