Grade A #BookReview: Platform Decay by Martha Wells

Platform Decay (The Murderbot Diaries, #8) by Martha Wells
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, space opera
Series: Murderbot Diaries #8
Pages: 256
Published by Tor Books on May 5, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Everyone's favorite lethal SecUnit is back in the next installment in Martha Wells' bestselling and award-winning Murderbot Diaries series.
Having someone else support your bad decision feels kind of good.
Having volunteered to run a rescue mission, Murderbot realises that it will have to spend significant time with a bunch of humans it doesn't know.
Including human children. Ugh.
This may well call for... eye contact!
(Emotion check: Oh, for f—)

My Review:

After the events of System Collapse – which come up fairly often in Murderbot’s consciousness in this new story even though Murderbot would rather bury those events in a dark hole in its memory somewhere – I was a bit concerned about Murderbot. Specifically concerned because the system that was collapsing throughout System Collapse seemed to be Murderbot’s own system. Those events make Murderbot certain that Barish-Estranza, the evil megacorp that Murderbot and its friends outmaneuvered in System Collapse, is STILL out to get all of them – because that’s what evil megacorps DO and Murderbot is right to be paranoid about it.

But all of that, and Murderbot’s doubts about its own capabilities throughout that story, have had me worrying since the title of this story, Platform Decay, was announced. I’ve been worried that the platform that we’d watch decay in this book would ALSO be Murderbot’s own.

In spite of having added emotions to its programming – an act that Murderbot STILL isn’t sure was a good idea – Murderbot is not the platform in the process of collapsing in this story. It could be argued that Barish-Estranza might be, but they are obviously too big to fail. Not that they’d ever admit to failing, and not that their representatives don’t fail all over the platform that IS collapsing in this story.

The actual platform that is in danger of collapsing is a transportation platform on a stupidly designed and administered torus around a mined-out planet. Along with, quite possibly and it really should, the mish-mash of megacorp governance that keeps the wide, vast, long, boring segments of the torus from even communicating with their neighbors. Murderbot hates the whole thing all throughout their long, dangerous, and occasionally outright tedious journey around the thing.

(That tediousness is entirely from Murderbot’s perspective. The READER is absolutely riveted.)

Murderbot, on the other hand, is way, way, way out of its comfort zone – if it would admit that it has such a thing. It begins on a well-planned – well, a well-planned-ish – mission to rescue members of its friend Dr. Mensah’s family from a B-E plot designed to capture someone from Dr. Mensah’s inner circle. (B-E is still VERY salty about the events in System Collapse and this whole plot is an obvious trap. Murderbot is the best representative for Dr. Mensah to send for many reasons, including the fact that Murderbot would rather deal with this mess themself AND it will really piss B-E off which is always a win.)

The plan, which was already shakier than Murderbot would have preferred, doesn’t merely not survive first contact with the enemy, it goes entirely pear-shaped. Leaving Murderbot at the beginning of a long journey with not nearly enough information facing MANY changes of transportation, all of them old and slow, to get around the huge torus in time to make a pickup on the other side.

All while protecting one of Dr. Mensah’s spouses, one of her daughters, AND the whole family’s grandmother – whether THAT relationship is by blood or adoption. As if that weren’t enough, they’ve collectively committed to a rescue along the way, getting their enemy’s children out of the clutches of the evil megacorp that their mother got them involved with in the first place.

The journey is so long and so fraught that Murderbot doesn’t have nearly enough time to watch serials to calm itself down. It’s a mess and so is the situation. But not so much of a mess that Murderbot doesn’t have a chance to get them all out in one piece.

Even if it has to sacrifice itself in the process. Then again, self-sacrifice is ALWAYS Murderbot’s plan Z – especially when the planning is so sketchy that it has skipped all the letters after B. As the planning for this mission certainly has.

Escape Rating A: This series is officially titled “The Murderbot Diaries” – and there’s a reason for that. Whether they are precisely Murderbot’s “diaries” or not, they are all told from Murderbot’s own perspective, from inside its own head, obfuscating the things it doesn’t want to think about, shying away from memories it doesn’t want to deal with, and generally being snarky about human behavior and human stupidity. (Two of the shorts, Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy (one of this year’s Hugo contenders in the Best Novelette category) and Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory are told from other perspectives. Nevertheless, consider the series to be the all Murderbot, all the time channel.)

Which means that the series rides or dies on Murderbot’s own voice. If you enjoy their perspective – particularly if Murderbot is thinking a few of the same things you would in the same situation – the series REALLY works. If epic snarkitude is not for you, then Murderbot may not be either. But you’ll be missing out because this series is fantastic.

Part of what makes Murderbot such a fascinating and fantastic character is that they are on a journey of self-awareness AND self-fulfillment. In a way, this whole saga is Murderbot’s coming-of-age and into personhood story. They learn, they change, they grow, they regress, they have impostor syndrome, they take two steps back and try again. Just like the rest of us.

But that’s the rest of us persons. The rest of us self-aware and self-willed beings. Murderbot has no desire whatsoever to become human. It thinks we’re mostly gross and stupid, and it’s not wrong most of the time. It’s not Pinocchio, and it’s not Star Trek’s Data. It does not want to become a “real boy”, or a “real girl” for that matter (it wants no part of the gender binary for itself, thankyouverymuch).

Murderbot is on the journey to discover itself, whatever form that discovery might take. But it does not desire to be human. Ever. Which is part of our collective fascination with the character.

This particular entry in the series takes the form of a rescue mission combined with a long journey. It places Murderbot in a position where it is not exactly ‘in charge’ but isn’t exactly a follower. Instead, in spite of its own doubts about itself, it’s one of the ‘adults’, using that term loosely, protecting and rescuing at first one and eventually three traumatized children.

And it’s starting to realize, not just that it needs the humans as much as the humans need it, but that it feels surprisingly good to have others support its decisions – even the potentially terrible ones. Especially the terrible ones.

What it’s going to do with that new bit of self-knowledge is something we’ll all discover, including Murderbot itself, in the next installment of the series. Hopefully in not nearly as distant a future as the future that Murderbot and their friends are living through.

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