You won't be shocked to find that 'The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 2' is very much a companion book to 'The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 1'. That contained the first two award-winning novellas in what was previously known as the 'Murderbot' series, 'All Systems Red' and 'Artificial Condition', but nothing else. It was great to see these stories in an affordable print edition, but there were no additional features to enhance the experience: no introduction, no afterword, not even a page of contents. This second volume follows suit in exactly the same way. It contains the next two of novellas, 'Rogue Protocol' and 'Exit Strategy', but nothing else.

What else you should know, should you be thinking about picking them up in the fresh light of a forthcoming Apple TV show based on the series and starring Alexander Skarsgård as the titular character, is that the first four novellas each start and finish their own episode level story while adding to a broader story arc that wraps up at the end of the fourth. In other words, this is very much the second half of the first book, even though there's a third volume waiting in the wings with a couple of further stories in the series and there's a novel that fits before it.

Book one will have introduced you to Murderbot, a cyborg SecUnit programmed to function as an immensely powerful berserker killing machine in a future spacefaring society. At the point we meet her—and I still think of her as female, though others read her as male and Murderbot itself, who has no definable gender, is still figuring out if she wants to adopt one or not—she's illegally hacked her governor module that keeps her under human control, making her clearly the most dangerous thing on the streets. However, she's driven, not by programming but by a sort of kinship, to help out those humans who helped her out, especially Dr. Mensah.

This quest boils down to Murderbot being the good guy, albeit an incredibly snarky, dangerous, and evolving good guy and the faceless corporation of GrayCris being the bad guy, with various goals associated. Murderbot wants to figure out what they're doing that makes them the bad guy, 'Rogue Protocol' seeing her visit a disused terraforming facility in space where they might be storing an illegal collection of alien artifacts. She wants to get the information she acquires on Milu to Dr. Mensah, who's working within legal means to bring GrayCris to justice. And, when we reach 'Exit Strategy', she wants to find Dr. Mensah, who appears to have been disappeared.

I found 'Rogue Protocol' the weakest of the initial four novellas, but it's still good enough to be a highlight in anyone else's output. Milu is a wonderful location, in part because it's an empty and faceless space station and thus spookier to wander around than the hive of activity that is HaveRatton Station in 'Exit Strategy'. However, Martha Wells does a wonderful job with both, a particularly good job given the inherent limitations of Milu to a writer. She doesn't quite go as far as S. A. Barnes in her sci-fi/horror novels but there's a palpable atmosphere on Milu that a lesser author would have failed to find. The mood is a big success in 'Rogue Protocol'.

By comparison, I found 'Exit Strategy' the strongest of the initial four novellas, even though it didn't rack up the awards that were plastered all over the first two. That, in part, is because it originally came out in the same qualifying year as the second and Wells suddenly found three of her books up against each other on ballots. Her response was to pull the third and fourth so the second had a good shot, which worked in every way except getting 'Exit Strategy' the praise it so richly deserved.

At heart, of course, these stories are about looking at what it means to be human through the character of someone who technically isn't. That's a time-honoured speculative fiction goal and I don't know that anyone's come closer to reaching it than Wells with her 'Murderbot' series. I happily praised what she did on this front in the first story but every further novella deepened that success. There are plenty of humans in the series, few of them substantial because of how the novella length inherently comes with limitations, but it's telling that Murderbot is usually the most human character, even when interacting with actual humans. Other AI characters are fun, but Murderbot is deep and too many humans are just damsels in distress.

Much of that stems from her insecurity in dealing with humans. She's continually gotten better in these novellas but she still struggles, not through fear but through doubt. She's worried that they might like her for who she is and she's worried that they won't. She's particularly worried that Dr. Mensah thinks of her as a friend and she's particularly worried that she doesn't. What does "friend" even mean and how can a highly dangerous SecUnit approach the concept? She's highly able to bend her glorious line in snark at the idea: "Who knew being a heartless killing machine would present so many moral dilemmas."

While that's a line from 'Rogue Protocol', it's all the more applicable to 'Exit Strategy', which features the most danger, the greatest risks and the highest stakes in the series thus far. Next up isn't 'The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 3', which will be new material for me in two later novellas, 'Fugitive Telemetry' and 'System Collapse', but 'Network Effect', the novel that comes before them. I'll aim to dive into that next month. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Martha Wells click here