Platform Decay Audiobook by Martha Wells— narrated by Kevin R. Free

Why the audiobook wins

Kevin R. Free has been Murderbot's voice since the first novella, and eight books in he has the register down cold: flat, fast, faintly put-upon, timed like somebody who would rather be watching a serial. That deadpan is the engine of this one. The running emotion check keeps handing Murderbot feelings it did not ask for, and Free plays every result as an inconvenience instead of a revelation, which is much funnier than sincerity would be.

Audio also does something the page cannot. Murderbot's asides, its corrections, its editorializing about the humans standing right there, all of it blurs together visually and comes apart cleanly in performance. Free gives Three a different flatness, younger and less certain, so the two constructs stay easy to tell apart through the long stretches where they are arguing about what either of them actually wants.

Five hours and forty-five minutes makes this a single-afternoon listen, short by the standards of anything else you will start this month, and an easy way back into the series if you have been away since System Collapse. One Audible credit covers the whole rescue.