This review is based on an eARC (Advance Reading Copy) provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Platform Decay will be released on May 5, 2026.

At this point, readers know what to expect from The Murderbot Diaries. The series has won a legion of fans and a host of genre awards and has even been made into a (very fun) TV series. Platform Decay is the eighth book and is not the place a new reader should start. But it’s a very fun series, so I’m still reading. What is there to say about the newest installment from Martha Wells?

Platform Decay takes place soon after the events of System Collapse, following Murderbot on a mission to extract a small group of humans from under the nose of a powerful corporation with the worst of intentions. I’m sure it will come as no surprise that the extraction doesn’t go exactly as planned. And so Murderbot has to improvise, dealing with hostile corporates, unpredictable humans, and its own burgeoning emotional awareness. 

Anyone who has gotten this far into the series should have a pretty good idea of what to expect from a new entry. Murderbot will do some sneaking, some outright fighting, and a lot of introspection about what it would rather be doing instead. Platform Decay adds an emotional awareness module, but by and large, it stays true to the formula. 

But Murderbot’s success isn’t because of Wells’ particular facility writing action sequences, but rather because of the characterization. The introspection and the navigation of interactions with ordinary humans (okay, and interactions with various higher-level bots) are the highlight of the series. There’s a reason that books two and five are some of the most popular. 

Frequently, those interpersonal interactions are frontloaded, a period of relative calm before a big, action-packed finish. But in Platform Decay, Murderbot is on mission from the opening pages, and interactions with others serve as punctuation more than as their own episodes. There’s still enough to be endearing, but the balance has shifted more toward the action side, and that side isn’t Murderbot’s best (except, you know, in the ability to kill things. Murderbot is good at that). 

As far as its place in the series goes. . . well, it’s an episode. Murderbot is in a different emotional place than it was in book four (let alone book one), but there’s not a lot of character movement here. In that way, it’s a bit like Fugitive Telemetry—the only installment published out-of-order according to the in-story chronology. Platform Decay doesn’t literally go backwards, but neither does it move very far forward. And seeing as how the series has hit eight books, perhaps that’s not a surprise. They’re all fun reads, and there’s clearly an appetite for the episodic adventures of Murderbot. But at the same time, it’s hard to compare episodic adventures of Murderbot to the series’ best entries. 

On the whole, if you’ve liked the first seven books, you’ll doubtless have fun with Platform Decay. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it does offer another entertaining adventure with everyone’s favorite SecUnit, and that’s still enough to make it worth the read for series fans. 

Recommended if you like: late-series Murderbot.

Can I use it for Bingo? It’ll be Published in 2026 on the card released in about five weeks. If you have an ARC. . . well, I suppose it fits Biopunk?

Overall rating: 15 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.