Book Review: Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells

Fugitive Telemetry

by Martha Wells (Wells)

 

This is sixth story in the Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells, featuring one of the most unique narrative voices in modern science fiction. The story is told from the point-of-view of a self-aware security bot (SecUnit), who broke the security software and hardware that was keeping it a slave to its human owners back in the first novella, All Systems Red (2017). Since then, despite the fact that all “Murderbot” (which is what it calls itself) wants to do is be left alone to hide somewhere and watch its hundreds of hours of popular media (the futuristic equivalent of soap operas), the Security Unit has made friends — both biological and mechanical — and through their intervention, has achieved a certain level of autonomy over its own fate — this, despite the fact that most humans would prefer to see it back under human control.

 

In this sixth volume of this compelling science fiction series, the SecUnit ends up having to investigate the murder of a human on the research colony where it currently resides. Always distrustful of human motivations, SecUnit doesn’t really want to help the human security officers it has been asked to assist, but without SecUnit’s technological capabilities, the humans’ ability to quickly investigate and solve the murder is questionable. So…SecUnit grudgingly cooperates. What ensues is a fascinating murder mystery investigation in a high-tech futuristic science fiction environment.

 

Highly recommended…as long as you’ve read the five previous installments in the series!

(Before you read this, you’ll want to read the previous five novels or novellas in the Murderbot series by Martha Wells.)

 

( official Murderbot Diaries page on the official Martha Wells web site )

 

Read Scott C.’s reviews of All Systems Red in the July 2019 Staff Recommendations on the libraries' BookGuide resource pages!
Read Scott C.’s review of the first four volumes of the Murderbot Diaries in the January 2020 Staff Recommendations on the libraries' BookGuide resource pages!

 

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!