half agony, half hope

Murderbot is MurderBACK in the next installment of Martha Wells’s NYT bestselling Murderbot Diaries series System Collapse 🤖🚀

WHAT’S IT ABOUT

Following the events of Network Effect, our favorite lethally cybernetic television fiend has done the previously unthinkable: agreed to accompany the sentient spaceship Perihelion (dubbed ART by Murderbot, short for Asshole Research Transport) and crew on its next mission. 

Unfortunately, they’re not going to get too far. 

Having failed to harvest dangerous artifacts from their target planet by way of Murderbot misadventure, the Barish-Estranza corporation is much angered and determined to recoup their considerable losses. And when you’re a lethally opportunistic space corp, blood and muscle are valuable currency. 

Murderbot, ART’s crew, and the Preservation humans have planetside work to do as Barish-Estranza seeks to claim the planet’s beleaguered colony as a conscripted workforce.  But for Murderbot, the challenge is as internal as it is external. Something is deeply, deeply wrong with it. Normal operational parameters are unmet, but with the corp’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams en route, Murderbot needs to resolve its issues, and fast!

This is a great intro to Murderbot and the series!

I feel compelled to add that “Murderbot” is a name it gave itself - it’s a company product, it probably has a serial number but it wasn’t given a name. Humans renting it for security just called it “the SecUnit.” But names and identity and personhood are complicated, and Murderbot has a complex and unhappy relationship with violence (violence done to it, violence it was compelled to do, violence people expect from it, violence it chooses to commit to protect itself and others...)

The other thing is that I have a very low tolerance for dark fiction and dystopias nowadays - I don’t think they’re bad things to write, I just can’t take it - and I did not find the Murderbot Diaries hard going or depression-triggering. Even though they *are* about a runaway slave in a corporate space dystopia, and the backstory is awful.

MB itself is a delightfully snarky narrator, and there’s a lot of team and found family and people choosing to be good to each other despite the overwhelming burdens they carry, a lot of trauma-recovery and exploration of new and confusing realms of friendship and loyalty, a lot of daring and heroic life-saving (while grumbling internally about how stupid it all is, because MB will never see itself as any kind of hero).

Let this cranky media-fan cyborg into your life. It’s a good time.

I would be a terrible SecUnit, but I find Murderbot one of the most relatable protagonists in anything I have ever read.

(I too, "liked the imaginary people on the entertainment feed way more than I liked real ones, but you can't have one without the other.")

So I’m listening to the Rogue Protocol audiobook (it was the one that didn’t have a waitlist at the library) and I’m mostly just losing it thinking about how from the perspective of any human in the series, Murderbot is actually the BIGGEST Deus Ex Machina. It’s particularly evident in RP, but it holds up for the whole series: ASR: To all of the survey team members, It’s basically like their normal jobs all of a sudden went to hell BUT luckily for them, their amazon Alexa had already rebelled against its controllers and was capable of saving all their lives. Like there was no way they could have or would have expected that, and in-universe that sequence of events was astronomically unlikely. AC: To Tapan and the rest of the polycule, an incredibly cheap, fantastically competent, unreasonably loyal and helpful security consultant just showed up exactly when they needed it, saved their lives multiple times, and then got their data back, before vanishing into thin air.

RP: This is honestly the biggest one, but like, literally a random SecUnit appeared on an empty station at the exact moment that it needed to to save Abene’s life, followed immediately by it killing a bunch of combat bots and rescuing the team from the security they were supposed to have. And then it just…leaves. Via hull breach.

ES: At this point Pin Lee, Gurathin, and Ratthi do know about MB so it’s more of a Chekhov’s gun to them than a deus ex machina, but it still fits the space in the story from their perspective: their negotiations to get Mensah back have been going nowhere, they’re all feeling pretty hopeless, and then BOOM, the rogue SecUnit which ran off and they haven’t seen in months shows up boasting a bunch of upgrades and a makeover and pretty much handles everything for them.

NE: Again, most of the people in this book are familiar with MB so it’s less deus ex machina to them, but to ART’s crew? They’ve been kidnapped, their ship compromised, possibly in the worst situation they’ve ever been in as a crew, and then Peri’s SecUnit Friend which it found randomly a while back just shows up to get them out of a bad situation. (They don’t know about the alien remnant wormhole drive or the kidnapping at this point there’s honestly no reason for Peri’s SecUnit to even be in the system.) It manages to do this twice simultaneously.

Anyway I’ve said all this before but I just think it’s great, especially because Murderbot totally does not see what all these people must be seeing, which is the most helpful person imaginable wondering in to rescue them over and over again

Murderbot is who Spider-Man wants to be

Writer Spotlight: Martha Wells

It’s finally time. Martha Wells returns to her bestselling Murderbot Diaries series with a new novella, Fugitive Telemetry. A seasoned writer of sci-fi and fantasy, she is known for The Wizard Hunters, Wheel of the Infinite, the ‘Books of the Raksura’ series, and the Nebula-nominated The Death of the Necromancer, as well as YA fantasy novels, short stories, and non-fiction. We sat down with the winner of two Hugo Awards, two Locus Awards, and a Nebula to ask her about the new installment of the series, what inspires her, and Murderbot’s blogging habits.

Can you tell us a little bit about Fugitive Telemetry? What made you want to revisit the Murderbot timeline, and what excites you most for fans returning to the series?

There’s a scene in Network Effect where Murderbot shows Thiago a video clip of when it stopped an assassination attempt on Dr. Mensah with the help of Preservation Station Security. In the clip, Murderbot has a good working relationship with the Station Security people. I wanted to go back in the timeline a little and show how Murderbot’s relationship with those characters developed; the rocky start when Murderbot was still getting acclimated to the station, and how the people on the station got acclimated to Murderbot. And I’ve always loved murder mysteries, so that seemed a fun way to do it.

N.K. Jemisin once described Murderbot as a “loveable, snarky, gender-subversive killing machine.” What first inspired you and continues to inspire you in the writing of this distinctive voice?

Whenever I start a new story, the character voice is the most important part. Once I get that, I can build the world and the plot around that voice. I got the idea for the story that became All Systems Red in the summer of 2016, and the world seemed to be going to hell in an even worse way than it usually is. I had also been thinking a lot about escapism and how books and TV can be so important to self-care and providing a mental refuge, how they can help give context for your emotions and help process trauma. I was thinking about what a character like Murderbot would go through and what it would really want, and somehow I came up with the first line of All Systems Red. The voice just followed behind it, bitter and vulnerable but also snarky and fed-up and deeply sarcastic and jaded by what it had seen of humanity.

Do you have any advice for folks who are writing sci-fi, maybe engaged in fanfic communities, and wondering about making a career out of their writing?

Write what you love, what really appeals to you, what you’re most interested in. Also, if you want to be traditionally published, do your research and learn as much about the publishing industry as you can. There’s a lot of misinformation floating around, and it can really hurt your efforts. (Places like the resources section of the SFWA and the “Commonly Used Terms” section on Bookjobs can provide you with a lot of good information.) No matter how much you love it, professional writing is a job. It can be a very difficult one to succeed in and very rough on your emotions.

Do you have any hopes and dreams for the future of the sci-fi genre? What would you like to see more of?

In the past few years, there’s been a lot of new voices in the genre who are writing some fantastic work, pushing the boundaries of the genre in new and exciting directions, to the point where people have referred to this time as a new Golden Age of SF/F. I hope that that trend continues and that the genre continues to expand and grow.

As a writer, how do you practice self-care when juggling work commitments and the creative processes of writing and editing?

It’s not easy. :) Right now, I’m trying to go easy on myself and not push to get too much done in one day; just take it a little bit at a time. Even though I’ve been writing professionally since 1993, and I’m fairly experienced at wrestling with self-doubt, depression, and anxiety, it can still be rough.

If Murderbot had a blog, what would it be called, and what would it contain (fandoms/mood boards/incorrect quotes, etc.)?

It would probably call it something so basic as to be annoying, like “Blog.” It would have nothing except stills, publicity photos, and gifs from the shows it was watching, especially Sanctuary Moon.

Thanks for taking the time, Martha. Fugitive Telemetry is out today!

Fanart for part 2 of the Murderbot Diaries, “Artificial Condition” by Martha Wells!! I’ve already drawn a lot of stuff from part 4 but I want to post more part 2 & 3 first haha

Also, I was pretty nervous about posting fanart for this book cause I know I’m drawing Murderbot differently than most people might picture, or how Martha intended it to look. But there have been a lot of really nice and funny comments/tags on my previous post so I’m really appreciative of everyone’s kindness. <3

If you haven’t heard of this series, pick up “All Systems Red” ASAP it is SO good

Cover for the next Murderbot novella 💚

:DDDD

Please tell me that bizarre many-armed thing standing behind Murderbot is its new best friend.

Everyone Go Read The Murderbot Diaries Right Now