Guest Post : Why I love the Murderbot Diaries
"I, for one, welcome our new SecUnit overlords" The Simpsons, kinda
by the brilliant Myfanwy Fox
On Mother’s Day last year, my son handed me his Kindle, saying, ‘Mum, you have to read this.’
‘What is “this”?’ I asked, handling the unfamiliar tech.
‘The Murderbot Diaries. By Martha Wells.’
Ah, the dire-sounding series he’d been on about for a couple of years, texting me the odd bemusing “funny” snippet. I had brushed off all his attempts to interest me in Murderbot, with its daft name, but this time I humoured him – it was such a generous gesture he was making. I brewed myself a cuppa, nabbed a biscuit, and sat down to read a few pages so I could say, hand on heart, I’d given it a go (subtext: now leave me in peace).
Three hours later I finished All Systems Red, the first novella in the series, and I wanted – craved – more. Murderbot is dangerously addictive. The narration is perfect. In the following week I read all five of the then existing books, two short stories, some fan fiction, and pre-ordered a hardback of new novella not due for a few months. Since then, Martha Wells has signed the biggest ever to date contract with Tor for the next few Murderbot books (and some fantasy stories, but let’s forgive her) and she has just won Hugo awards for Murderbot as best series and best novel (Network Effect).
Here’s Murderbot’s introduction:
I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music concerned. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.
Murderbot is a SecUnit, a part human (cloned tissues), part robot security machine. SecUnits are super-strong and fast, capable of independent thought, but controlled by a governor module in their brain, which can punish them or even kill them. They must obey orders. Murderbot has its own demons because it has memories – organic, its data having been purged – of killing people. It doesn’t want to be forced to do that again and it is determined to uncover what happened.
Meanwhile, it hasn’t managed to escape The Company that owns it so it’s on a contract half-arsing its job while watching Sanctuary Moon, its favourite serial. If it is caught with a hacked governor module it will be recycled; rogue SecUnits have a bad reputation.
Murderbot is a tool of the “Corporation Rim” and has a constant battle of wits – and hacking – to stay ahead of The Company and its forces. When the humans it is guarding are attacked, what will Murderbot do? What will they do, when they discover it’s a rogue unit?
With its superpowers, anxiety, sense of right and wrong, gender neutrality, snarkiness, and horror of making eye contact, Murderbot first found a following in the neurodivergent community and its popularity initially spread in online forums. Why do Murderbot fans fall so in love with the series? Like many Pratchett characters, Murderbot is so beautifully human and humane.
Wells was almost about to give up writing when a scene with Murderbot came to mind as she was finishing the last book in her Raksura series, as she explains in her blog:
A lot of things were coming to a boiling point that year. I had a lifetime of anxiety, depression, and undiagnosed developmental disorders. I was sick of being told that if you're not completely open and spilling your feelings for the approval of everyone around you then you must not have any feelings. Books, but also TV and Star Wars had probably saved my life as a kid, but that wasn't the narrative people wanted to hear. (It's cool if literature saves your life; if literature got a major assist from Land of the Giants and the Saturday afternoon Godzilla movie, not so much. *) I was still hanging on as a working writer in a field that expected women my age to quietly fade away. I'd been angry all my life, but the oncoming election of Trump was making me exhausted with rage. I was terrified of what would happen, to me, to my family, to our friends, to all the people I knew. I had to put it all somewhere, so I put it into Murderbot.
Murderbot’s desperation, resilience, bloody-mindedness, and relationships with its new friends – though it doesn’t like the f-word – blend into edge-of-the-seat action sequences that are up with any of the great filmed series in genre. Vast intergalactic corporations – the organisations that build SecUnits and take over planets even if previously colonised (parallels with empires and slavery in our more recent history, of course) are the faceless evil monsters.
In one novella Murderbot is interviewed for a documentary. Why does it always change the company’s name to “The Company”? And then the interviewer realises Murderbot has already done this to the transcript as they speak. The writer in me wonders if Wells always had this joke in mind and saved it up, or simply didn’t feel the need for a company name at first (All Systems Red was written at speed) and then realised it was worth so much more. Nothing is wasted.
One individual character – aside from our eponymous (not a word Murderbot would use unless to pick its pretentions apart) hero – looms larger than life: ART (Asshole Research Transport according to Murderbot, Perihelion to its crew and the wider universe), the sentient spaceship that finds Murderbot at first curious and later world-saving – a mutual arc of developing respect (and friendship). Network effect includes an aggravating teenager and a laugh out loud scene between teen, ART and Murderbot on whether its code equivalates to genes – and replicating code/genes to make new bots or babies.
So I reckon my son should be on commission with Tor because he hooked me and now I’m a Murderbot pusher too, sending snippets to friends and posting regular, ‘You must read this,’ links on social media. Murderbot may be nominally sci fi but it’s a story about what makes us human, a story about finding our way against impossible odds, a story about friendship, the most vital f-word of all if we are to thrive individually and collectively. The best genre stories carry us beyond the limitations of our real world into something so much greater. Give it a go. Read the first few pages and suspend your disbelief. That’s what reading is about, right? Hand on heart, it gets easier the more (good) SFF you sample.
Wells mentions in her blog that she was ready to quit, so I’ll end by letting her share her encouragement for us all, whatever kind of writing we do or want to do:
There are people who don't want you to write. They especially don't want you to write and be published. They want all stories to be told by people who are just like them. They have many different ways of letting you know that, and they all add up, and sometimes the weight of it is crushing.
I know sometimes it's unavoidable, because of health problems or other things you just can't do anything about. But if you feel you are being pushed out of this field, and you don't want to be, I hope you will continue to write, and write your stories, and tell your truth, and push yourself back in. Because you never know what might happen if you keep trying. Your story may be the lifeline that your readers desperately need to pull them to shore.
* Own your influences.
All your likes and dislikes, your sufferings and your guilty pleasures are grist for creativity. Let it all ferment in your creative compost and see what crawls out.
Guest post by…
Myfanwy Fox -
Biologist now running a charity shop, interested in ecology, psychology and communication. Poet and writer of science fiction.
Check out her website here - Fox Unkennelled
Down The Rabbit Hole
Bonus links:
Short story
The Future of Work: Compulsory
A very brief prequel to the series
Short story
Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory
Set after Exit Strategy
Feelings REDACTED: What Happens When Murderbot and ART Talk to Instagram
A bit of life-affirming silliness
Today I Found Out - “overlords” quotation