The Complete Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells
Published 2020
How hard is The Complete Murderbot Diaries to read?
The Complete Murderbot Diaries scores 48 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Plain contemporary vocabulary with invented corporate terms.
- Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
- Short, dry, fast sentences.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Concrete, though personhood is the running question.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Considerable world-building across five books.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- A narrator who hides its feelings from itself as much as from us.
- Symbolic density: 42 out of 100
- The serials and the armour do modest work.
- Ironic distance: 65 out of 100
- The deadpan against the feeling underneath is the whole voice.
- Resolution withholding: 42 out of 100
- Each volume closes; the larger question stays open.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Five novellas forming one arc.
How The Complete Murderbot Diaries is regarded
The Complete Murderbot Diaries holds a literary regard score of 51 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.