Someone You Can Build a Nest In feels like a Murderbot novel through a fantasy lens
John Wiswell’s debut novel Someone You Can Build a Nest In was one of Polygon’s most anticipated SFF novels of 2024, and it lived up to that title. It’s an energetic, deeply strange, surprising book whose protagonist, a monster named Shesheshen, strongly reminded me of one of the decade’s most popular SFF protagonists, Martha Wells’ Murderbot. Like Murderbot, Shesheshen is a nonhuman character who struggles to understand human emotion and behavior, and is frustrated and even repelled when she starts experiencing it herself. They share a certain outlook — a loneliness they can’t acknowledge, and an attachment to one human in particular.