#and SecUnit losing its shit when it thinks something happened to ART

[elkian]

A couple months ago I was having a conversation with my mother about books and mentioned The Murderbot Diaries, and she was surprised because she doesn't usually hear me talk about reading sci-fi. I'd never thought about it that way but I can kinda see why she said that, and it made me realize something about why I like Murderbot and Martha Wells' writing so much.

I think part of the reason fantasy is my primary genre is because it requires the least amount of prerequisite knowledge to get into. Every 'verse is going to have a different way of doing magic, even if it's similar to another's, and it's impossible to know that going in.

I think I have some experiences with sci-fi that tried too hard to be "realistic" and required the reader to either know, or be willing to read, a lot about physics and rocket science and so on before actually getting into the story. Obviously this isn't a sweeping statement one way or another, but I think it put me off of reading a lot of sci-fi because it sounded like homework, basically. And I think also it tended to be a little dry in an effort to sound 'mature' - this isn't your comic book science, this is REAL SCIENCE for SERIOUS readers.

Murderbot, by contrast, is incredibly accessible to the average reader. This is because Martha Wells understands what's important to the story: TMD doesn't go into the granular mechanics of FTL travel because Murderbot itself has the baseline amount of necessary colloquial knowledge (you go into a wormhole, stuff happens, you absolutely do not want to leave the ship while in the wormhole) and moves on. 

Murderbot having the shittiest, cheapest educational downloads possible isn't just convenient to handwave nitty-gritty worldbuilding, but it is crucial to Murderbot's personality and characterization. Murderbot -all SecUnits, or at least Company SecUnits, according to Murderbot's notably unreliable narration- doesn't know shit because it was made by cheapskates to be rented to cheapskates and potentially trashed during the rental period. And there's good in-universe reason for the Company to avoid granting unnecessary knowledge to its products - just look at what Murderbot accomplished with its bare-minimum education.

(Sidenote: this concept comes up in the IDW Transformers comics, specifically More Than Meets The Eye and Lost Light, with MTOs starting with major education downloads and that slowly transitioning to them getting the bare minimum as the war raged on and they became more and more apparently expendable.)

Anyways, it's refreshing to read when the author understands what kind of knowledge is actually important to the story. If the whole thing was, for instance, from ART's perspective, the knowledge available would be different due to ART's much greater personal library of scholastic knowledge and general know-it-all personality. Murderbot, by contrast, can get away with lines like "it's an anagram (not an anagram, the other thing)" and terms like "feed device" and "fauna", which leaves the world much more ambiguous to the reader -allowing the imagination to play- and highlighting that which is and isn't important. Murderbot is an action hero in the narrative most of the time, and the writing reflects that.

(Thinking of sci-fi I did read and get into and enjoy, it's a lot of stuff like this - Mary Shelley's Frankenstein*, HG Well's Time Machine, and Isaac Asimov's I, Robot come to mind, and most of them handwaved the specific scientific elements in service of actually telling the story; the last kind of used the scientific elements to tell the story, but presented them in a way that was easy to understand and get into. Honorable mentions go to arguably Gideon the Ninth (idk if it's a scifi but it's scifi-adjacent at the least), Iron Widow, and This Is How You Lose The Time War, which all have scifi elements that are easy to absorb one way or another due to the narration.)

*I read this for class and let me tell you, if I could go back in time and beat Percy Shelley to death with a shoe before he suggested all his stupid unabridgements I would do it in a fucking heartbeat, that was the only real problem I had with reading it.

[alyssalikestoreadbooks]

System Collapse - Martha Wells

"Am I making it worse? I think I'm making it worse.

Everyone's favorite lethal SecUnit is back.

Following the events in Network Effect, the Barish-Estranza corporation has sent rescue ships to a newly-colonized planet in peril, as well as additional SecUnits. But if there’s an ethical corporation out there, Murderbot has yet to find it, and if Barish-Estranza can’t have the planet, they’re sure as hell not leaving without something. If that something just happens to be an entire colony of humans, well, a free workforce is a decent runner-up prize.

But there’s something wrong with Murderbot; it isn’t running within normal operational parameters. ART’s crew and the humans from Preservation are doing everything they can to protect the colonists, but with Barish-Estranza’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams, they’re going to have to hope Murderbot figures out what’s wrong with itself, and fast.

Yeah, this plan is... not going to work."

Read Date - May 18th, 2025

Length - 256 Pages

Genre - Novella, Sci-Fi, Fantasy

Rating - 8/10

Stars - ★★★★☆

Notes - seeing MurderBot and ART interacting so casually again is just beautiful to me. i love them together so much, they're my favorite duo. just the way they CARE for each other. ART actively telling MB "take care of my humans....and yourself" because MB isn't considered property in any aspect of the word anymore? so much has changed?? it's just mind blowing i can't believe we've progressed this far. the talks of a secret society living underground is really cool and hasn't really been explored before in this series. i LOVE all the mentions of "redacted" bits because i just KNOW something fucked up is about to happen. last time something got redacted from MurderBot it ended up, you know, murdering a bunch of people. it was crazy! the reveal that redacted was a system shutdown that happened because of a falsified memory is interesting as fuuuuuuck..... its referred to as a moment as a flashback, and honestly i find that intriguing as all hell because as mentioned in the book, we dont KNOW how secunits respond to trauma. MurderBot getting in contact with AnaCol and finding out they have 22 humans and their own SecUnit?? So there IS an undergound society of sorts????? was NOOOOOT expecting this. i thought it'd be like the aliens where its all made up garbo but no! these little shits actually exist. hearing how MurderBot speaks about Three is SO endearing to me. it's like his kid, exactly like Arada said it'd be, and at the same time it's entirely different because MB doesn't know how to nurture a being properly. that's why Three has the entire crew to help look after it and allow it to make it's own decisions, like an adult has to do with their child growing up. guide them, but allow them to prosper on their own. this is def NAWT the point of chapter 7, but all i could focus on was that apparently Amena was playing with MB's hair to make it fluffier to "make it feel better" and that is just so domestic and cute?? like MB once feared becoming a pet robot and dear friend it is not a pet but instead family. i love this little fucker so much. MurderBot wanting to save these humans it doesnt know is so sweet. it's adapted so much through the time it's spent with it's different crews, and it's really starting to value human life more (despite talking about murdering them all the time lol). the team (mainly ART and MB) making their own media to send to the society was SO NEATO. i would KILL for the ability to just curate my daydreams into tv shows but i cant! MurderBot can literally just MAKE TV SHOWS. im CRYING over that. SO UNFAIR. the scene where MurderBot is fighting, loses it's weapon, and wraps itself AROUND THE OTHER SECUNITS FACE??? IMMMM SOOOO WEAAAKKKK OH MY GODDDDD. IT IS SO PERFECT I LOVE IT SO MUCH. when i said the fight scenes were my favorite parts of this book i MEANT IT! the BE shuttle attacking everyone and there being two was just unexpected for me. i'm glad they fleed. MurderBot taking over flying the ship for ART while it's damaged, again, is very domestic. i mean, cmon!! ART is transportation. MB is helping it do it's entire job, it's entire function, it's purpose. it's honestly just really sweet. MurderBot finally PROCESSING AN EMOTION?? CATHERTIC?? AMAZING!! SO PROUD OF IT!! It also talking about basically going to therapy? and choosing to stay with ART and it's crew? idk i just find the growth of the characters SO AMAZING AND BEAUTIFUL AND I CANNOT GET OVER THIS SERIES HOLLLLYYY MOLLLLLYY.