Exit Strategy

'''Wells, Martha. Exit Strategy. Book 4 (and planned conclusion) of The Murderbot Diaries.''' New York: Tor, 2018. Preceded by All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, and Rogue Protocol. Available as an Audible.com audiobook, narrated by Kevin R. Free.

Note Murderbot's facing off against "a Combat SecUnit [... that's difficult to] destroy, with hacking and enhanced scanning abilities"; Murderbot and a robot ship's-pilot fighting off a computer virus "intended to seize control of [the ship's] systems, neutralize any augmented human crew, and open all the airlocks. Murderbot and the bot pilot hold off the worst effects of the malware, and manage to isolate the virus in a shuttle that they disengage from the gunship." Soon after, though, "Murderbot has a critical system failure, and collapses. Awakening," significantly, "in a med bay [....] Murderbot begins a lengthy self-repair process" and is comforted by humans and offered work — or a retirement just absorbing media — and "is content to know that it has options"(quoting the Wikipedia entry for the novel)

For "the human/machine interface," Murderbot may be a significant step in the breaking down — deconstruction — of those two categories. • Murderbot needs to pass for augmented human — a human with implants and/or prosthetics, but short of a cyborg — and manages to do so. More important is his learning to do so, requiring observing and analyzing human behavior beyond what is necessary for ... its usual security work (ellipsis mark indicating pause to consider the appropriate singular-possessive pronoun for an entity for whom gender and animate/inanimate status are problematic).

• Murderbot has and tells us that it has emotions and enjoys them only when those emotions are elicited in its consuming media that would correspond to our TV mini- and not-so-mini-series. Murderbot finds real-world emotions usually less pleasant — although in this Murderbot is not a totally reliable Narrator (not lying but — significantly — conflicted and developing).

• In this culmination of the "Diaries" series, we can be sure that Murderbot is capable of friendship and free-will loyalty, freely willed, or at least as freely willed as with humans. We also 'experience' a friendly relationship insofar as readers or listeners to the audiobooks identify with Murderbot as a first-person Narrator highly conscious of its audience and their probable reactions.

• The conclusion of the novel has Murderbot among liberal humans, a free agent people wish to hire (and pay) for security services, and a potential citizen. For the citizenship issue cf., e.g., Isaac Asimov's "The Bicentennial Man" and Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Measure of a Man".

For considerations of genre, note the automated invasive advertising in Exit Strategy, which can be seen as both the reductio ad finem of Satire (pushing a trend to a grotesque conclusion) or science-fictional extrapolation. Cf. the highly satiric Pohl and Kornbluth novel The Space Merchants and Pohl's 1984 sequel The Merchants' War, and the dystopian SF DEMOLITION MAN.

RDE. Initial Contributor, 7Mar19