Liz Bourke Reviews System Collapse by Martha Wells
System Collapse, Martha Wells (Tordotcom 978-125082-697-8, $21.99, 256pp, hc) November 2023. Cover by Jaime Jones.
The seventh of Martha Wells’s Murderbot long-form stories, System Collapse is a novel-length sequel to Network Effect, picking up within days of that novel’s conclusion. Murderbot fans are unlikely to be disappointed here: Wells is on form with the series’ trademark black humour, razor-sharp tension, Murderbot’s all-too-relatable interpersonal interactions, action, and high stakes.
Murderbot, its friend the Asshole Research Transport (ART for short), ART’s crew, and the humans from Preservation have committed to helping the inhabitants of the alien-contaminated lost colony planet and at the very least, keeping them out of indentured servitude to the corporations that strive to exploit everything in reach. This is made more complicated by the fact that the Barish-Estranza corporation has sent ‘‘rescue’’ ships to the system, and are attempting to manoeuvre their way into outright possession. These reinforcements contain a number of additional SecUnits, so if matters come to blows, Murderbot and its companions are seriously outnumbered.
And Murderbot is experiencing… issues. Operational issues that it has never experienced before, linked to its traumatic brush with the alien contamination. So when it and some companions go to try to convince an isolated offshoot of the main colony population – an offshoot that may or may not be suffering from the alien contamination problem that affected the main colony – that Barish-Estranza doesn’t have their best interests at heart, it doesn’t exactly feel as though it’s at peak performance. Never mind that reasoned persuasion isn’t exactly Murderbot’s strongest suit. Worse news: Barish-Estranza beat them there, and now they have to persuade the isolated colonists under a time limit, in the presence of hostile actors – and factions in the corporate team may change the parameters of the problem at any time.
The beating heart of System Collapse is the event that Murderbot refers to in the first part of the book as ‘‘redacted.’’ Murderbot really doesn’t want to think about this event, in which Murderbot experienced a human-style traumatic flashback to its personal encounter with alien contamination, a flashback that – as occasionally happens with human traumatic flashbacks – included a vivid false memory of an even worse outcome. Murderbot essentially passed out briefly as a result of this flashback and its effects on Murderbot’s mind and body: a complete system collapse that recalls the novel’s title.
This would be distressing for anybody. For Murderbot, a being that at the best of times is a bundle of un- and under-acknowledged trauma and neuroses, but who thinks it shouldn’t be because it’s a construct, not a human, this unprecedented event is exceptionally distressing. Not only did it have a flashback (something that, as a SecUnit, it thinks it shouldn’t be capable of having), and not only did it pass out because of the emotional distress (something that, as a SecUnit, it thinks it shouldn’t be capable of doing), it remembered things that didn’t happen.
Murderbot has always been able to trust its ability to perceive the world around it, and while some of its memories have been wiped, it has always been able to trust that what it did remember actually happened. It has never before had a moment when it remembered two contradictory versions of events. Now it doesn’t know if it can rely on itself to function normally, especially since it doesn’t know if something will trigger it to pass out again.
Murderbot acknowledging this uncertainty, learning to operate around it and to repose more trust in its friends – beginning the process of accepting that it’s prey to certain kinds of very human weakness, not that it’d put matters in such terms – is the emotional heart of System Collapse. Learning how to ask for help, and what help to ask for, and figuring out what it wants and how to reach for it: that’s Murderbot’s journey here. (Murderbot remains entirely too relatable for comfort.)
Well, that and the occasional fraught stand-off and desperate, explosive confrontation. But despite its action-adventure bones, System Collapse is a more low-key, introspective novel than many of the Murderbot stories have been so far. As is usual for Martha Wells’ work, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
If you haven’t read the Murderbot stories, I don’t advise starting here. But I do advise starting them: if you enjoy them, you’ll enjoy this one too
Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, is out now from Aqueduct Press. Find her at her blog, her Patreon, or Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council and the Abortion Rights Campaign.
This review and more like it in the September 2023 issue of Locus.
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