Jonathan O'Neill's Reviews > Fugitive Telemetry

3.5 ⭐

There’s a homicide case on “preservation fucking station”, the home of Mensah and the rest of the preservation survey team that we’ve come to kind-of-but-not-really know throughout the series so far. Mbot is inclined to assist Station Security with their investigation, despite neither party being over the moon about the idea, due to a concern that the evil GrayCris Corporation may be involved in the murder and this would not bode well for the safety of Mensah and the gang. So, we see Bot Bot having to deal with a new cast of entirely generic characters that lead off hating/fearing him but ultimately come to appreciate him for his competence as a security (murder) bot and his willingness to abstain from displaying such competence against themselves and the rest of the residents on Preservation.

At this point, I can confidently say to you, dear reader, that if you didn’t enjoy the first book in the Murderbot Diaries, ‘All Systems Red’, then you won’t enjoy any of the subsequent releases. ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ seems to be Well’s motto with this particular series.
I have to confess; I’ve gone into the last couple of novel(la)s with a little bit of pre-emptive negativity. See, I’ve wanted the scope of the series to expand and become something much more epic, which it’s perfectly capable of doing, since finishing ‘Rogue Protocol’, the third book in the series but it was made abundantly clear, when that didn’t happen in the full-length novel ‘Network Effect’, that this is not the direction Wells is taking her baby.

I can’t begrudge her that, it is her baby after all, but it does hurt my enjoyment a little bit presuming that all that’s in store for the future of the series is more of the same. The same running jokes about Mbot not wanting to do anything but watch TV shows (you can expect about a half dozen variations of this same comment per novella):

”If I was going to do this, I wanted to get started so I could make sure this anomalous murder wasn’t an indication of a threat to Mensah. Plus, I had a lot of downloaded shows to get through.”

The same trademark/predictable (I suppose the two go hand-in-hand) snark from Mbot, which is great by the way but he does tend to just cycle through the same repertoire of commentary regarding his unique observation of humans. Funny? Yes… Done to death? Also yes!

Despite all this, at 3.5 stars, I still clearly enjoyed this even despite the fact that you’ll know who the murderer is as soon as you hear the description of the type of weapon used (maybe before if you’re a better detective than me – highly probable). There’s just something unusually gratifying (in a second-hand sense) and even therapeutic about observing Mbot hacking foreign systems, kicking ass and taking names. I like to complain a lot but we all know I’ll be coming back for more!