For most of his life, Moon has been a man without a home, not even knowing what he is. All he knows is that he can shift shapes, becoming a
winged, scaled, and long-tailed hunter... and that the only other shifters he's ever encountered have been the cruel Fell, who destroy whatever
they touch. Moon wanders the Three Worlds, always in search of a place to belong among various groups of groundlings, but it never lasts - until
at last he encounters Stone, a shifter of his own kind. The stranger tells him he is a Raksura, and offers to bring him back to the Indigo Cloud
colony to be among his own race. But his arrival coincides with a dark time in the colony, and none of them trust this strange outsider who
doesn't even know how to be a proper Raksura. Worse, the Fell are about; they've already destroyed one nearby colony, yet Pearl, queen of Indigo
Cloud, seems open to treat with them. Like it or not, Moon finds himself drawn into the heart of the brewing conflict, one that will reveal an
even bigger threat to all the Three Worlds.
Review
The Cloud Roads is a very strange sort of fantasy. It has its roots firmly planted in old-school realms like Edgar Rice Burroughs's
Pellucidar and Barsoom or Fritz Leiber's sorcerous Nehwon, creating a vast and wild and untamed world populated with all manner of strange peoples
and peculiar ecosystems and untold wonders, littered with enigmatic remnants of lost cultures even more astonishing than what remains. It beckons,
it dazzles... and, unfortunately, it threatens to numb, creating a place where it's almost impossible to work out the rules or parameters. The
Raksura race is a bewildering combination of multiple castes and forms, not counting their "groundling" (roughly humanlike) and shifted forms,
something like specialized individuals in an ant colony, and their chief enemy, the Fell, also has numerous forms. On top of that, I was supposed
to juggle numerous names, associated relations, alliances, and rivalries, plus numerous groundlings (races and individuals), all while following
a main character who, frankly, could be less than pleasant to be around. Moon serves as a proxy for the reader in his ignorance of the Raksuran
ways, but he leans into his lone wolf habits to the point of irritation. If he can't bring himself to connect with or care about Indigo Cloud,
how can I, the reader following him through his story, hope to do so? A little too much weight is placed on breeding and fertility; the story
gets going when one of the mates Moon was handed at the latest groundling village he was staying with gets angry that he can't sire a child with
her, kicking off events that force him to join up with Stone, and the fact that he's a consort - the only sort of Raksura who can breed with a
queen - becomes a major plot point. Among all this, the plot lurches along through various encounters and obstacles, constantly distracted by
shiny objects in the Three Worlds and blunted by Moon's pessimistic (if learned) assumption that he'll never fit in anywhere, though the tale
finally builds up a decent head of steam by the climax. Still, even by the end, I had trouble connecting with Moon and the Three Worlds, which is
unfortunately why I clipped a half-star from the rating. I kept catching glimpses of a spark in this book, the hook that would grab me and drag me
deep into its wonders, but by the end I just couldn't reach it.
Sixteen-year-old Emilie only meant to run away from home; she didn't intend to become a stowaway on a voyage through the aetheric currents to the
long-rumored center of the hollow world. But a mishap trying to get to a ferry lands her aboard the Sovereign. Now, she's right in the middle
of an adventure wilder than anything she's read about in her books, full of strange sights, lost civilizations, rival philosophers, magic, betrayals,
and more. Now, all she has to do is survive long enough to return to the upper world...
Review
Emilie and the Hollow World is a bit of an odd duck as stories go. Emilie's adventure has a throwback feel to it, like something out of Jules
Verne or Edgar Rice Burroughs, set in a world where magic is real and science (or something like it) is in the hands of often-wealthy "philosophers."
The Hollow World is full of strange sights and wonders and dangers aplenty, straight from an old adventure yarn. And therein lies part of the problem;
those older stories, while often brimming with imagination, didn't always have the deepest characters or most compelling plots, both of which modern
readers tend to expect - especially most young adult readers. Despite being sixteen (indicating this was written for a young adult audience), Emilie just
plain doesn't feel like a teenager. She could just as easily have been four or five years younger, though these days even middle grade audiences tend to
expect a little more complexity in their characters and plots. Emilie's world, for all its wonders, feels strangely thin, particularly the surface world
(where the only two types of people in existence seem to be pale-haired northerners and "nut-brown" dark-haired southerners, perhaps a deliberate simplicity
to make the unique races of the Hollow World seem all the more exotic), and her reasons for leaving home come across as contrived - partly because Emilie
is more of a plot construct than a whole character, the plucky young adventuress runaway who weasels her way into an outsized adventure among real, live
grown-ups and proves herself the heroine every boy and girl reading her secretly wants to be. None of the other characters have much more to them, either,
several feeling rather extraneous. There's at least one more book in the series, but I doubt I'll go out of my way to track it down. While Wells demonstrates
admirable imagination in weaving this homage to elder-day adventure tales, I guess I just expected a little more.
It was supposed to be a routine security run - so the SecUnit, a half-organic humanoid machine, figured it would be boring. Not that it minded boring. Better
a boring trip supervising planetary surveyors, part of the equipment rented from an interstellar exploration corporation, than another bloodbath like the one that
led it to dub itself Murderbot. And since hacking its behavioral governor, freeing it from compulsory obedience to both the Company and the humans who had rented
it for the mission, "Murderbot" could use its free will to stream the entertainment feeds for its favorite serials. If it did a half-baked job in the meantime,
well, the scientists did opt for the cheap rental package, and humans never paid much attention to its kind anyway, considering them as disposable as any piece of
equipment. But these humans aren't like the others who have rented it... and this planetary survey job is about to turn deadly serious, with sabotage and equipment
failure and the sudden, suspicious disappearance of another survey team on the same world.
Review
The compelling voice hooked me into this sci-fi adventure tale from the first paragraph of this compulsively readable tale. "Murderbot," a genderless and nameless
being, has secured its free will, but doesn't know what to do with it other than watch entertainment shows and observe (often with distaste) the ways of humans. The
dangers of the mission, and the unusual nature of its human companions (who hail from a rare non-corporate system, that views even synthetic beings as more than just
disposable items), open up opportunities it never dreamed possible... but, to take advantage of them, it has to decide if it can learn how to trust - and, of course,
survive. Compelling as the main character and voice were, though, they couldn't quite cover for weaknesses elsewhere; the characters tended to remain names on the page,
the setting and interstellar world somewhat sketchy, and the logic behind the plot seemed a trifle wobbly when peered at closely. Still, it's a fun, if light,
read.
After its last job, the SecUnit that calls itself Murderbot no longer works for the company that manufactured and deployed it... but it still technically belongs to
humans, if humans who consider artificial entities as equals: even "equals" apparently require a living guardian. It also still has questions about its past, about the
incident for which it named itself - the incident that led it to hack its governor module and develop free will. So it slips its leash again and strikes out on its own
across the galaxy. With the help of a massive (and arrogant, not to mention incredibly nosy) transport ship bot, ART, Murderbot returns to the scene of its crime, the
RaviHyral Mining Facility... only to become entangled in fresh problems and a new crop of humans who can't seem to survive without a little artificial security
assistance.
Review
Once again, Wells delivers a compulsively readable adventure with a fun main character who would rather sit around watching media shows all day, but is forced - by
circumstances and its own developing personality - to wander a hostile galaxy, assisting humans (who seem remarkably incapable of basic survival skills) along the way.
Murderbot still longs to be left alone, but remains troubled by what little it knows (and the many things it doesn't know) about its violent past. On RaviHyral, it
finds even more disturbing questions when all record of the incident appears to have been scrubbed from memory - but, of course, there are plenty of problems in the
here-and-now, when it finds itself acting as a "security consultant" to a group of wronged researchers. ART makes a fun sidekick, if one Murderbot is reluctant to
accept, even as it provides another window into the inhuman mindset. Unlike most "free will machine" stories, the artificial beings in these books do not aspire to
humanity - Murderbot has seen more than enough of them to never want to be one, for all that it doesn't generally wish them active harm (who would make media shows if
they were gone, after all?) - but rather independence and the freedom to determine their own destinies... and to not be used as instruments of mass murder, when
feasible. The in-story adventure resolves, as it did in the first tale, but larger questions remain as Murderbot seeks to unravel its origins and the truth about the
"incident" on RaviHyral. Overall, it's an enjoyable, if occasionally violent, romp.
The synthetic security unit Murderbot is on a mission to understand its past, but keeps finding more questions - many tied up with its former employer, GreyCris,
which has been pulling some very shady (not to mention deadly) stunts across the worlds of the Corporate Rim. Though technically it was freed by the last clients who
rented it, Murderbot won't truly be free to do what it wants - mostly avoid humans and stream media - until those questions have answers and certain unpleasant legal
proceedings are resolved. Its quest takes it to an archaeological site on the half-forgotten world Milu... but, once again, a team of hapless humans with
spectacularly poor timing turn up to complicate the investigation by blundering into mortal peril.
Review
Rogue Protocol maintains the fast pace and snarky narrative wit of the previous two Murderbot adventures, returning focus to the larger story arc of
finding out what GreyCris is up to and why it's so obsessed with alien ruins that it's willing to slaughter anyone who comes near its claims (with a heavy
side-question of how any humans manage to survive without a somewhat-friendly rogue SecUnit to haul their posteriors out of danger.) The action can almost feel
overwhelming; as a synthetic being, Murderbot can and does track action in multiple locations simultaneously. Other characters can sometimes be a blur, though the most
important relationships are usually with other artificial entities. This time, that role is filled by Miki, a "pet" robot with a childlike mentality whose innocence
about human nature is rudely shattered not just by Murderbut but by events in the story. These interactions get to the heart of Murderbot's fumbling efforts to
understand its own nature and potential and what it truly wants out of its freedom, efforts it often tries to avoid by hiding in serials. Unlike the previous two
tales, this one stands less on its own as it sets up a major revelation that might break open the GreyCris case/conspiracy; skirting spoilers, the reader is left on a
cliff edge waiting for the actual reveal. I have the fourth book in the Kindle queue, and hope to get to it soon.
The rogue SecUnit known as Murderbot confirmed its suspicions about the GreyCris corporation's activities during its exceptionally eventful trip to Milu: they
have been harvesting illegal alien synthetics from archaeological sites. The problems from the lawsuits fired by the Preservation representative Dr. Mensah have
also hurt GreyCris - as has the interference caused by Murderbot's actions on Milu. The corporation put two and two together and decided Mensah must have ordered
her "pet" SecUnit to sabotage GreyCris... which not only wasn't Murderbot's intention, but has endangered her survival. Now the doctor is being held hostage at
corporate headquarters while terms of the ongoing lawsuit are negotiated. GreyCris has proven itself willing to kill before to protect its secrets, and they have
only grown more desperate as Murderbot's meddling has exposed more of their dirty laundry, so there's an exceptionally high chance that neither Mensah nor her
associates will survive this "negotiation." Once again, Murderbot must save the day - only, this time, it may not win.
Review
Picking up about where Rogue Protocol (the third installment) left off, Exit Strategy starts with high stakes and tension, then just keeps
raising both right up to the finale. The action is nearly nonstop as Murderbot once more juggles behind-the-scenes hacking with personal violence (and, naturally,
takes a few breaks to stream media.) Returning to Mensah forces the rogue SecUnit to confront its own feelings about humans in general, about how it sees itself,
and what it really plans to do with its hard-won freedom - a freedom most everyone seems determined to terminate. This may not bring its personal growth from
mindless drone to independent being full-circle, but it does complete a significant arc. Also completed (or seemingly completed) by the end is the GreyCris plot,
a resolution involving plenty of bot-fighting action, hacker attacks, and more. The series continues from here, apparently shifting to a longer format, but this
works as a good resting place before Murderbot pivots to deal with new challenges, personal and professional... and, of course, finds new media to binge-watch.
It's been an enjoyable series thus far, and I'm hoping it continues to entertain going forward.
A lot has happened since the half-organic, half-artificial security construct SecUnit, who still calls itself Murderbot, hacked its governor module to attain
free will. At first, it mostly used its freedom to stream media and silently judge the stupidity of its clients, until it was found out. It finally has nominal
freedom under the protection of Preservation, humans outside the powerful Corporate Rim that runs much of the known galaxy... but even an artificial being has
to be useful, so it still works security for Dr. Mensah and her family. (Even in Preservation, humans are incredibly bad at keeping themselves alive without a
SecUnit on hand.) What started as a routine survey mission goes wildly askew, however, when the return trip is interrupted by unknown hostiles - hostiles who
have apparently taken over and destroyed an old friend, ART, the AI pilot of the university ship Perihelion. Now, in addition to keeping his human
charges safe, SecUnit has another objective: figure out who these unknown people are, and make them pay in blood. Fortunately, as a self-described Murderbot,
making humans bleed should be easy. Figuring out what's behind the unusual attackers will be the hard part. Hard, and potentially lethal...
Review
The first novel-length adventure of SecUnit, a.k.a Murderbot, maintains the snarky narrative voice and breakneck action of the rest of the series. SecUnit is
still figuring out what it wants to do with its freedom, and whom - if anyone - it wants to serve. It still isn't used to being cared about or having friends,
and its reaction to ART's presumed deletion drives home just how deeply it has learned to care for others... and how dangerous it can be when those others come
to harm. Hints have been dropped throughout the series of the dangers inherent in "alien remnant" tech and contamination, but not a lot has been mentioned about
specifics; this adventure deals more with that aspect of Wells's future world, and just how dangerous the remnants can be. As in previous installments, sometimes
the names and tangled loyalties and relations can be a bit thick, as can the action (given that SecUnit can monitor multiple situations simultaneously thanks to
drone feeds, events can be complicated), but it sorts itself out by the end, as SecUnit takes another step toward creating its own path in a complicated
universe.
