wednesday books are not at full performance

[landofnowhere]

System Collapse, Martha Wells. I took a break from Murderbot to read a bunch of historical stuff, partly because I'd remembered that this wasn't as good as Network Effect. Which is true, but I still liked it better the second time around, though in some ways it's less of a fun read. I mentioned when reviewing the early books in the series is that part of the appeal is that while Murderbot is a huge bundle of anxiety, it's also stunningly competent in what it does, especially when it has a reason to care. However a lot of the first half of this book is Murderbot having to deal with stuff going on that is making it less competent, which is useful character development in that it gets to work more as part of a team, but means that the fun stuff is really loaded into the second half of the story.

(I have seen the first two episodes of the show, but would prefer to have this be a book-discussion-only zone.)