I really enjoyed Martha Wells’ four-volume hardback Murderbot Diaries. The series was recommended by a friend who thought I’d enjoy Ms. Wells’ dry humor. Well, I sure did. I also enjoyed the future-verse of space travel, AI, and government by soulless corporations which she created. Ms. Wells describes her universe through the experiences of a rogue security “bot” who still chooses to protect people who annoy it and are too stupid to defend themselves while watching soap operas and fully exploring self-protective paranoia.

The only constructive criticism I have is that the short novellas are “bare bones” in terms of description. The job of imagining what the spaceships, the planet explorations, and the space stations look and sound like is almost entirely put on the reader. This is normally part of the reader’s job, but it is a big lift for this series. There could have been more meat on the bone. The novellas would have better served the reader as short novels or one combined longer work.