Like the novellas, Network Effect, the first full-length novel in the series, is narrated as a pseudo-confessional diary by a SecUnit that calls itself Murderbot. The first volume, All Systems Red, deservedly swept the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for best novella Artificial Condition (vol. I’ve written/raved about The Murderbot Diaries elsewhere on this site. Now, as the world faces months or years of coronavirus uncertainty and my own country blunders self-destructively into a near-term future that promises to be equal parts horrific and absurd, I’ve found another lifeline: Network Effect, the latest installment in Martha Wells’s superb sci-fi series, The Murderbot Diaries. It was exactly the perspective I needed to reframe my experience-the right story at the right time. In situations like a global pandemic, where the actions of isolated individuals are too small to make a difference, it is only through collective action that we truly have agency-the kind of action made possible by the social networks and communities that enable us to trust each other and work together for the benefit of everyone.

What saved me from succumbing to those feelings was reading and reviewing William Gibson’s novel, Agency, which gave me an entirely new understanding of how to effect change at scale. As I wrote on this site, “It doesn’t feel like taking action-it feels like doing nothing. Faced with an urgent threat, I felt compelled to confront the problem, but what difference could I make? The paradox of the pandemic is that the best course of action is to withdraw, to reduce social contact, to wait.

A month ago, as the enormity of the coronavirus pandemic was becoming clear, I found myself at a loss for what to do.

Murderbot diaries network effect