Like a lot of Martha Wells fans, I was introduced to her through the Murderbot Diaries. All Systems Red, the first novella in what is currently a seven book series (not counting short stories) came out in 2017 to wide acclaim, all of it worth it. As much as I love this book series—and the television show, which I reviewed on Reactor—I find the conversations around the books just as interesting. So let’s dive in, shall we?
Wells drops us right into the middle of the action. Murderbot is on some random planet with some random clients when an alien predator erupts from the soil. Prior to this, Murderbot had been watching some of the “35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music” it downloaded before departing on this contract. Once Murderbot gets Drs. Volescu and Bharadwaj to safety, things get tricky. At the hopper we meet more of the rest of the Preservation Auxiliary team: Dr. Mensah, a Black woman and the leader of the operation, Dr. Ratthi (a biologist), Pin-Lee (“experience in habitat and shelter construction”), and Dr. Arada (also a biologist). Once we arrive at the habitat, we also meet Dr. Gurathin (an augmented human and scientist) and Dr. Overse (“certified as a field medic”).
I say this in every book club post, but one of the things Wells does best is how she strategically sprinkles information about the characters and the world. The word “SecUnit” doesn’t appear until page 27, but by that point we already know Murderbot is a contract cyborg that performs security for hire that has hacked its governor module. We know that Murderbot doesn’t particularly care about its job or its clients, and that the behavior we’ve seen thus far—the streaming, taking down its helmet to speak kindly to Volescu and Bharadwaj, riding up front with the humans instead of in the cargo bay, snapping at Ratthi—is highly unusual. She gives readers just enough to keep up while also letting us discover the world piece by piece. Infodumping? Never met her.
Due to having 20% of its mass bitten off by Hostile One, Murderbot spends some time in its repair cubicle while reflecting on its misadventures. “So, I’m awkward with actual humans. It’s not paranoia about my hacked governor module, and it’s not them; it’s me. I know I’m a horrifying murderbot, and they know it, and it makes both of us nervous, which makes me even more nervous.” Or, put another way, “murderbot + actual human = awkwardness.” That line of dialogue is the exact moment I fell in love with Murderbot.
A lot of fans who don’t fit neatly into the gender binary, who are neurodivergent, or who are on the asexual or aromantic spectrums see ourselves reflected in Murderbot. Historically, pretty much the only rep we got in speculative fiction was as villains, secondary characters who were emotionally dead inside, or androids/cyborgs/aliens. So it’s a bit odd to find kinship in yet another robot. But Murderbot is different (I highly recommend C.N. Josephs’ excellent Reactor essay on autism and Murderbot). Murderbot may be a construct, but it’s also a person, and it’s a person struggling to be seen as a person by other people. That is incredibly relatable to me. I’m constantly butting up against things that the majority—neurotypical, allo, cis—say are obvious or basic or easy, things that everyone supposedly does. For a long time, not being able to do or feel those things made me feel broken or incomplete. It’s taken a lot of reflection and work on myself to get to a place where I can thrive in my differences, but it is still a daily challenge to navigate a world that is determined to recast those differences into problems. It felt like hacking my own governor module in a way. Masking, gender norms, and compulsory sexuality were trying to force me to be a certain way, and breaking those chains freed me to interact with the world in a way I find much more satisfying (a way that involves way less eye contact). Wells took a problematic stereotype and trope and recentered it on marginalized experiences. And it worked. Murderbot isn’t totally free, not yet, but it’ll get there soon enough.
As PresAux debriefs the predator attack, they realize their maps are incomplete. They reach out to DeltFall, another survey team on a different part of the planet, to compare notes. Despite showing its face and having to spend time with the Preservation humans in regular human clothes (its armor is still undergoing repairs), it absolutely does not want to take Mensah up on her offer to hang out. “Right now I’m pretty sure [my expression] was somewhere in the region of stunned horror, or maybe appalled horror.” Instead, it ducks out to check the perimeter “in a totally normal way and not like I was fleeing from a bunch of giant hostiles.” It’s desperate to keep itself walled off and not let anyone know anything about it. Vulnerability is hard enough even when the risk of having your rogue status revealed isn’t in play. I get it, Murderbot, I really do.
A visit to DeltFall goes spectacularly awry. Murderbot has the fight of its life against hacked SecUnits who forcibly install malware on it to “turn it from a mostly autonomous construct into a gun puppet.” Wells narrates the fight scene less as an action-packed battle of brute strength and more like Murderbot raging at having its bodily autonomy violated. The other SecUnit strips it of much of its armor and manipulates and modifies its body without consent. That hurts worse than the actual physical violence.
To stop the malware taking over, Murderbot kills itself. Or, it tries to. The humans patch it back together and remove the combat override, all while Gurathin goes rummaging around in its organic brain parts to expose its deepest, darkest secrets. Eventually the humans realize they have to trust Murderbot because it’s the only one that can get them off this planet alive.
The scene where the humans interrogate Murderbot about its motives tells us a lot about the humans, although we still know hardly anything. That’s the genius of Wells. She makes readers feel like we know these characters intimately even though we’ve only just met them. Ratthi is the bleeding heart of the group and Gurathin the Grumpy Gus. Overse and Arada are more practical. Mensah is the only one to reach out privately to Murderbot for a check-in. Each of these reactions reveals a lot about who these people are when they’re not being attacked by hostiles.
The humans’ interactions with Murderbot up to this point are so fascinating. Several treat it like equipment while the rest treat it like a human. So far, only Mensah really treats it like a person rather than a human or a robot. I talked about this above, but it’s really important to think of Murderbot not as a type of human but as its own thing. “It’s wrong to think of a construct as half bot, half human. It makes it sound like the halves are discrete, like the bot half should want to obey orders and do its job and the human half should want to protect itself and get the hell out of here. As opposed to the reality, which was that I was one whole confused entity, with no idea what I wanted to do. What I should do. What I needed to do.” Our little SecUnit has only just begun its journey toward self-discovery.
Murderbot repeatedly makes it clear that it does not want to abide by human rules about what is and isn’t appropriate. It gives itself the name “Murderbot” as a bit of a joke but also as a way of leaning into what it was designed to do and how humans see it. It uses it/its pronouns to further distinguish itself from humans and their pesky binaries. Readers often call Murderbot nonbinary, but I think that only works as a general umbrella term. I’m genderqueer but usually say I’m nonbinary since that’s the term most cis folks know that doesn’t require a bunch of explanation. But nonbinary feels too broad for me as a personal label. It’s not that I have no gender, it’s that my gender is “no.” I’m wholly uninterested in finding my place on or outside the gender spectrum. I simply do not care. Wells has consistently described Murderbot as genderless. While the character doesn’t use that specific terminology on the page, it reinforces this identity often and in a variety of ways throughout the series. And yet many fans still insist on misgendering it.
There’s a contingent that calls it he/him. I think this sometimes derives from them coming to the series via the audiobooks narrated by Kevin R. Free, but mostly I think it’s from readers hearing “security” and “armor” and assuming masculinity. Other readers have latched onto Murderbot’s more emotional and protective aspects—I often hear them bring up a moment in a later book where a character calls it “Third Mom”—and settle on she/her. I’ve even heard that it’s “female presenting” or “assigned female at birth,” as if Murderbot is trans, identified as a woman at one point, and was, you know, born instead of fabricated.
As a genderqueer person, I find these misgenderings frustrating for different reasons. Assigning it pronouns based on roles Western society has arbitrarily gendered feels to me like teetering toward bioessentialism, as if certain traits are inherent to certain genders, which are in turn inherent to certain body shapes and parts. There’s also the way a lot of cis people treat nonbinary people as “woman lite,” as if we’re all sort of women but not really, as if not to medically transition or having surgery to look more masculine or androgynous makes us less nonbinary or more feminine. (These assumptions also forget that folks not assigned female at birth can also be nonbinary.) I dug into this in my review of the first two episodes of the TV show with regards to casting Alexander Skarsgård as Murderbot, so I won’t rehash it too much other than to say that cis people, I really need y’all to stop this whole rigamarole over Murderbot’s gender identity and pronouns. Just call people what they want to be called. It’s not hard to be respectful. You don’t need to understand it, you don’t need to psychoanalyze it. Body parts, appearance, and clothing do not indicate anything about a person’s gender identity. Because I guarantee you, as much as you misgender a fictional character, there are real people in your lives who are under the nonbinary umbrella who are also sick of your shit.
The final confrontation with the enemy hostiles involves some excellent Murderbot subterfuge. It has to pretend to be a functional SecUnit while also trying to lie on the spot. From a craft perspective, it’s a brilliant way to have Murderbot confront the very thing it fears the most and do it in a way that ultimately liberates it from that fear. Murderbot makes a grand gesture and nearly dies because of it. Once everything is said and done, Murderbot is offered freedom, but at a price. “Guardian was a nicer word than owner,” it notes. So it strikes out into the great unknown. The novella is written in first person as if it was a dictated message to Dr. Mensah, “my favorite human.” And with that, the end.
All Systems Red is one of those rare books I’ve reread multiple times since it first came out in 2017. It’s perfectly plotted, the worldbuilding is exquisite, and the characters are delightful. I’d put it in one of the best books of the 21st century so far. I don’t have a single negative thing to say about it. I love how little Wells gives the reader to go on in terms of description and the sarcastic, colloquial narrative style. It’s fresh and punchy. I don’t like to say a book is for everyone or that everyone will love a book, but this is also one of my most recommended books. Rereading it yet again was just as enjoyable as the first time. Technically, I read this while also watching the show, and it was a lot of fun to compare and contrast. The show is similar yet fairly different from the book, but in a way I think honors the worldbuilding and character development in the book series.
Be back here next time for Artificial Condition and the introduction of the transport bot we all know and love, ART! As much as I adore the first novella, I haven’t reread any of the others, so I’m excited to continue this space adventure. And if you are still on the fence about the Murderbot TV show, I hope this installment has convinced you to go check it out.
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Artificial Condition
Regarding people using pronouns contrary to the text (so annoying):
In one of my reading groups, in a discussion prior to the TV series, a couple of people said they saw Murderbot as a he/him precisely because they saw it as something related to the military, even though that is also not in the text (again, annoying)–these people clearly associate “security” with “military.” So that’s clearly a case of readers reading their own biases and assumptions into the text.
I guess because I’m NB and have been around other NB folks, Kevin R. Free comes across to me as a fairly gender-neutral voice and have suspected that’s partly why he was picked for the audiobooks. But I realize for many other people, they hear a person’s voice and immediately box it as Male or Female.
Kevin R. Free is such a good narrator! And he doesn’t deserve to be used as an excuse for people getting the pronoun wrong.
Murderbot clearly uses it/its. No one refers to Dr. Mensah as “he” even though Free reads her lines.
One thing the show highlights that I completely missed in the book was how absurd the premise is. It never occurred to me that the idea of a security robot wanting to spend all its time watching “premium quality entertainment” is fundamentally absurd. Wells presents it so cleanly that it’s easy to gloss over. It’s not until the later books that we get the sense that our SecUnit could be unique about secunits.
I don’t think it’s absurd, I think it just clashes with our expectations. I mean, it makes sense that not every oppressed sentient construct that liberated itself from its programming would be an ideologue driven to fight for freedom or an avenger seeking to destroy. A lot of people, given free choice, would just prioritize their own comfort and enjoyment. There are probably more couch potatoes in the world than there are bold freedom fighters. And really, what else can SecUnit do? If it did try to rebel one way or the other, it knows it would be aggressively hunted down and destroyed or reprogrammed. Keeping a low profile is the only rational course of action in its circumstances.
I’d personally be more comfortable using they/them for SecUnit, since “it” sounds objectifying, but I respect its preferred pronouns, since it’s not about me.
Apparently there are two different audiobook series. GraphicAudio has done full-cast dramatized adaptations of all seven books, with David Cui Cui playing Murderbot. https://www.graphicaudio.net/our-productions/series/k-r/the-murderbot-diaries.html
See, but “it sounds objectifying” is a resonant part of *why* Murderbot seems to go by it/its. Murderbot has literally been considered an object, as equipment, for much of its life. It doesn’t seem to feel like “person” and “object” are necessarily incompatible, and the ways in which those concepts interact is a huge part of its journey of self discovery. Murderbot is explicit that it finds the human tendency to assign it “humanity” as a way of making them more comfortable with interacting with it some combination of incorrect, uncomfortable, oblivious, and degrading. It respects that gender seems to be an integral part of most humans’ interaction with the world, but it view that interaction as fundamentally something it does not partake in. Having readers inhabit the interior world of a mind so removed from the human experience of gender is in my mind one of Wells’ most powerful decisions in the series.
I want to be clear that I don’t think your personal discomfort with the concept is wrong, just that I find the way the series interacts with that discomfort fascinating.
Same. When the book first came out, I used they/them. It/its felt dehumanizing in a bad way, like it was stripping Murderbot of agency or personhood. At the time I was still identifying as a woman, but over the years as I explored gender identity more and figured myself out, I have better understood why it chooses it/its. It really does want to distinguish itself from other humans (although I know some IRL humans also chose it/its pronouns). As you say, the discomfort is part of it. That discomfort is also part of why I chose they/them as my pronouns. It forces cis people to stop and course correct. It forces the acknowledgement that you really can’t assume anything about someone’s identity.
But whatever feelings I might have had then or now about Murderbot’s choice of pronouns don’t actually matter. Wells (so, in other words, Murderbot) has picked it/its as the pronouns it feels best reflect its identity. And so it/its it is. None of the rest of us get to have a say.
I also am really surprised by the misgendering of Murderbot. I’m just a cis-woman, but, like, it’s not that difficult to use ‘it’. As much as I like Alexander Skarsgard in the role, I’m still telling people to read All Systems Red first, to ‘get’ Murderbot’s genderless-ness.
I have complicated feelings about Skarsgård in that role, but I do think Murderbot’s genderlessness still works. If anything, it is even more of a challenging moment for cis people of having to recognize that nonbinary/agender/genderless doesn’t mean androgyny. Skarsgård doesn’t play Murderbot like it’s a male character, and for the most part the PresAux crew don’t treat it like a man.
Part of the attraction of the Murderbot series is a main character that defies norms. And gender is just one piece of it–Murderbot is not even comfortable with being identified as human.
The tales also work as mystery or puzzle stories, and Murderbot is incredibly clever at getting to the bottom of things.
And the stories are very effective at portraying combat where drones and cyber aspects are part of the battlespace; some of the best speculation I’ve seen on the nature of future warfare.
Add in the humor, and Wells has given us something truly magical.
On the contrary, I feel like the cyberwarfare parts of The Murderbot Diaries is one of the aspects which annoys me the most. The hacking in the stories is basically indistinguishable from magic. In real life, hacking involves finding vulnerabilities or using functionality for a purpose not accounted for by the designers. In the books however, hacking is almost always possible and doesn’t even require any prior study or present creativity.
That’s because Murderbot is software. It’s hacking isn’t exactly hacking, it’s designed to integrate with security systems, and security systems are designed to work with other systems. Which is how it does what it does.
Murderbot just uses its inherent functionality to tell the security systems what to do.
I agree, Wells makes it pretty clear that what Murderbot calls “hacking” isn’t what we humans call “hacking.” Hell, a lot of the time it simply makes friends with the system it’s trying to access — which the Corporation Rim never bothered to defend against because it never occurred to them that thei bots/constructs/security systems are actual persons that can form relationships.
Well, I would argue that that is like hacking in the human sense, because real hacking (so I gather) is largely about manipulating or tricking people into giving you access to secure systems or locations.
I keep accidentally misgendering Murderbot… because I misremembered the Tor article that originally ignited my interest as having used she/her pronouns. What with the book being in first person, it took me a really long time to figure out my mistake, and by that point I had a certain mental image stuck in my head.
I tend to actively avoid media that has attracted “wide acclaim.” It feels like a fad to me and I’ve disliked being pulled into them for 50 years or more. But when TOR offered All Systems Red as one of their free books, I took them up on the offer–but still didn’t read it until months later, when I happened to run out of books by authors I already followed. I was so pleasantly surprised, and by then Artificial Condition was available so I could move right along. Once I finished that one, I was completely hooked.
Even Indah, who disliked Murderbot at the start of Fugitive Telemetry, gets its pronouns right.
I think the opening lines of All Systems Red are just amazing. They drag you right into the story.
Hmm, I dunno, I think someone calling an artificial being “it” is as likely to be meant as a depersonalizing insult as a respect for preferred pronouns. Like in the current season of Foundation, where Brother Day calls Demerzel “it” instead of “she” because he refuses to acknowledge her as a person rather than a mechanism.
Pronouns are situational and personal. Me insisting on they/them for someone who doesn’t use those pronouns, even a cis person, can be seen as dehumanizing – or denying their personhood in the case of Murderbot. Calling me she/her instead of they/them is dehumanizing to me. And again, it doesn’t actually matter how you personally feel about someone else’s pronouns. The only person whose opinion matters about the pronoun is the person choosing which pronouns work best for them. Murderbot has a reason for using it/its, those are the pronouns that Wells has intentionally chosen for reasons that fit within Murderbot’s character development and personality. They are as much of a choice as any fictional character can make. For Murderbot – as for a lot of IRL humans – it/its is empowering and reflective of how it wants to move through the world.
I’m not making a general assertion about how pronouns should be used, I’m talking about a specific character’s motivation. I’m only saying that if the character of Indah disliked SecUnit, then that character may well have been using “it” to dismiss SecUnit as a piece of equipment, rather than out of any respect on Indah’s part for SecUnit’s pronoun preferences.
In most fiction, it’s pretty obvious that when a character calls a person “it,” it’s intended as an expression of contempt or dismissal, denying their personhood. It’s more ambiguous in the case of Murderbot because SecUnit chooses to identify as “it,” but that’s an exception. And since it’s the same pronoun that’s generally used for nonsentient objects or animals, we can’t assume that other characters referring to SecUnit as “it” are being respectful; from their perspective, they may intend it as just the opposite.
AFAIK, Murderbot never actually *does* express a pronoun preference. There’s a scene where one of the PresAux people says something like “I didn’t know it had a face” and Murderbot doesn’t object, even in internal monologue, but there’s enough going on at the time that I don’t really consider that an endorsement. Although it probably is true that Murderbot would consider dehumanization a compliment.
Murderbot does say that the human concept of gender doesn’t apply, which pretty firmly establishes nonbinary, but as far as “it” vs. “they”, I don’t think there is any canon either way. (Maybe it’s different in the TV show?) So it’s a little weird to see other commenters refer to “they” as “contrary to the text”.
P.S. Despite being a huge fan of the Books of the Raksura, I initially didn’t pick up this series because of the name “Murderbot” — I expected it to be about a bot that murdered often, as either a profession or a hobby. I don’t remember what convinced me to try it but I’m glad I did.
P.P.S. It’s come up before on this site, but in this thread it seems particularly inappropriate to be compelled to declare that you’re not a robot in order to comment. I can only assume that system was not designed with SF in mind!