Network Effect.

The six books on the shortlist for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel were all written by women, which I believe is a first. The list includes N.K. Jemisin’s tremendous The City We Became and Susanna Clarke’s triumphant comeback novel Piranesi, as well as a sequel to the awful 2019 winner The Calculating Stars.

Martha Wells’ Network Effect might have some momentum going into this autumn’s vote, as the novel won the top prize in both the Nebula and Locus awards, which would give it the Triple Crown of science fiction (also won by The Calculating Stars, so clearly it doesn’t mean anything more than baseball’s Triple Crown). It’s the first full-length novel in her award-winning MurderBot series, which stars a nameless android called a SecUnit as the protagonist that is gradually evolving more humanlike thoughts and emotions after breaking free of the technology that chained it to its employers. It’s also very, very good at killing.

The novel opens with a brief story where SecUnit thwarts an assassination attempt against its boss, but the bulk of the novel surrounds a kidnapping attempt that brings SecUnit and his boss’s teenage daughter Amena on a ship that is full of hostile humanoid beings, which SecUnit calls Targets, and that is about to take them through a wormhole away from their own ship and her family. That’s all the plot the book really needs, although Wells adds some layers of intricacy and brings back a character from one of the earlier novellas.

Network Effect plays out like a hard-boiled sci-fi book, as SecUnit is sarcastic, dry, and often unfeeling, although not quite to the degree of being callous, and there is a mystery at the heart of the story – not just who is behind the kidnapping, but why. (I’ll spoil something obvious: It’s not just about the Targets.) We get a lot of ass-kicking, in which SecUnit specializes, and some cool technology bits, like SecUnit’s mini air force of drones, and some technology bits you’ll just have to accept and move on, like all of the mental coding that goes on in the book.

SecUnit is a robot, ultimately, which means it runs on code, and that proves central to the story, as multiple bots in the book end up turning the nature of source code into a pivotal plot point. Wells appears to be using this as a metaphor for human consciousness, and a way to explore the most basic questions of identity and dualism. If a bot is deleted, and restored from a backup, is it the same bot? What if someone copies a bot’s kernel and loads it into a new body? You could just read Network Effect as just a rollicking sci-fi adventure – which it is – and ignore this detail, but I think Wells is at least trying to do something more here.

There’s a fair bit of in-world jargon that threw me off, since I haven’t read any of the previous stories set in this universe, and you do have to just accept a lot of the technical stuff as given, especially anything revolving around coding. The action and the three-dimensional rendering of SecBot, who could easily be flat and boring, are strong enough to make up for any deficiencies in those other areas, and Wells deftly steers the plot through a couple of very sharp turns that give this book a ton of narrative greed. I don’t think I’d vote for it over Jemisin’s or Clarke’s books, but it is a very fun ride.

Next up: Colson Whitehead’s new novel Harlem Shuffle, which comes out today.