Fugitive Telemetry

This is the fifth novella in the series, and comes directly after the fourth in the timeline: before the novel, although it was published after the novel.

It's one of the better novellas in the series: the plot is interesting, Murderbot's comments are amusing, and the story isn't primarily about stupid humans getting themselves into unnecessary trouble, which makes a change.

Unusually, it's a whodunnit, and the ending is a bit too close to cliché (“The butler did it”), but it surprised me at least. Though I'm no armchair detective, and I'm easily surprised by whodunnits.

This is not a matter of major concern, but it annoys me peripherally that the author goes with the modern fashion for using ‘they' as an all-purpose singular-or-plural pronoun. I read it as plural, I double-take whenever I realize the author is using it as singular, and it's annoying to keep suffering these double-takes while reading fiction. We already routinely use ‘you' as singular or plural; but any singular-or-plural pronoun causes ambiguity, lack of clarity. Whenever we see it, we have to try to guess whether it's supposed to be singular or plural. ‘You' was originally a plural-only pronoun, and should have remained plural-only; the same with ‘they'.