#complete with clickbait titles and unnecessary emojis

[rjalker]

System Collapse is just so bad it'd be funny if not for the completely unnecessary transmisia (That doesn't even fucking make sense lofl).

So here's the things it's not:

It's not plot driven

It's not action driven

It's not mystery driven

It's not character driven

There's just 60,000 ish plus words of a whole lot of nothing happening and us being literally told things are happening.

We're told Murderbot has a Systems Collapse™ 😱 (A horrified emoji clutching its face in fear), and we're told that it's making mistakes.

As in it literally keeps going "I'd fucked that up" "Oh look another mistake I'd made" "I was useless"

But not like, actually making any real mistakes. Martha Wells is continuing the pattern of the 6 first books in the series, where we just get told Murderbot is making mistakes instead of Murderbot actually making mistakes, but this time it's even more glaringly obvious that that's what she's doing because it happens like 50 times. For no reason.

(And not even in a "Murderbot's self esteem is spiraling and it's having a horrible angsty time" way. No. It's fine except for where we keep being told it's not fine. But if you go off of what we're shown, it is, in fact, literally fucking fine. because it's bad writing.)

"not instantly noticing a door on the other side of the giant dark room" is not a mistake worth commenting on. No, not even in an in-universe sense. And especially not worth doing so what felt like fifty fucking times for things just as inconsequential.

If she wanted us to believe that Murderbot was actually making mistakes and performing at sub-optimum efficiency or whatever...how about have it fucking lead a group of humans into a room with people pointing guns at the door and someone gets shot because it wasn't paying attention or couldn't focus? Bonus points if the humans it's babysitting had been trying to draw attention to the problem but it kept shooting them down (No pun intended) and insisting it was the security and it knew what it was doing.

no, we can't do that, because that would require Murderbot to actually makes mistakes that matter.

And with Martha Wells writing, that's never gonna happen because all of her protagonists are overpowered Mary Sues who are never allowed to "lose" in any real way, and that includes making actual mistakes. (And, as many of my other posts have talked about at length, this is also why none of her characters will ever become physically disabled no matter how many times they get blown up or stabbed or shot or eviscerated)

So she's just gonna keep literally telling us that Murderbot is making mistakes about things that are not mistakes and don't actually matter. And that's all that we're ever gonna get.

Even in the book that's supposedly about Murderbot Having A Mental Breakdown 😱 (another horrified emoji).

And just like the rest of the book titles, this one has nothing to do with the actual story being told, at all. It is in fact the worst title so far because it's just so blatantly "clickbait" and a lie. lol.

I literally said aloud to Walks when I was 20 pages in, "I feel like this is gonna be a Steven Moffat".

And yeah, I was right, it literally is.

The first literal 99 pages, not even joking, are just referring to the Systems Collapse™ 😱 (another horrified emoji) the book is named for, and referring to this event, which already happened, offscreen, before this book started, as, literally, redacted.

Implying constantly that it's some huge big traumatic deal with far-reaching consequences and major impacts on our main characters.

And we literally do not even get told what this event was until literally page 99.

And then by page 101 we're done talking about it.

And we are literally told what happened. Not even shown it from Murderbot's perspective.

Because it...wasn't even aware of it at the time. It remembered sitting while the humans were talking, and then its very next memory is waking up in the medical bay, perfectly physically fine as always.

And you may be thinking in petrified horror, "oh gods, what happened during the time it doesn't remember?" and imagining all sorts of plausible and horrible scenarios.

And uhh, well I don't want this post to have any more spoilers than it already does, so I'll make like Martha Wells and just tell you: None of the things you're probably imagining, which would make sense and fit within the story and justify all this drama around the event, are what happened.

What happened, is, like the rest of this book, a whole lot of nothing.

And as I said above. This book is not driven by the plot. It's not driven by a mystery. It's not filled with action. And it's not driven by the characters or their emotions.

Nothing in this book seems to matter, except that we just keep being told it matters, like we're told Murderbot is making mistakes.

I love character-driven stories. If this book were 60+ thousand words of nothing but intense Murderbot introspection and development, I'd have loved it.

But it's not. And there's nothing else to make up for the fact that it's not. All the other books had either interesting action, interesting characters, a lot of funny things, or a lot of sad things. This has exactly none of those things.

It's not funny, it's not sad, it doesn't have any interesting character interactions, the plot, which is overly complicated and doesn't make sense, wastes a whole lot of time doing nothing, and we just keep being told that Murderbot is Especially Traumatized™ right now, but not actually shown this in any way. We did not need to be told that Murderbot was having a mental breakdown in book 5, it was fucking obvious from the way it was acting. We were shown the fact that it was breaking down.

Here? Nope. No show, all tell, and what we're being told isn't even true...probably all of the time, to be honest. There's no point where something bad happens and then Murderbot goes "that was bad". No, the telling isn't a reaction to the showing.

We just get told things and that's supposed to make them true. But that's not how storytelling works.

Oh and all the rest of the problems this series has had until now? yeah Martha Wells is still continuing those. Augmented humans AKA cyborgs AKA disabled people are still explicitly excluded from the group of "human", because Martha Wells saw The Imperial Radch series talking about how THE EVIL FUCKING EMPIRE does not consider disabled people to be human, and decided that was a cool thing to do without...the whole thing where it's evil to do so, and that's the whole fucking point.

Literally the entire point of this in The Imperial Radch is to show that dehumanizing people is something fashists do. But Martha Wells missed that part, so she's just gonna keep dehumanizing disabled people in The Murderbot Diaries as a point of course. With no contemplation by anyone or anything that hey maybe this is a bad thing to do.

She's still still making up millions of excuses to avoid freeing other enslaved people because she thinks robot rebellions are too cliche to be interesting, so the alternative is "don't free slaves whenever you get the chance because ummmm what if they're enslaved for a good reason and decide to murder everyone?" Yeah, we're on book 7 and she's still doing that shit.

She keeps showing us that Murderbot is just as overpowered as the rest of her protagonists, but all of sudden when it comes to freeing other slaves, now all of a sudden poor little Murderbot can't do anything because ummmmmmmmmmmmm it'd have to....*checks notes* hack the security system first. ya know, that thing it's done millions of times? that thing it does without hesitation or trouble literally all the time?

It's like the fucking Democrats every time they win office. Oh no, sorry, they can't actually do anything in this extremely powerful position to help people, they're actually totally powerless and um we should give them more money and more power and then they'll be able to do the bare minimum to help people Vote Blue No Matter Who [heart emoji]

Murderbot can hack anything it wants whenever it wants at any time, and only chooses not to send space stations crashing out of orbit to be polite.

But ohh, as soon as there's another enslaved SecUnit in front of it that it has the power to free, then all of a sudden um there's nothing it can do, it can't hack the security system all of a sudden.

Literally this:

[ID: The meme of someone putting on sunglasses, originally saying, "I can't read suddenly. I don't know." Now edited so the top is captioned, "Murderbot when it's given the chance to free other slaves:", with the person now saying, "I can't hack suddenly. I don't know.". End ID.]

And this isn't a character flaw, this isn't Murderbot being traumatized and falling for the same propaganda that justified it being enslaved.

No, this is all because Martha Wells thinks robot uprising and slave rebellions are too cliche. Literally. They're too cliche. And these people are enslaved because they're so dangerous. So they should stay enslaved. And we're on book fucking 7 so far. So the racism is continuing and there's no sign of it stopping any time soon.

Sarcasm: Slavery is fine apparently as long as you're scared of what the enslaved people will do if you free them! Such great morals. Definitely couldn't have been unpacked in the second book at all.

The first few books were always making excuses not to free other slaves, but they've never been so blatant about being excuses until now. There is genuinely no excuse for keeping this shit up at this point. She's already spent the first 6 books showing us how completely overpowered Murderbot is. Pretending it suddenly can't do anything only when it's time to free other enslaved people is so fucking transparent and racist. Like I said it before and this book is just further cementing the fact that these books, despite the premise, are just slavery apologism at this point. We are on book 7! Seven! you don't need seven fucking books to deal with this shit!

Anyways don't waste money buying this book. Get it from your local library or the Web Archive or borrow from a friend. It's not worth spending money on. If your local library doesn't have it yet, make an Official request for them to get it.

The only thing worth reading it for is so you can see exactly how not to tell a story, because the problems in this one are so fucking glaringly obvious at all times.

Worst Murderbot book published so far. -5/10. Do not recommend. Definitely do not spend money on it.

[bomb-galoshes]

Great Idea #36483:

Zed and Tannis having their own ECHOtube channel where they vlog about their weird experiments on Psychos and “what’s in my medical bag” challenges.