REVIEW: Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory (e-short story) by Martha Wells

"Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory" is a sci-fi short story in the Murderbot Diaries series. It should be read after Exit Strategy.

Review:

Dr. Ayda Mensah attempts to do her work and pretend she's fine after the events of Exit Strategy.

First, I want to say thank you to the person who let me know about this story and where to go to read it. I'm sure going straight from Exit Strategy to Network Effect would have worked out fine, but the really nice thing about this story is that it's the first time we get to see Murderbot from someone else's POV.

And yeah, not everyone on Preservation is happy about the idea of a rogue SecUnit hanging around, and I wonder what other SecUnits would do if they didn't have functioning governor modules anymore and could just do whatever they wanted. They probably wouldn't all be like Murderbot, happily watching serials in between (and sometimes during) efforts to save humans from dying.

Since Murderbot spends so much time assuring readers that everyone is justifiably terrified of rogue SecUnits, I got a kick out of Mensah actually finding Murderbot to be a very comforting presence. She knows she has to find other ways of working through her emotions (like actually visiting a mental health professional, which she'd been resisting), but for now, right after a traumatic incident, it's nice to have SecUnit watching out for her and being intimidating when anyone scares her.

All right, on to Network Effect...