Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/1/21

One book this week: I bought it, and actually even pre-ordered it, which is vanishingly rare for me. (I was ordering other stuff, saw this was coming out in about a week, and figured I might as well order it then rather than forgetting about it. But I still generally don't think of myself as a person who would ever pre-order things: I used to get stuff well ahead of publication, he said, shaking his fist at a cloud, so I'm not going to turn into that kind of uber-consumer if I have any say in the matter.)

The book is Martha Wells' Fugitive Telemetry, the sixth book about Murderbot. It's novella-length, matching all of the books aside from the immediately previous one, Network Affect, which is mildly surprising. (Usually, when a series makes the jump to novel, it doesn't typically jump back.) From the card page, it may be that the novellas are "The Murderbot Diaries" and the novel is its own separate thing, which would be deeply weird...but so is book publishing in general.

In any case: new book about Murderbot, about 190 pages long, hit stores earlier this week. The cool kids probably read it Tuesday and posted quick takes on Insta, but I'm a lot slower than that these days. (He said, starting to wax poetic about the days he used to hang an onion from his belt, and reminiscing about how he used to get a manuscript in the mail in the morning, read it that night, and write the reader's report first thing in the office the next morning.) I do expect to start it this weekend, which is the past weekend as you're reading this. So I may actually already have read it, though I doubt I have managed to finish it. (And now I'm starting to dive into time-travel tenses, which is a sign to end this post.)