Review: Exit Strategy

Series: The Murderbot Diaries: #4

Murderbot has really stirred up some trouble. Now Dr. Mesnah’s caught up in it and it’s time to come back and perhaps fix some things.

Like the rest, it’s a quick read with a wonderful sense of all too familiar alienness, wonderful hacking and action scenes, and a fascinating look at what it means to be a person–or not.

Worth the read, but at this point, I expect you’ll already be blowing through these.


One thing that I thing I’ve failed ot mention thus far for all of these books (which is really a shame) is just how ‘seen’ Murderbot feels. THere’s… apparently not that much different between a cyborg with a penchant for hacking gone rogue and an almost certainly neuroatypical coder … with a penchant for hacking. :D

I might be wrong. I knew interpreting the emotional subtext in the speech and appearance of real humans was completely different from interpreting it in shows and serials. (For one thing, the shows and serials were trying to communicate accurately with the viewer. As far as I could tell, real humans usually didn’t know what the hell they were doing.)

Pretty much. Humans usually don’t know what they hell they’re doing.

Also:

In the shows, I saw humans comfort each other all the time at moments like this. I had never wanted that and I still didn’t. (Touching while rendering assistance, shielding humans from explosions, etc., is different.) But I was the only one here, so I braced myself and made the ultimate sacrifice. “Uh, you can hug me if you need to.” She started to laugh, then her face did something complicated and she hugged me. I upped the temperature in my chest and told myself it was like first aid.

Also also, I do love the (over)use of parentheticals:

I took my bag with me because it was likely I wouldn’t come back here. (Yes, I was going to miss that display surface.) It also had my projectile weapon, and you never could tell when you might need armor-piercing fire power. (And I could hook my right hand on the strap, which gave me something to do with that arm. How humans decide what to do with their arms on a second-by-second basis, I still have no idea.)