User Profile

All over the place. Fun and exciting at times, achingly dull and cliched at others. Totally unbelievable, many chase scenes, shallow romance subplot, male gaze-y descriptions of every female character, much gadgets, kind of a lot of product placement, and what feels like a denouement that was hacked into a press piece for some stealth watercraft with an eye-rolling acronym.

I won't lie and say I didn't enjoy it, but there wasn't exactly a lot of soy on the bean on this one. It's a Hollywood blockbuster that goes down easy if you don't think too hard.

Maybe that was why I had been nervous about meeting Mensah again, and not all the other dumb reasons I had come up with. I hadn’t been afraid that she wasn’t my friend, I had been afraid that she was, and what it did to me.

The band is back together. I really like the way this fourth novella comes back around back to the Preservation Alliance folks that the books started with. It's fun to see Murderbot with the same people and in a similar protection role, but having a lot more agency.

Pin-Lee groaned and rubbed her face. "I'm almost glad you're here."

This is minor, but Pin-Lee also has some amazing moments here and finally gets to pull out her scary lawyering. I love the combination of how both angry at and yet how also protective of Murderbot she is.

SecUnit's on the case!

I've kind of been hopping about the Murderbot books, so I'm just going through them chronologically now. I had missed this one in my earlier readings, but now I realize it's kind of the tonal "key" to the shift in SecUnit's attitudes in Network Effect.

The ending of Exit Strategy is such a great payoff. It's so understated and compassionate. I loved it.

@optional@buecher.pnpde.social Thank you, that's very kind of you to say. When it come to media, I think many of us (especially middle-aged people like myself) have a lot of misplaced nostalgia for certain genres / tropes. It's so easy to assimilate these kind of "scripts" without hardly any mental effort.

Anyway, like you said, the very least you can do if you still enjoy this kind of problematic stuff, is at least be aware of what's happening, and not just swallow the ideology uncritically.

OK so after looking it up it's not as embarrassing as it sounds, but I really thought the MC swore off romance because of Ronald Regan, which-- while I'm 120% sure my politics are in stark contrast to Clancy's--I found that line more hamfisted than his usual tacit endorsement of American imperialism.

Anyway, this book is silly.

Sigh... I'm not proud. Literally found this in a wet box at the side of the road and fondly remembered reading a Rainbow Six a couple lifetimes ago. If nothing else, I don't much care if I drop it in the bath while reading. :p

Not my usual thing, and normative af, but the pacing and imagery were good, characters distinct and punchy, never felt lost, and I cared about the plot all the way to the end, so it did something right.

I want to say I didn't like it, because of what that would say about me, but I actually did enjoy it, despite myself. :)

@ks@bookwyrm.social Well said. I wasn't sure how they would all come together until the end.