Rogue Protocol

The third Murderbot novella keeps the series’ chief appeal: a dry, anxious narrator who would rather avoid people and ends up in trouble anyway. The adventure is competent, but to some it repeats the previous book’s pattern, has scenes that are hard to picture and feels like an in-between episode that barely advances the larger story. At 176 pages it is a quick stop for existing fans, not a place to begin.

Worth knowing The third Murderbot novella, from 2018, sends the security unit that hacked its own governor module to Milu, a terraforming platform GrayCris abandoned in a hurry, to find proof of what the company was really doing there; it is the evidence Dr Mensah needs from the first book. On the platform it meets Miki, a human-form bot whose humans treat it as a friend, and the book is about Murderbot watching that and not knowing what to do with it. About 160 pages, a short mission with a bad end. Martha Wells started the series with All Systems Red in 2017; the whole run won the Hugo for Best Series in 2021, and the novellas are read in order.

The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.