First published as a subscriber essay in January 2024.
How Murderbot copes with the real world through the fictional, and so do we.
Spoiler warning!
There are spoilers for ALL books in The Murderbot Diaries in this essay! [Ed: excluding Platform Decay]
ALL OF THEM.
If you’re not up to date and don’t want to be spoiled, go finish them and then come back to me.
But for now… consider yourself warned.
In two days, as I write this, I’m getting on a plane to visit Japan for the first time since the pandemic began. I’m drowning in deadlines and haven’t started to pack, but all I seem to be able to do is rewatch the second season of Good Omens. Two years and a few months ago, I was getting ready to relocate from Sydney to Brisbane to start a PhD. That time, my binge re-read was The Lord of the Rings. A year and a bit before that (give or take), when I was getting ready to move to Japan to teach English, I rewatched every episode of every season of Lucifer, start to finish.
Each of these moments were exciting, but nerve-wracking. Right now, I’m worried about how different post-pandemic Japan might be compared to when I was living there. I left in a hurry in mid-2020 and that part of my life feels unfinished. What will it be like to be back?
Basically, I’m anxious. Binge re-watching or re-reading is my coping mechanism. My already-established love of the story recharges my battery, and knowing the ending helps soothe the nerves. There will be no surprises, good or bad, to jolt an already overactive emotional response. There will be enjoyment, simple and grounding. And, feeling more stable as a result, I will be ready to face the instability to come.
This is something Murderbot and I have in common, and part of why The Murderbot Diaries are high on the list of my cathartic re-reads. I hope, given the spoiler warnings, that if you’ve read this far you’re already familiar with Martha Wells’s series of novel(la)s, but in case you need a recap: The Murderbot Diaries follows a part machine, part organic security unit (SecUnit) which has hacked its governor module, meaning it’s no longer forced to obey its clients. However, rather than start murdering everyone as you might expect from a ‘heartless killing machine’ (its term, not mine), it spends its time watching and re-watching soap operas. It would really rather be left alone with its shows, and tries very hard not to care about the humans it’s protecting… but things never seem to work out that way.
Just as Murderbot copes with its real world and the people in it by repeatedly binging media, I do the same by immersing myself in its world, among many. So let’s examine what The Murderbot Diaries tells us about the way storyworlds can provide context to help us understand — and cope with — the ‘real’ world, and ourselves.
Sympathy for the Heartless Killing Machine
‘I don’t want anyone to tell me what I want, or make decisions for me. That’s why I left you, Dr. Mensah, my favourite human’ (All Systems Red 149)
This is the ending of All Systems Red and every time I read it I start to cry. Yes, even right now. Not only because of the sweet contradiction of a self-titled ‘heartless killing machine’ explaining itself to Mensah, its ‘favourite human’, and hoping she’ll understand. Not only because Murderbot has been treated terribly by humans up until this point — and yet, where Mensah is concerned, it has chosen to care. But because even though Mensah gives Murderbot the opportunity to have what we assume everyone wants — a home, a family, a way to be humanised after an existence of being treated like a thing — this is not what it chooses.
I have never chosen what everyone tells me I should want, either. The ‘2.5 kids and white picket fence’ idea the world seems intent to foist on me is intensely, physically, anathema. I feel constantly pressured to explain myself, to justify my (apparently) anomalous existence to the people around me (such as the co-worker who told me I must have been abused as a child because I’d chosen not to have them myself). Even the plots of the books or the shows I love seem to conspire — the number of characters who give up something magical for the ‘adventure’ of settling down boggles me.
This, then, is why the end of All Systems Red makes me cry. Not because it’s sad. But because in it, I feel seen.
Storytelling excels at creating empathy with characters (Keen; Petraschka). While ‘persons exist, characters do not’ (Petraschka 227), as readers we can nonetheless become as invested in the fate of characters as the people in our lives. One of the strengths of fiction is to extend this empathy to characters whose lives, experiences, and ways of being are entirely different to our own. As Martha Wells herself says,
it’s one of the most important uses of fiction, to try to engender empathy and understanding for people in situations that are not things the reader has ever encountered (Jennings)
Generating empathy for nonhuman characters, however, can present a challenge, because ‘one of the essential requirements for character identification is a certain humanness’ (James 581).
Murderbot is not only nonhuman, it actively resists any attempt to humanise it. Wells has stated that:
I wanted to write about 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 (Wells, Subterranean)
It doesn’t react the way everyone around it assumes it should, and it makes choices even the humans closest to it don’t understand. As the series progresses Murderbot does, however, realise ‘that even though it’s not human, it’s still a person’ (Josephs) and in granting Murderbot this personhood, without forcing upon it a certain humanness, Wells normalises this difference. She makes it okay to be the way you are, even if that’s different from what everyone else expects or wants.
Wells has reflected on her own experience with anxiety, depression and undiagnosed developmental disorders and the roles they played in the writing of Murderbot:
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 (Wells, Subterranean)
She goes on to say that ‘books, but also TV and Star Wars had probably saved my life as a kid’ (Wells, Subterranean). My own reaction to Murderbot is a sense of relief, a direct result of seeing my own emotional responses being played out by this character. From wishing I could sit in a cargo hold rather than talk about my feelings, to leaning on my favourite books and TV shows in times of stress, I cannot help but see myself ‘in its skin’ (Sheehan).
WorldHoppers and Sanctuary Moon
So we watched WorldHoppers. It didn’t complain about the lack of realism. After three episodes, it got agitated whenever a major character was killed. When a major character died in the twentieth episode I had to pause seven minutes while it sat there in the feed doing the bot equivalent of staring at a wall, pretending that it had to run diagnostics. Then four episodes later the character came back to life and it was so relieved we had to watch that episode three times before it would go on’(Artificial Condition 29)
I tried to cut down the quote above but it’s impossible, because ART’s reaction to WorldHoppers, which it is watching with Murderbot in this scene, is one of the most relatable passages I’ve ever read. (ART being Murderbot’s nickname for the self-aware research vessel Perihelion, and stands for Asshole Research Transport). I, too, have rewatched key episodes of my favourite shows to reassure myself that yes, that event that brought me so much joy or relief really did happen. I didn’t imagine it. Everything’s okay.
Murderbot’s media of choice is the sexy-space-colony-legal-drama The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon (except Murderbot skips all the sexy parts). It’s the show it goes back to time and again. It makes Murderbot ‘feel like a person’ (Exit Strategy 115), provides context for the emotions it had never been taught to process, and keeps it company ‘without having to interact’ (Exit Strategy 116). It’s a comfort blanket — in Artificial Condition, ART plays the soundtrack of Sanctuary Moon when Murderbot needs help to calm down (125) — and also a model. It gives Murderbot a way to understand its own feelings by experiencing those of the characters, helping the SecUnit build a vocabulary it was never programmed with.
And then it meets ART, and as Sanctuary Moon helps Murderbot become itself, WorldHoppers helps the two of them become friends. They start from a position of mistrust, but through the experience of sharing media a kind of understanding and companionship grows. ART doesn’t have organic parts, unlike Murderbot who has human bits in its hybrid brain. Where Murderbot learned about its emotions through Sanctuary Moon, ART learns to process its bot-version of emotion through engaging with Murderbot’s responses to the media. Murderbot templates for ART the way Sanctuary Moon did for it. It brings them closer to each other, but also closer to understanding themselves.
This is the power and the joy of ‘media’ — the books, movies, podcasts, games, and TV shows (etc.) that we love. We gain just as much when we experience stories on an individual level as we do when they are shared, and these gains are complementary. I’m happy immersing in Murderbot on my own. I get a sense of release from identifying with the characters; I enjoy the action set-pieces and revel in Murderbot’s sarcastic voice; and the writerly part of me can’t help leaning back to appreciate the craft of the thing. But I’m equally thrilled to have converted friends into fans — shout out to Amanda who, after I read the first chapter out loud during a writing retreat, proceeded to burn through all the books and is now as nerdy about it as the rest of us. Being able to discuss Murderbot with her has helped me deepen my own thoughts about the story, adding layers I couldn’t come to on my own.
Immersing in the world of Murderbot, as well as discussing it with fellow readers, has added to my own emotional templates and vocabulary. As all stories do.
Just tell the story
Bharadwaj had said that was what I’d done with Sanctuary Moon: I’d used it to reconfigure the organic part of my brain (System Collapse 161)
Media, for Murderbot, ‘becomes a means of making sense of the emotions it is starting to experience’ (Kania 218). It better understands itself, the world around it and those who inhabit it, through the stories it consumes. Sharing the media experience with Murderbot not only enables a similar self-understanding in ART, but their mutual enjoyment forms the building blocks of their friendship. There’s a reason ART uses a clip from WorldHoppers to communicate with Murderbot when the latter needs help (Network Effect 123) — the story connects them.
So, too, have I leaned on stories like The Murderbot Diaries to give myself permission to accept that it’s okay to feel the way I feel or make the choices I have made — despite disapproval from the outside world. Murderbot has provided me with outlets that I didn’t know I needed. When, in uncomfortable situations, I think to myself ‘Murderbot would look at the wall right now, I wish I could look at the wall right now’, or ‘god I wish I could be watching this whole thing through a drone’ I’m filtering those situations through a fictional lens that alleviates some of my unease.
Throughout the Diaries Murderbot consumes a considerable amount of media. In System Collapse, however, it works closely with ART and its humans to create media of its own. It tells its own story. Ostensibly, this is to stop a group of colonists from making a terrible mistake — they’re disconnected from the Corporation Rim and don’t understand the kind of slavery they are about to sign themselves up for, until Murderbot’s story helps them see the truth of the situation. But it does more than that. Telling its story helps Murderbot process and deal with the traumatic events of Network Effect.
Wells has commented on how research and personal experience both played a role in the representation of Murderbot’s trauma:
I’ve also dealt with things of my own that have made me think a lot about emotional trauma and all the repercussions of it. It affects everything I write. I also do a lot of research on it, listening to people talk about their own experiences (Jennings)
In System Collapse Murderbot is plagued by panic attacks and increasingly intrusive flashbacks which undermine its performance and ramp up its anxiety:
Whatever caused the false memory to spontaneously appear out of fucking nowhere, it had made my performance reliability drop so quickly that I shut down, variously upsetting and freaking the humans out…it was like what happened when a human had a flashback (System Collapse 100)
It tries not to think about these moments, [redacting] them and all references to them until the situation triggers the ‘false memory’, potentially putting it and its humans in danger and forcing Murderbot to confront the issue. Merely acknowledging the problem, however, doesn’t stop the flashbacks from bleeding into its processes. It isn’t until it tells its story, as part of the broader narrative of ‘what would happen to [the colonists] if they said yes to Barish-Estranza’ (161), that it begins to heal. The signs that it’s coming out the other side include swearing at ART again, but also that it doesn’t require Sanctuary Moon quite so much: ‘It was comforting, right, but I was really in the mood for something new. I hadn’t wanted to watch anything new since my stupid memory incident’ (172).
It’s important to note that the story Murderbot tells the colonists through the media it creates is, in its own words, ‘not my story’ and ‘fiction’ (161). Despite this, the process of telling is still deeply cathartic. For me, this mirrors the power in fiction (and especially speculative fiction) to use metaphor and cognitive estrangement to help us work through difficult feelings or experiences by first taking a step back from them. Here, I’m using Darko Suvin’s definition of ‘SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement’ (15) in that we ‘transport ourselves to the other world (estrangement) so that we can better think about this one (cognition)’ (xxi).
The Murderbot Diaries are evidently fiction, and not my story, but reading and immersing in them is deeply cathartic for me. My personal creative practice also works this way — stories about space walks or haunted houses are actually ways in which I test the depths of my feelings or daub Betadine on a metaphorical wound. Because ‘good science fiction is neither an escape from reality nor a description of it’ (Nodelman 24) it enables a space in between. A position of distance that softens the emotion and makes it, for a time, ‘safe’ — not reduced, not ignored, but rather othered in a way that turns it from something enormous and terrifying and impossible to cope with to something enormous and terrifying but manageable. An airless void can be traversed, a ghost can be exorcised and a governor module can be hacked. Those feelings don’t go away, back here in the real world. Of course they don’t. But once we return from our storyworlds we do so equipped with the strength to deal with them and, I’d also say, we don’t come back alone. The characters we meet there return with us. And bring their drones.
Conclusion
‘The kind of fiction that was true in all the ways that mattered’ (System Collapse 161)
Murderbot’s arc begins with the realisation, in All Systems Red, that even if some humans are nice and it likes them, it still doesn’t want to be one, or be told what to do by them. Over the course of Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy and Fugitive Telemetry, it makes friends both human and construct, and begins the slow journey towards discovering what it actually wants. Who it actually is. In Network Effect those friends come together and put everything on the line to save Murderbot’s life. (It’s still not sure how to deal with that.) This emotional arc ends, for now, with System Collapse. Murderbot, struggling with its trauma, tells its story to save the colonists and actually ends up healing itself.
There is power in story to help others and to help ourselves. They can be a comfort in times of stress, or provide a map to help us navigate our own feelings. Through stories we connect to others — both characters, friends, and fellow fans. Stories, and their ‘nice safe emotions’, deliver us space to deal with trauma we might not be able to confront head on, while simultaneously compressing the distance between our experiences and those of others.
All of which is really just to say — the stories, worlds, and characters we love are a gift. A joy. Whether we’re reading them for the first time or binge-rewatching for the [redacted]th time, they’re giving us tools and companionship to help us navigate our way through our lives in the outside world. And they’re a lot of fun in the process.
Joanne Anderton is an award-winning writer of speculative fiction, children’s books and creative nonfiction. Her most recent short story collections are Inanimates: Tales of Everyday Fear and The Art of Broken Things. She’s currently undertaking a PhD in creative writing at the University of Queensland, where she's attempting to use speculative fiction to write memoir and having far too much fun in the process. You can find her at joanneanderton.com.
Reference List
Bourke, Liz. “Murderbot’s Inconvenient Emotions: Exit Strategy by Martha Wells.” Tor.com, 2 Oct. 2018, www.tor.com/2018/10/02/book-reviews-exit-strategy-by-martha-wells/.
James, Erin. “Nonhuman Fictional Characters and the Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis.” Poetics Today, vol. 40, no. 3, Sept. 2019, pp. 579–96.
Jennings, Kelly. “OUT OF TRAUMA: Martha Wells in Conversation with Kelly Jennings.” IZ Digital, 2023, interzone.digital/out-of-trauma/.
Josephs, C. N. “Murderbot: An Autistic-Coded Robot Done Right.”’ Tor.com, 21 June 2022, www.tor.com/2022/06/21/murderbot-an-autistic-coded-robot-done-right/.
Kania, Elsa B. “Musings on the Murderbot.” To Boldly Go: Leadership, Strategy, and Conflict in the 21st Century and Beyond, edited by Jonathan P. Klug and Stephen J. Leonard, Casemate, 2021, Chapter 29.
Keen, Suzanne. 2006. “A Theory of Narrative Empathy,” Narrative 14: 207 – 36.
Nodelman, Perry. “The Cognitive Estrangement of Darko Suvin.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 4, 1981, pp. 24–27.
Sheehan, Jason. “Sulky, Cynical “Murderbot” Is One of Sci-Fi’s Most Human Characters.” NPR, 27 Jan. 2019. www.npr.org/2019/01/27/688354123/sulky-cynical-murderbot-is-one-of-sci-fis-most-human-characters.
Suvin, Darko and Gerry Canavan. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. Oxford, United Kingdom: Peter Lang Verlag, 2016.
Tamagawa, Emiko. “‘Murderbot’ Is Not Your Typical AI.” Wbur: Here & Now, 11 May 2021 https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/05/11/murderbot-diaries-martha-wells.
Thomson, Jessica. “Surviving the Corporate Galaxy: An Interview with Martha Wells." Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship, 2 July 2020, brookfieldinstitute.ca/surviving-the-corporate-galaxy-an-interview-with-martha-wells/.
Wells, Martha. All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries Book 1). Tordotcom, 2017.
Wells, Martha. Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries Book 2). Tordotcom, 2018.
Wells, Martha. Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries Book 3). Tordotcom, 2018.
Wells, Martha. Exit Strategy (The Murderbot Diaries Book 4). Tordotcom, 2018.
Wells, Martha. Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries Book 5). Tordotcom, 2020.
Wells, Martha. Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries Book 6). Tordotcom, 2021.
Wells, Martha. System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries Book 7). Tordotcom, 2023.
Wells, Martha. “Introduction to the Subterranean Edition of The Murderbot Diaries.” Marthawells, 21 Oct 2021, marthawells.dreamwidth.org/564808.html.