Dogman, Murderbot and other things that made me happy this week

New Murderbot novella!!!! Fugitive Telemetry came out on Tuesday, and I couldn't quite drop everything to read it right away, but finished it yesterday. A little murder mystery set on Preservation Station, before the start of Network Effect. Our favourite sarcastic SecUnit has a dead human and some new annoying live humans to deal with, and it is as funny and heartrending as ever. "Fortunately, I had a lot of experience being screamed at and stared at by terrified humans." 

A Goodreads reviewer mentioned Murderbot's deep integrity, and now I want to reread the novella with that in mind, because I think it's a theme Martha Wells rather brilliantly weaves through it. Along with the usual friendship, selfhood, decency, and other things a rogue killing machine has to figure out for itself while trying to avoid more humans getting dead. Also my favourite cover of all of them so far.

And then I went to my local bookstore to pick up 13 Ways to Eat a Fly, a cleverly grotesque counting book by Sue Heavenrich (often seen on Marvelous Middle-Grade Monday). I now know far more than I ever wanted to about the disgusting eating habits of insectivores! I think this will be hugely popular among my nephews (and at least one of my nieces). Kudos to Sue and her illustrator David Clark for presenting so much detailed science in such an engaging way. 

While at the bookstore I noticed the two latest Dav Pilkey graphic novels: Dogman: Grime and Punishment and Dogman: Mothering Heights. I happen to think Dav Pilkey is one of the best comic writers out there, and The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby is a masterpiece of literature, but I have not been keeping up with his Dog Man series. The idea of Wuthering Heights and Crime and Punishment given the Dav Pilkey treatment* was too good to pass up, so I had to bring them home.

So I had another afternoon of laughing out loud, pounding the couch cushions, tears running down my face. And then Pilkey sucker-punched me with the sweet, wise denoument of this story arc about the redemptive power of love.

Trigger warning: Many people seem to object to the diarrhea-themed song parodies in Dog Man, so if that's an issue for you, you've been warned! I found them hilarious, but I have a particularly nuanced sense of humour.

The last thing that made me happy this week was the discovery that Becky Chambers has another book out in her Wayfarer's series: The Galaxy and the Ground Within. Will be reading that one soon. And if that weren't wonderful enough, she's starting a new series called Monk and Robot, the first novella of which, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, is coming out in July. The premise sounds amazing (and reminds me a little of the wonderful middle-grade novel The Wild Robot, also the Ghibli film Castle in the Sky) and I am so there for a robot who abandoned human civilization having conversations with a non-binary monk!

*For fans of Brontë and Dostoevsky: it's not a particularly close retelling of the classic novels. In case you were wondering! But Mothering Heights does contain "The Most Romantic Chapter Ever Written," complete with Romantic Advisory: Mushy Content, and Smooch-o-Rama, The World's Most Amorous Animation Technology. And there are various crimes and various punishments (and people getting dirty) in Grime and Punishment, though a grand total of zero dead humans.

Murderbot!!!! And my birthday present finally arrived! A good week!

Martha Wells' Murderbot novel, Network Effect, came out on Tuesday, and yay for the pandemic because I hardly had anything I needed to drop so I I could spend all day reading it! Also a good thing I was all by myself, because I was laughing out loud and crying (sometimes with laughter, sometimes not) and yelling at the characters, and having the most fun I've had all pandemic.

I may have mentioned one or two times how much I love Murderbot. The novel is everything I wanted it to be and more. We get Dr. Mensah's brother-in-law, who doesn't trust Murderbot and definitely doesn't like it, and Dr. Mensah's teen-aged daughter, who is miffed at Murderbot but also trusts it implicitly,  and ART, who—gah—can't say anything about ART! And new scary villains and weird scenarios that only Martha Wells could think up that require Murderbot to care about things. A lot. Also, some of the really terrible bad things that have happened to Murderbot may have caused some lingering trauma that might possibly be affecting its performance reliability.

I liked this quotation and Rachel Neumeier's comments about it: kind of sums it up, really! But amidst all the violence and mayhem there are the awesome character moments that punch you in the gut, and always Murderbot's sarcastic, defensive, sulky, exasperated, painfully human, wise voice.

You know that thing humans do where they think they're being completely logical and they absolutely are not being logical at all, and on some level they know that, but can't stop? Apparently it can happen to SecUnits, too.

I've told you this before: go read the Murderbot Diaries. Start with the novellas so that you'll be able to fully appreciate the novel. Trust me, you need this in your life right now!

(According to Goodreads there is a short story told from Dr. Mensah's point of view, but I can't find it anywhere! Anyone know where I can get my hands on it??)

Then on Friday, the book I had ordered for my birthday back in March finally arrived. It's the new Folio Society illustrated Howl's Moving Castle. Look how beautiful it is!

I just don't blog in the summer, but Murderbot is still awwwwwesome!!!!

This is what I do instead of blogging in the summertime:

I also tend to reread instead of reading new books. But when the latest Murderbot came out (which happened to be in the middle of a hiking trip, but at the tops of the mountains we had pretty good reception, so I was still able to download it. Kind of love the whole ebook thing*) I used up all my phone battery reading it in my tent. Murderbot: Rogue Protocol is every bit as fun and deep and heart-wrenchingly funny as the last two. "I hate caring about stuff. But apparently once you start, you can't just stop." And I just can't stop caring about Murderbot.

All Systems Red totally deserved its Hugo win. Lots of cool Hugo winners this year, actually. Lois McMaster Bujold got best series for World of the 5 Gods, much deserved. Did you see N.K. Jemisin's speech? Fantastic:

"I look to science fiction and fantasy as the aspirational drive of the zeitgeist." Damn, this woman can write.

* There are millions of books floating around in the sky, people, and you can stand on top a mountain and grab exactly the one you want. Is that not the coolest thing ever?? Imagine what Chaucer would think.

In which I decide Martha Wells is a favourite author

How is it June already? I guess my excuse is that I was in Spain and Portugal for half of May. (I'll put a few pics at the bottom of this post, if you want to see any.)

And what did I spend all my travel time reading? Turns out that Martha Wells was my go-to read, out of all the options I loaded onto my phone. And after finishing all 5 novels and two short-story collections in the Raksura series, and the two published Murderbot novellas, I can confidently say that I really, really like Martha Wells!

The Raksura series has a lot of awesome stuff going for it. Flying people, for starters. Better yet: shapeshifting flying people who can pass as normal groundlings (no humans in this world, just lots of varieties of bipedal human-shaped people)—but when they shift they get wings and tails and claws and crests. Yes, kind of like dragons, but also totally original and just really cool.

Raksuras also have a fascinatingly unique social structure (with some clever gender-reversal going on, just for fun), and they live in these completely awesome magically hollowed-out tree colonies—Wells' settings are endlessly inventive and interesting; a great world to get immersed in.

Moon is an entirely empathetic character in whose perspective to enter this world. He starts out not even knowing what species he is, just knowing that he has to hide his shapeshifting ability from the groundlings he lives with. His journey from exile to hero is the compelling thread that ties all the books together, but there are also lots of cool bad guys to fight, interspecies diplomacy to manoeuvre, ancient ruins to discover, and romantic entanglements to, uh, untangle.

Written for adults, but I think it would go over very well with a YA audience. Lots of fun and incredibly imaginative. (If you liked Avatar I bet you'll enjoy these books.)

It looks like The Murderbot Diaries will end up with at least four novellas, and one can only hope there will be more. I can't tell you how much I love the character of Murderbot. I was hooked from the first line, and it only got better from there:

"I COULD HAVE BECOME a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure."

I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but Murderbot the character is hilariously sarcastic, self-depreciating and incisively observant. The corporate-run future world is a brilliant commentary on our current corporate-run world, and Murderbot's journey to figure out its identity ("If people won't be shooting at me, what will I be doing?") is surprisingly touching.

Very different from Ancillary Justice, but Murderbot and Breq are kindred spirits, I think.

Also appropriate for YA audiences.

So now that I know how much I like Martha Wells, I think I'd better try her Ile-Rien books. Will let you know how that goes!

Here are a few photos from the area around Ronda, in southern Spain. Pretty spectacular scenery!