Exit Strategy by Martha Wells

I feel a bit silly reading a book that just turned into a TV show.

In book 4 of the series, the Murderbot flies between space stations and faces several attempts to be stopped. However, it has no clear goal or understanding what’s going on, and it’s also not clear why the rich corporations are trying to stop it. We’ll have to wait more books to reach that clarity. Alien artifacts are involved, so it is promising.

This and the previous sci-fi book I read made me think about something else.

The Murderbot is flying through wormholes. Sten in The Wolf Worlds is also flying through wormholes. Assume a wormhole existed, and I flew from point A to point B through a wormhole. No object in space is stationary. Galaxies move towards gravitational attractors, star clusters orbit around the center of the galaxy, and planets orbit around stars. Flying to the other side of the galaxy through a wormhole means that my spaceship will suddenly be accelerated to incredible speeds, compared to the local objects, speeds from which the deceleration may take years. The spaceships in both books do not address that.

There is no plausible space flight, unlike what we see in true 5* sci-fis like Legion or Project Hail Mary. And if we remove the space flight, this book turns out to be a short cyberpunk novel, similar to Gibson’s world, where a heavily modified human surfs the Internet like if it’s a water slide.

For that, I think I’ll allow myself to score this book 4/5, still a great little adventure. The sci from the sci-fi doesn’t add up, otherwise very nice.

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