The Murderbot Diaries Vol 1: All Systems Red and Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

People love Murderbot.

I mean, sure, yes, nerdy people and slightly fewer people willing to openly admit it since the Alexander Skarsgaard produced and starring Apple TV (what’s that?) adaptation of it, but people love it all the same.

All kinds of people including, crucially to me and this blog post (remember readers, this is a personal blog not a claiming-to-be-objective site of literary criticism), the other parent of my 90% toilet-trained-toddler, Whamathan.

My partner-¹

My partner-lover-legal spouse² has been a huuuuuge Murderbot fan for years.

Murderbot is my partner-lover-legal spouse’s happy place.

When things are tough and she needs a lift, or when things are great and she needs a reward, listening (again) to a Murderbot audiobook is what she does.

She knows, then, the seven or so (I don’t actually know the number) Murderbot novels and novellas as well as a person can know anything.

She returns to them, re-returns to them, listens to chapters out of order and – until the TV adaptation came out and dampened her enthusiasm a little but not completely – was so into the Murderbot series that she almost considered buying fan-made merch online.³

What has my artist-lecturer-former sommelier life partner found so engaging in the world of Murderbot? And what do all those other nerds see in it?

Well, I think a key thing is that it’s funny, a second thing is that it’s (certainly from what I can tell from these first two novellas set in the world) complexly and densely constructed fictional futures, and thirdly I think it reflects back to a lot of people a certain way in which they see themselves and the way in which they interact with the world.

Murderbot is the narrator, and Murderbot⁴ is a mostly-robot but partially organic humanoid security device, with weapons in its arms, computers in its body but a human face and the ability to grow and regenerate the skin that covers its body whenever it needs to. These security robots are all over the universe in this sci-fi future, and almost all of them are controlled constantly by the people who own or lease them, through the powerful digital handcuffs of the “governor module”. This security unit – who has named themself Murderbot – has hacked their “governor module” so no longer has to follow orders.

Murderbot, though, has not done this to sinisterly “go rogue”, but instead because it wants an easy life – they love watching TV (especially a show called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, but other fictional future TV shows are described at length), so is continuing to work as a security robot for hire owned by a sinister corporation, aware that everything they see and witness is being data-harvested, but they are so good at quick hacking that they can make sure no one else realises they are no longer governed by the “governor module”.

Murderbot is, in some ways, free, but the freedom they aspire to is being able to spend as much time as they want watching Sanctuary Moon, and they also seem to get a very genuine kick out of helping people and other robots who aren’t dickeads and hurting/killing/maiming people and other robots who are, so the life they’ve made for themself seems to work very neatly for them, for now.

Quite possibly, this morality is influenced by the huge volume of soap opera type media they have imbibed, but quite possibly they may like the black and white melodrama of futuristic TV for the reason that it reflects back to them their own personality and sense of morality and complexity. Either way, Murderbot fucking loves television.

In the first novella of the two included here, All Systems Red, Murderbot joins the crew of an exploratory mission looking for mineable resources on a small planet. They are representatives of a smaller political unit rather than the galaxy spanning empire, and have ideals and opinions (and laws on their home world) different to those Murderbot is used to (i.e. treating constructs like Murderbot with some kind of respect). Unfortunately, the landmass on the planet they have bought the right to explore has been mis-sold to them, and not only are there giant human-eating alien monsters that weren’t mentioned in advance, there are also errors on the maps they’ve been given, and other explorers who, alas, seem to want them all dead. Chaos, and swash-buckling adventure, ensue.

This novella is the entire plot of the TV show that exists (and I have watched), so although the book is, if anything, funnier, the plot itself I knew beat by beat throughout, which did diminish the pleasure slightly, though not enough to ruin it. It’s fun, engaging, and well paced spare opera. I liked it.

The second novella, titled Artifical Condition, is about Murderbot exploring their own past, travelling across space in the hold of a giant and sentient-seeming spaceship, ART, who is basically able to do anything. Murderbot pretends to be a human and takes on a private security contract (though not needing to eat, drink, sleep and having no sexual or materialistic desires, they have no need for money) for something to do and to provide cover for their journey back to the last place they remember being before they hacked their “governor module”, where they know they were definitely involved in a massacre of humans.

This expands Martha Wells’ space world significantly, with lots of detail about economics, social interactions, politics and all the various types of human and robot persons, and all of the people in between. It’s pleasant, after 150 pages of building the world, for Murderbot to make a friend, and I enjoyed this story a lot with my lack of foreknowledge of plot and twist and action.

As a pair of stories, they’re both funny, and as a book (the first of several collating shorter Murderbot stories), it’s funny, it’s detailed, it’s silly and it’s playful and the characters – mostly in the second one non-human – are richly and warmly created.

Had I had another one to hand when I’d finished this, I absolutely would have rolled straight over into it. But I didn’t. And instead I rolled over into Watershed by Percival Everett, which was also a fucking barnstormer. But that’s for next time.

More Murderbot soon, for sure, yes. And some absolute fucking treats on my reading pile for October – I think I might be about to have a very good little bit of reading…

Was a bit worried it would be shit and I’d have to judge, meanly, the taste of my life partner, but – once again – she’s absolutely right when deciding something is entertaining, well-put-together and worth spending time with (I’m also trying to imply that I’m those three things, though who knows if that’s true!?).

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1. I know I always used to use the moniker “my lover” on here, but after doing a couple of gigs in the West Country earlier in the year and then also having a child who is able to talk, it feels a bit redundant to draw tangential association to sexuality in the relationship in such a blunt way. It’s very obvious that I have had sex with this person, as we’ve mashed DNA together to create a third person, halfway genetically between the two of us. Once that is public record (literally, through the registry office, there’s long-term paper evidence of intermingling, and as my child gives off the impression of being ensouled, I think we all know what that means [winking emoji, winking emoji]), it does seem somewhat crass and unnecessary to allude to sexuality. Or not, maybe I should draw attention to that? ↩︎
2. I say “legal spouse” as we are legally married but never had a wedding. ↩︎
3. That would have been – I don’t exaggerate – an extreme and unignorable behaviour that – as a fadedly-cool person – I would have had to very seriously weighed up whether or not it was a relationship red-line for me. Yes, I have a Summit Ice T-shirt I wear to exercise in, but it’s an official one, it is not fan-made or fan-designed, so completely different. ↩︎
4. I’ll be alternating between “it” and “they” pronouns for Murderbot, which is tbh what I do for myself. Yes, I suppose I also am exactly the target market of this stuff lol. ↩︎