I came to 'City Of Bones' via the 'Murderbot Diaries' I'd read each instalment as came out and enjoyed them all. The next one won't be released for another eight month's so I decided to try out Martha Wells' back catalogue.

I found 'City Of Bones', released in 2007, a decade before Murderbot, and what a find it turned out to be. How did I miss it back in 2007? Well, perhaps I read the publisher's summary which makes it sound like Indiana Jones meets Alladin, and passed. The actual story is much more original.

It tells of powerful people competing to find and control artefacts of an ancient technology that they think will give them powers that are almost magical. The story is set in a world that long ago was turned almost entirely into a deadly desert, leaving the remnants of humanity living in small stone cities built into coastal cliffs. The only people who can move freely through the desert are the Kris, a humanoid race bioengineered by the last of the ancient technologists to survive the worst the desert can do and with whom humanity has an uneasy relationship.

From the start, I found 'City Of Bones' to be breathtakingly good. The world the action took place in was original, credible, richly detailed and very strange. From the outside, these look like people who are struggling to survive, trapped between desert and sea in a city carved into the cliff. A city they'd no longer be able to build and in which society is literally stratified, with the poorest people living at the bottom and the elite having a great view from the top.

From the inside, it doesn't feel like that. This society is hundreds of years old. It has survived the really bad times. It's thriving. The city is expanding. It's elite have ambitions to control neighbouring cities and history is interesting only to academics unless it yields usable technology. I think this inside view is often missing from post-apocalyptic novels. People don't spend generations regretting what was lost. They focus on what they have, what they need and how they can close the gap.

One of the things I liked most about the story was that Martha Wells presents it from the point of view of outsiders. Khat, the main character, is a Krisman, His partner is an immigrant from a neighbouring city who, although he used to be an academic, is not allowed to be a member of the University. Both of them are excluded from official commerce, which is reserved for citizens. This excluded pair make their living on the shady edges of the trade in ancient artefacts and try not to come to the notice of the authorities. Martha Wells understands that the excluded need to see the society they live in very clearly in order to survive.

Khat is charismatic, intelligent, loyal, lethal and a little broken. An early trauma resulted in him exiling himself from his people to live among humans. It also left him with a deep fear of confinement and almost no ability to trust anyone. Khat's emotional detachment seems like a survival trait when we first meet him but, as we get to know him better, it becomes clear that it is a manifestation of a crippling emotional scar.

I liked that Martha Wells didn't trivialise this. She recognises that there are scars that don't heal and experiences that you don't recover from. Khat has built himself a life where he is surrounded by people who accept him for what he's become not out of charity but because they carry scars of their own. Perhaps Khat's biggest achievement is that he has made one friend that he will trust with his life.

All of which will be familiar to those of us who love reading Murderbot.

The plot reads like a thriller wrapped around a treasure hunt, except that Khat isn't thrilled. Hee doesn't want to be there but he can't find a way leave and the treasure being hunted may very well be a curse.

These days, a good Fantasy Thriller needs a heroine to save the day and Martha Wells gives us one. In a normal fantasy novel, our heroine would be presented as bright, brave, more talented than she knows and determined to make things better. Martha Wells gives our heroine all those attributes but also gives us Khat's view of her as naive and unconscious of her privilege.

The relationship between her (the princess-in-waiting / Jedi not yet come into her full powers) and Khat, (the excluded, scarred, survivor) is fascinating. Instead of the normal denied-attraction-blooming-into-romance trope, we have something more complex and truer to the nature of both people.

I had a lot of fun with this book and I'll be dipping into more of Martha Well's back catalogue soon.

The world the action takes place in is original, credible, richly detailed and very strange.

The main character is likeable, intriguing and not human.

The plot feels like a thriller wrapped around a treasure hunt.

Wonderful stuff.

About 4 hours ago I have been told that I have to do an impromptu night shift at work. Ah, the good times. 

So I´m a little bit peeved. And I´m currently not reading anything light and easy. And I don´t want to start a bigger book today, because I want to throw the dice tomorrow. (As you can tell, I´m not in one of my better moods today).

But thankfully, I have the fourth Murderbot Novella on my e-reader. I hope it can cheer me up a little bit. Plus, I have to finish this novella before reading the full-length novel Network Effect.

My last book order before finding out that layoffs are in my library's near future (how near? who knows!) has arrived. I now have a pile of Murderbot books. Yes, they were pretty expensive considering most of them are novellas priced more like novels, and if I do have to move sometime in the next few months I'll probably regret getting them as physical books. But hey, what's a handful more when you already own enough to fill four bookcases, right?

Anyway, they're very nice, and I'm looking forward to reading them. I'm hoping that Booklikesopoly will be accommodating and put me on a spot that lets me read Artificial Condition after I finish the third volume of Ascendance of a Bookworm.

Finally, Murderbot gets the full-length novel that it and we deserve. Thank you, Martha Wells. I've loved the other episodes in the Murderbot Diaries but I was a little frustrated at having them drip-fed to me in what seemed to me to be a novel broken into novellas for no good reason.

I preordered the audiobook version of 'Network Effect' and dived into it as soon as it arrived in my audiobook queue. After four hours of immersion in Murderbot's world, this was my reaction:

This is a wonderful ride. MurderBot remains its compelling self but being freed from the novella format means that the plot structure is more complicated and the puzzle that needs to be solved has more twists in it.

 

Reading 'Network Effect' is like falling through a cascade of action sequences while working on a big picture to make sense of everything. There's never a dull moment and it took some self-control for me to do anything else today.'

I managed to pace myself and consumed the book over three days rather than one. The mystery continued to become more complex and the actions scenes continued to pile on and they were all fun and very well done but what I liked most about the book was the way in which Murderbot developed.

Murderbot isn't, doesn't want to be and can't become, human. Humans are messy and often reckless, shouldn't be trusted with weapons, are inappropriately optimistic for creatures that are both fragile and slow. Nevertheless, Murderbot is attached to its humans pretty much in the way you or I might be attached to our Labradors.

So, if Murderbot is going to continue to associate with humans and commit itself to protecting some of them, but isn't, doesn't want to be and can't become human, how does it develop to become more than a SecUnit that's hacked its governor unit so it can spend more time watching TV?

Martha Wells' answer to that is inspired.

It's beautifully done. I had an exciting ride, a lot of action, good mystery and I got to watch Murderbot grow up.

I'll be back for more as soon as it's available.

I think the audiobook is quite well done, it even manages not to make Murderbot sound definitively male or female. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.