Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory - short story

Real Rating: 4.75* of five, rounded up because Murderbot

Because they are all refugees in the Preservation Alliance, descended from people who were left to die because rescue was deemed not cost-effective.

Which is why I read the Murderbot series the instant I can get the books. This is a short freebie that's just a tick before [Network Effect], and it's deeply refreshing to read something from Dr. Mensah's PoV.

Not that I don't adore Murderbot! I do! But breaking out of the one PoV that we have on the Corporation Rim is a breath of fresh air.

The Corporation Rim has always been a slave state, though it calls its institutionalized slavery “contract labor.”

It is through Dr. Mensah's clarity that I feel so seen in my hatred of this show more system's brutal, dehumanizing, and revoltingly deeply entrenched dominance of the hearts and minds I must live among, as Preservation is a fictional construct. It would be the work of but a moment for me to apply for asylum or whatever they call it to get to Preservation were it real.

It’s about being treated as a thing, isn’t it. Whether that thing is a hostage of conditional value, or a very expensively designed and equipped enslaved machine/organic intelligence. You’re a thing, and there is no safety.

When you exist at the whim of the electorate, as people like me...disabled, unhomed, elderly, infirm...must do, you're a thing. A profit point. An expense center. Not yourself, not someone with a lifetime's issues and lessons. I'm fortunate that I live in a place that allows me to be as independent as possible, and that I did enough useful work for enough years that my (HUGELY reduced in value) investment in government debt affords me the relative safety of housing, medical care, and therapies that I need. Had I stayed in Texas, had I been darker of skin hue, had I not had the mind-bogglingly good fortune to have my breakdown while talking to the one person who could, and would, and did help me...well, I'd be dead, and that's just the facts.

It's why I identify so deeply with Murderbot: We had all the right things go exactly right at the right time or we'd simply have ceased to exist.

And she tells herself: you’re being very foolish. Because you were a hostage for a period of days, and it was a minor inconvenience compared to what Murderbot— No, SecUnit; she’s never been given permission to use that private name. What SecUnit went through.

And if someone else was in her position, she would tell them how unhelpful comparisons like that are, that fear is fear.

But you're making one right now. You can't help it; it's human nature. One person with whom I am no longer friends said to me, "stop being so selfish and think of how much worse it is for my (Hispanic) people!"

Invalidation = abuse. Always, in all ways.

And that is what Author Wells does so eloquently by not doing it directly: She holds up your status as abuser while acknowledging your status as the abused. Murderbot...SecUnit to Dr. Mensah and the meatsacks inhabiting its spacetime...isn't kidding around with its self-granted yclepture. It was the more harmed, in my opinion, by its status as legally insentient property being thrust on it from birth (aka "chattel slavery") but it isn't innocent of abusive, life-denying behavior towards others.

Do moral dilemmas come more tightly coiled up on themselves than this? And breathes there an author whose exploration of these intense and weighty issues is so delightfully deft and assuredly airy than Author Wells?

No. show less

Styled a short story, more precisely "Home" is a work of microfiction set after the events of Exit Strategy and before Network Effect. I appreciate that it wasn't made epilogue to the former, it works better as pendant.

Unlike all other Murderbot installments to date, "Home" is not narrated by SecUnit, instead adopting third person omniscient and restricted to Mensah's experiences, treating of SecUnit only when they are together. The vignette is principally concerned with Mensah's PTSD.

It’s about being treated as a thing, isn’t it. Whether that thing is a hostage of conditional value, or a very expensively designed and equipped enslaved machine/organic intelligence. You’re a thing, and there is no safety.

Even in so short a space, show more again Wells reveals additional aspects of SecUnit's world with notable analogues to the history of White Supremacy in ours. show less

Dr. Ayda Mensah attempts to do her work and pretend she's fine after the events of Exit Strategy.

First, I want to say thank you to the person who let me know about this story and where to go to read it. I'm sure going straight from Exit Strategy to Network Effect would have worked out fine, but the really nice thing about this story is that it's the first time we get to see Murderbot from someone else's POV.

And yeah, not everyone on Preservation is happy about the idea of a rogue SecUnit hanging around, and I wonder what other SecUnits would do if they didn't have functioning governor modules anymore and could just do whatever they wanted. They probably wouldn't all be like Murderbot, happily watching serials in between (and sometimes show more during) efforts to save humans from dying.

Since Murderbot spends so much time assuring readers that everyone is justifiably terrified of rogue SecUnits, I got a kick out of Mensah actually finding Murderbot to be a very comforting presence. She knows she has to find other ways of working through her emotions (like actually visiting a mental health professional, which she'd been resisting), but for now, right after a traumatic incident, it's nice to have SecUnit watching out for her and being intimidating when anyone scares her.

All right, on to Network Effect...

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less

A very short story set shortly after the events of book 4. Doesn't feel like an essential piece of reading, but it adds some context to a few conversations in books 5 and 6. It's odd to have a story in this universe, with these characters, but that isn't in Murderbot's first person snark. And this third-person narrative focuses on Dr. Mensah, her relationship to Murderbot (although it would hate that phrase), and her reaction to the events of book 4. More serious in some way than the primary books, but still delightful. However, this made me realize that a significant part of my enjoyment of these books is Murderbot's voice, so 1 star off because that's missing.

Short story set just after Exit Strategy, showing a tiny slice of Ayda Mensah’s life as she struggles with the traumatic events she’d just lived through.

In a break from the rest of the series so far it’s seen from Mensah’s point-of-view, with Murderbot’s interactions mostly, but not exclusively, via the feed.

Though succinct, it brings added depth to the burgeoning friendship between Mensah and Murderbot. I really liked it.

A Murderbot short story
How do you process your emotions after a corporate kidnapping?
I think I would like this more if I read it in context. As a standalone it's ok but not great.

Another Murderbot short story. Like Rapport, this one comes up a little short (3.5 rounded up to 4). It doesn't work as a standalone as it's focused on how Dr. Mensah is coping with PTSD after her kidnapping.

I feel like it was a chapter that got edited out of another book, but it makes sense why it would've been as Home is told from Dr. Mensah's POV, and all of the major works in this series are told from Murderbot's POV. Maybe it would've worked as an epilogue.

While Dr. Mensah is dealing with Planetary Council members on Preservation Station, discussing the seriousness of the villains from Corporation Rim, Murderbot keeps pestering her in her datafeed with requests for security equipment like a kid in a toy store. While the hostility show more of Corporation Rim is too large an issue to be resolved here, Murderbot's shopping is. We get to see the depth of the relationship between Mensah and Murderbot. We also get some world-building of this universe Wells has constructed via Mensah that Murderbot wouldn't be privy to.

So if you're a Murderbot completionist, it's definitely worth a read. But if you're new here, you should definitely go back to the beginning. show less