Reading: Exit Strategy

The fourth and last of Martha Wells' Murderbot novellas (but at least the sadness of that 'last' is mitigated by the recent news that there will be a Murderbot novel in 2020), Exit Strategy sees Murderbot returning from its investigative travels to rescue its original clients from All Systems Red. Despite being only novella-length, it squeezes in a lot of action, but underneath the hacking and shooting and hair's breadth escapes only to find that the danger isn't quite over yet the novella's real theme is Murderbot's development as an independent individual. Throughout the series, we've seen it learning to pass among humans and interacting with people who perceive it as another person; reunited with its original clients, it finds itself interacting with people who know it's a SecUnit but still think of it as a person, and (very unwillingly) finds itself having to confront the question of what it wants to do and be. Although there's quite a lot of considerably-more-than-mild peril and Wells' future is full of Evil Megacorps which are even more Evil and Mega than today's corporations, there are also found families and utopian refugee colonies and kindness and caring and it felt like the perfect SF comfort read, and Murderbot's voice is still delightfully snarky and wonderfully funny.