This is a reivew of “Rogue Protocol“, the third book in the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells.
You can find a review of book one here, and of book two here.
The case against the too-big-to-fail GrayCris Corporation is floundering, and more importantly, authorities are beginning to ask more questions about where Dr. Mensah’s SecUnit is. Murderbot would rather that those questions went away for good, so it decides to do something about it.
Like the previous two stories, the story takes place in a confined setting and with a small crew of characters. The setting for this book wasn’t really expanded upon, but it was fascinating nonetheless. A station floating within a large, incredibly active storm cloud covering a lot of the surface – if not all of it – neatly cuts off all communication with the surrounding world. No one ever got down to the planet surface or even saw it.
It has become obvious that this jaunt away from Dr. Mensah is exactly what Murderbot needs. Like any human whose situation suddenly changes from captivity of any sort to freedom, it needed to find itself. It needed to experience things for itself, learn, change and become more equal to Dr. Mensah than it was from the start.
And this time it has learned about friendships. It is no longer a theoretical concept for Murderbot, but a more visceral thing. Miki, though annoying, did nothing but help and even took the final step. Don Abene valued Miki enough to not only try to order it to safety, but also had Miki’s controls set to total free will. MIki wasn’t a pet like Murderbot had assumed at first. It was true friendship between human and robot.
No wonder that it left Murderbot confused and disturbed at the end. The fact that Murderbot also has to suddenly act like a normal SecUnit once again, makes it realise just how much it hates that.
Now, over to the bad. There isn’t much, but there are a couple of things.
One thing that is starting to become noticable is the lack of competent, good, strong male characters. So far all the characters who have truly done anything in the story or been more than just secondary characters, have been female. Which is completely fine, competent women are cool. But it does kinda get monotonous when every single competent, proactive person is a woman.
I did find a grammar mistake in both the previous books, but that could have been because of the style of writing from first person. This, however was a real spelling mistake that ought to have been caught and corrected.
Other than that, this is an excellent book and episode in Murderbot’s life, and I am eager to read the fourth book.
Read this book! Seriously, just read it!
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