Honestly though: how can anyone read the Murderbot Diaries and not think Gurathin is utterly adorable?
This is the man who says to A ROGUE SECUNIT:
“I can’t tell if that’s you being passive aggressive or you being willfully obtuse.”
Later: Gurathin sighed and rubbed his face and looked off into the distance, like he regretted all his life choices that had led to him standing here right now. On our private feed connection, he sent,
Or you could just show them where you were when this person was being killed.
Gurathin is utterly adorable. He is a sweetie. He is clearly (as, let’s face it, anyone with any sense at all would be) hopelessly smitten with Murderbot. It’s a sensible interpretation of the text. And it likes him too…it even uses its private name with him in Exit Strategy:
Picture commissioned from @cmdrburton , it is lovely, you could get one commissioned too, just for you, buy more art
“Murderbot Impersonates an Augmented Human Security Consultant,”
Gurathin: Hey it calls itself Murderbot and I have some concerns.
MB: You do not trust Murderbot implicitly and without question? Murderbot, who would give its life for you? You betray Murderbot! Jail for client! Jail for client for one thousand years!
Gurathin sighed and rubbed his face and looked off into the distance, like he regretted all his life choices that had led to him standing here right now.
In 2021, I read a total of 40 books (thus far) — which is the lowest amount of books completed in a single year in about a decade. Over the past two years in particular, I’ve found it harder to focus on reading and have turned to other forms of media to fill in my entertainment needs. However, in reading less books per year, I’ve found that the quality of books has gone up. I’ve enjoyed or…
BOOKS READ IN 2018: All Systems Red by Martha Wells
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 35,00 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.
“SecUnit—” Arada started at the same time as Ratthi said, “I don’t think—”
ART interrupted, SecUnit’s earlier statement that I “lie a lot” was untrue. I obviously cannot reveal information against the interests of my crew unless circumstances warrant.
Arada nodded. “Right. We understand. I think SecUnit is looking out for our interests—”
i’ve been wanting to draw this scene since i first read ne and finally got around to it HSDJKS
“It’s joking.” Ratthi managed to sound like he completely believed that. “That’s how it looks when it’s joking.” He sent me on the feed, Stop joking. Gurathin sighed and rubbed his face and looked off into the distance, like he regretted all his life choices that had led to him standing here right now.
[ID: a drawing in soft orange, yellow and green, showing three people. Dr Gurathin is closest to the viewer, facepalming, burying his entire face in his hand. He wears a button up shirt. Right in front of his right elbow is a drone that seems to be looking at him. In the middle is Murderbot, staring blankly ahead, standing around kind of awkwardly. It wears a hoodie and has a drone floating right beside its head. To its left and most in the background is Dr Ratthi, gesticulating strongly with a forced smile on his face. There’s another drone hovering just above his left hand. He wears a tunic with embroidery on the collar. They are in a corridor on Preservation Station. Behind them on the wall are three potted plants - a huge monstera (behind Ratthi, quite fancy looking), a cactus (behind Murderbot, rather tall and straight, but with the tiniest blossoms crowning the top) and a cypress (behind Gurathin, neat but fuzzy). /end ID]
2.
To the humans, I said, “I’m going after the others, just stay here—” I felt a hard thump from behind. It was low and to one side, where a fairly important part would be, if I was human. I turned. Human One had the armored hostile’s weapon, the one I had taken away and dropped down into the module. And she had shot me with it.
[ID: a drawing in bright pinkish-red, white and gray. We see over the heads of five refugees huddled together in the back of the room. They all wear worn down worker’s clothes. A scrawny child with short fluffy hair sits on the floor, someone young kneels beside them. Their hair is braided loosely and their worker overalls are slipping down their shoulder. Three adults stand protectively around them. In the middle of the room, in front of the group, Human One has a weapon still smoking from discharging aimed at Murderbot. Murderbot is standing with its back to the group, a fresh wound in its lower back, looking over its shoulder to Human One. Its face is not visible. A bright white light comes from the hatch of the room. /end ID]
“Not that! Why are you sad and upset?” That was the point where even I could tell that Amena was terrified as well as furious. “There’s something you’re not telling me and it’s scaring me! I’m not a fucking hero like my second mom or a genius like everybody else in my family, I’m just ordinary, and you’re all I’ve got!” I wasn’t expecting that. It was so far from what I thought she had meant, and she was so upset, that the truth inadvertently came out. “My friend is dead!”
[ID: a drawing in cold light blue and turquoise. In the centre is Murderbot with a very exasperated expression, shouting and gesturing, blood trickling down its face. Its left gunport is deployed. In the foreground, visible from behind, is Amena, tilting her head at it. She has a fluffy afrod tied halfway back. Both of them are wearing the same kind of space suits. Three drones float around the area, and in the background Eletra is recovering in ART’s MedBay. /end ID]
2.
Instead, the diagram showed the connections, but they came from the dead human body, and formed a weblike mass. It was interwoven with the central system, then stretched out to the walls, following the old connection pathways. I bumped into the hatch, which was when I realized I had been backing up. 2.0 whispered, That’s targetControlSystem.
[ID: a drawing in bright turquoise and dark red and purple. Murderbot is standing in the entrance to the control room, the hatch of which is red-purple, and bright turquoise crystallic light is shining from inside the room and reflecting on it. Warnings and text boxes are glitching up in the feed in front of it, and in the circular room lies a human body, eyes open, overgrown with glowing white crystals that connect in strings to the roof and pillars in the room /end ID]
She glared at me. “You left.” Somehow I hadn’t expected that. I said, “Mensah said I could learn to do anything I wanted. I learned to leave.” “You could have told her what you wanted. We—she—we were worried, okay.”
[ID: a drawing in digital greens and blues. The camera looks down over Murderbot’s shoulder at Pin-Lee in a translucent transport bubble floating above an illuminated station (signified by glowing squares in the distance). The bubble as a circular bench as a sating area and consists of a light turquoise field indicated with hexagons. Murderbot is evading Pin-Lee’s stare and frowning, it wears a hoodie and pants with many pockets. Pin-Lee wears elegant clothes, a cropped blazer, tight pants, and heels. Her hair is tied in an elaborate bun, and she leans towards MB with a glare. /end ID]
2.
On the company ship, it wouldn’t be a MedSystem, it would be a cubicle. “It absolutely cannot wait,” I told him. Ratthi dropped to the deck beside me and yelled for Gurathin to bring the shuttle’s emergency kit.
[ID: a digital drawing in purple, yellow and grey. Murderbot is lying on the floor of a shuttle. In front of it, Dr Ratthi, sleeves rolled up and holding an emergency kit, is starting to work on extracting shrapnel from Murderbot’s knee. His torso blocks the view on most of Murderbot’s body, but the broken knee is clearly visible. Dr Ratthi wears tight pants and boots, a button up shirt, and has several small pouches attached to his belt, his hair is curly and he has a slight beard. Behind them, Dr Gurathin also leans down to help. He wears a casual suit with a turtleneck shirt beneath, hair combed back, and an augment visible in thin lines around his right eye. Dr. Mensah and Pin-Lee are visible in the background, standing in the shuttle’s cockpit. Pin-Lee is fully in the frame, looking towards the shuttle’s front, Dr Mensah is peeking over her shoulder at the scene. /end ID]
Abene said, “Were you hit?” She stepped toward me, reaching to push my jacket aside. I jerked back a step. She stopped, startled. Miki turned, its visual sensors focusing in on me. I checked its camera and got a view of my face. I thought I had gotten good at controlling my expression, but apparently only when I wasn’t feeling actual emotions. In our feed connection, Miki said, Abene won’t hurt you, SecUnit.
[ID: a drawing in dark teal and blue hues. In the front, Hirune is passed out on a chair, barely visible. Behind her is Don Abene, a woman with light braided hair over her shoulder, reaching a hand out toward Murderbot. Murderbot is bleeding from a wound in its stomach and on its right thigh, and backing away from her, looking horrified/scared. There is blood on the floor underneath it. Murderbot wears thick heavy boots, dark pocketed pants with various thigh holsters, a hoodie and a jacket over the hoodie. On the right is Miki, visible from behind, also lifting a hand towards Murderbot. Miki is a humanform robot with heart-shaped ear attachments, light silver coating and a helmet-like head. /end ID]
2.
Miki was crumpled in front of the bot, and something looked wrong. I was climbing to my feet, trying to see how Miki was damaged, when I froze. Something looked wrong because Miki’s chest was crushed, its processor, memory, everything that made it Miki squeezed to nothing in one flex of the combat bot’s hand.
[ID: a drawing in cold hues of light blue and light purple. In the foreground and almost blurry, a deactivated CombatBot’s arm lies palm up on the ground. Behind that is Miki, sprawled on its back, torso bent and squished,,an ear bit torn off, head turned to the viewer, its faceplate showing “…”. Murderbot, injured more and wearing the same outfit from the first drawing, is coming up from behind it, looking at Miki. It has a small, mournful expression on its face. /end ID]
Let me in, ART said, as cool and calm as if we were discussing what show to watch next. I had never given ART full access to my brain. I had let it alter my body, but not this. We had three seconds and counting. My clients, the other humans on the shuttle. I let it in.
[ID: a digital drawing in orange and blue. Murderbot is shoving to its feet in an apparently empty shuttle, holding on to the back of some seats. Murderbot wears wide pants with pockets and a hooded jacket. Its head seems to be under water, its hair floats and its eyes glow bright blue, as if the upper part of the drawing was a wave of water. The part of the image outside the bubble is in orange hues. /end ID]
2.
Calm down, ART said, not helpfully. I was too frozen to respond. After three seconds, ART added, She’s frightened. You are a reassuring presence.
[ID: a drawing in deep purple and yellow, showing two people in a small room. From a top-down angle, Tapan can be seen curled up and asleep, facing Murderbot. She wears shorts with tights beneath and a hoodie, her hair is in a bun. Beside her are her shoes, a backpack and some other supplies. Murderbot is sitting up and looking down at her, and is dressed in pants with many pockets, a hoodie, and boots. Yellow light shines in from underneath the door. /end ]
“You were very good with Dr. Volescu. I don’t think the others realized … They were very impressed.” “It’s part of the emergency med instructions, calming victims.” I tugged the blanket tighter so she didn’t see anything awful. I could feel something lower down leaking.
[ID: a digital drawing in dark gray and red. Dr Mensah, a stocky woman with short light hair, is visible form behind, standing in front of on open cubicle. The light from the cubicle illuminates her and she casts a long shadow. Murderbot is visible looking uncomfortably to the side, holding a blanket to its chest, with a lot of inorganics visible. The image cuts off without showing Murderbot’s eyes. /end ID]
2.
Pin-Lee leaned over me and I said, “This unit is at minimal functionality and it is recommended that you discard it.” It’s an automatic reaction triggered by catastrophic malfunction. Also, I really didn’t want them to try to move me because it hurt bad enough the way it was. “Your contract allows—” “Shut up,” Mensah snapped. “You shut the fuck up. We’re not leaving you.”
[ID: In the foreground of the drawing, Murderbot is lying on its back, helmet broken and hair visible. It’s looking up at Dr Mensah, who clutching her bleeding arm and shouting, Pin-Lee with her hair tied up looking grim, and Dr Gurathin in the background, using a display device. All three of them are wearing green outdoor suits. They are in a ravine, and the orange sky shows bright shining planetary rings. The image is in brown, green and orange tones. /end ID]
“So, Murderbot. One of the questions I get asked a lot is what inspired the character. I think people want/expect there to be a crystal clear single moment where something tangible and identifiable sparked the idea. But there really wasn’t; or if there was, I don’t remember it. What I remember is a whole lot of things, all coming together at once. It started when I was working on the ending of The Harbors of the Sun, the last novel in the Books of the Raksura series. It was the conclusion of the series, and I was sweating over it. This was the series that, with great difficulty and many setbacks, dragged my career back from the dead, and I loved it and wanted to do the finale justice. I was having something like a creative surge, with ideas for new books, fanfiction, redecorating my house, digging up my backyard, all kinds of things. (My brain is what we call non-neurotypical and sometimes it goes very fast.) One day, somewhere in there, the plot idea popped up for an enslaved security person who had destroyed their governor module but would have to reveal that to save an innocent group of scientists. I had an image of a scene which turned into the moment in All Systems Red where Mensah knocks on the wall of Murderbot’s cubicle, an act of transgression which sets off the story. It was going to be a short story with a sad ending. I decided to quickly type some notes on the idea so I wouldn’t forget it. I ended up writing the cubicle scene and then forced myself to stop and go back to work on the novel. The day after The Harbors of the Sun draft was finished, I started on what ended up being All Systems Red, though at the time it was just called The Murderbot Diaries. All my books, except for my Star Wars and Stargate Atlantis media tie-ins, had been fantasy, but this was a science fiction idea. I’d been reading SF all my life, and some of my favorites were Bujold’s Vorkosigan series, Tanith Lee, Janet Kagan, Phyllis Gotlieb, and recently Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds, and Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. It quickly developed into something too long for a short story, but I had been reading some of TorDotcom’s new novella line, stories like The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson and Binti by Nnedi Okorafor. I checked the submission requirements and thought that around 33,000 words would be just about the right length for what I wanted to do. The sad ending got thrown out early on, though I didn’t decide on the actual ending until I got close to that point in the story. Murderbot needed time to grow and change on its own; going home with Mensah would be like trading up to a better owner. It needed to leave. The draft took from May 26, 2016 through June 26, 2016 to complete. It would have been faster, but I fell and had a back injury in the middle of it, possibly not unrelated to the rheumatoid arthritis that I didn’t know I had at the time. Then I had to go be on programming (with a cane and a back brace) at Comicpalooza in Houston. The day I got back home I started writing again. 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. There were other influences. The movie War Games where the sentient supercomputer decides for itself that playing games is better than waging war. The Lord of the Rings documentary about the program used to create the massive battle scenes and how they had to tweak it to stop it from making all the pixel people run away instead of fight. I wanted to write an AI that didn’t want to be human, and I was thinking a lot about what an AI would actually want, as opposed to what a human might think an AI would want. Once the novella was finished I sent it to my agent, Jennifer Jackson, who submitted it to Lee Harris at Tordotcom. Then we waited, and I went back to work on The Harbors of the Sun. I went to the WorldCon in Kansas City with friends, and ran into Lee as he was about to go to the Hugo Awards, where he would accept Nnedi Okorafor’s Hugo for Best Novella for Binti. He told me he was buying the novella and I was ecstatic while trying to be cool and professional. The next day I did a panel with Lee while Nnedi’s Hugo sat in a box on the floor behind the table. I was trying not to see that as a good omen, because in my career (all twenty-three years of it up to that point) I’d long ago accepted that my time for awards was past. But it turned out I was wrong about that. Lee asked for a second novella and I decided to write what happened next, which turned into Artificial Condition. After that, I wanted to keep going and offered to do two more. Each subsequent novella has been harder to write than the previous one, each taking me about three to four months of writing, cutting, and rewriting to get to a first draft. The novel Network Effect took me almost twice as long to write as any of my other novels. It was published last week, in the middle of a world-spanning pandemic, and here we are. I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who has embraced Murderbot (figuratively, because we all know it would hate that in real life) and to everyone who sees themselves in Murderbot. It’s a gift, to have readers love a character as much as you love writing it, to have readers identify with a character and to feel comforted by it. It’s a gift to still be able to write Murderbot, with everything going on in the world. So thank you for that gift.”
— The text of Martha Wells’s introduction to the Subterranean edition of The Murderbot Diaries, published March 2021. Full text here.
Excellent insight. (Dayum, girl, you can hyperfixate with the best of them.) I love the Raksura series, and the Murderbot Diaries, and I just read Death of the Necromancer and was entranced. These are *very* different worlds, with the liberal class & sexual attitudes and the evocative scene-setting perhaps being the only factors in common.
I am very excited indeed to see Martha Wells talking about the next Murderbot Diaries novella being released sooner than I was expecting! Yay!!!
But the most terrifying thing, to me, is the bit she says about Murderbot and agency, constructs and consciousness and the issue of slavery in the MBDiaries series.
I know the “is MB a boy or a girl?” question is still outrageously “Which books did you read???” but the idea someone reads the book and doesn’t see the constructs as slaves?
[ID: Martha Wells reading from a book, with robots - mechanical contraptions slightly smaller than most cats, with huge treads - surrounding her, positioned to look like they’re listening attentively. Text reads “Martha Wells reading to the search and rescue robots at the TEES (Texas A&M University Engineering Experiment Station) Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR).”]
Can we all take a moment to appreciate this photo from Martha Wells’s website
ok so uh not to be like “i think the robot’s autistic” or whatever but picking the murderbot diaries back up after learning that i might possibly have little an autism has been an experience for sure
