Recently, I’ve been striving to catch up with posting about the titles on my Book Booty list for 2024. Today it’s time for System Collapse by Martha Wells, which is the seventh title in the Murderbot series.

I have loved Murderbot since first encountering All Systems Red several years ago.

To date, there have been seven titles in the series, five of them novellas. System Collapse is the second novel and a direct sequel to Network Effect, which I consider essential reading in order to fully grok System Collapse.

I make no secret of being a Murderbot fan, so I was delighted to receive System Collapse as a gift. Although unlike the previous books, it did take me some time to get into the story.

Initially it was hard to know what was going on, “because [redacted]”, but it may also have been because the story did not take me where I expected to go at the end of Network Effect. There were also a lot of characters to navigate, with new players coming in while the old “Scooby gang” were still very much part of the mix, all in a much smaller page space (243 as opposed to 349) than Network Effect.

So I had to come to terms with that and recalibrate, before I could really get into the story. But once I made that shift, and particularly once the action started, all the old enjoyment kicked in — because Murderbot, but also because the story delivers on a combination of lost colonies, corporate bad actors, frightening but also conflicted cyborgs, and equally terrifying alien tech. It also examines the effects that the accumulation of such events are having on Murderbot: that is, that it isn’t just a “heartless killing machine.”

And that’s all I’m going to tell you, but if you’re a Murderbot fan like me you should enjoy this book, even if there may be an initial adjustment required. If you’re new to Murderbot I definitely recommend starting at the beginning with All Systems Red, but if you like works such as CJ Cherryh’s Cyteen, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, or The Expanse series by James A Corey, I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy the ride.

I read the hardback edition of System Collapse (243 pp.) As noted above, I received it as a gift.