Our score
Outstanding
Platform Decay
Martha Wells sends her murderous, TV-addicted SecUnit onto a rotting ring station to pull a group of hostages, children included, out of corporate custody. Platform Decay is a leaner and funnier entry in the Murderbot Diaries than the last few, built on a running self-diagnostic gag and the best partner work the series has given Three.
From the review
Old infrastructure is the best thing that can happen to a SecUnit. Half the cameras on this ring station are dead, the deck plans are decades out of date, and the maintenance crawlways run through spaces nobody currently in charge remembers building. Murderbot clocks all of it in the first few pages, because that is what it was built to do, and Martha Wells lets the competence play out at length before anything goes wrong. She has always understood that a body made for security reads a building the way other people read a face. The job is a rescue. A Barish-Estranza executive is holding a group of humans on the platform and treating them as recoverable assets, and Murderbot volunteers to go get them out, which means sharing small pressurized rooms with strangers for weeks. Several of the strangers are children. For Murderbot this ranks somewhere near being shot, and the comedy Wells gets out of it is real, but there is something underneath it. Kids do not honor the arrangement that lets a construct stand in a corner and be ignored. They ask direct questions. They stare. The strongest passages in the book are the ones where Murderbot has to be a person in front of people who will not let it be equipment.
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