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I'm a bit mystified by the hype for murderbot. I read it and thought it was OK but a lot of people rave about it. Still not every book is for every person, it didn't connect with me but it very obviously has its fans.
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I enjoyed the novella but also didn't feel like it did anything particularly new or interesting. I think a lot of people just relate to a snarky unwilling protagonist who would rather be watching TV.
I think that is a new and interesting protagonist tbh. So many are heros or have to develop into heroism. It’s refreshing to just have someone who explicitly doesn’t save the world or similar stakes.
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Murderbot is indeed somewhere between OK and good—personally I’m leaning towards good, but I wouldn’t compare it to a masterclass in short-form writing (like anything by Sheckley) or a longer piece you could debate for hours afterwards (like A Memory Called Empire , to give a recent example). It doesn’t try to be mind-numbingly flashy, it doesn’t proselytize, it just brings you to alien vistas to meditate on the natu…
A Memory Called Empire was so good! Seems like nobody has heard of it.
However, it shouldn't be surprising that it's little known to the type of crowd that Murderbot Diaries is likely to appeal to...perhaps even more so when audiobook is the preferred consumption format for such short novellas as many commenters here have expressed.
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My thought when I was reading it was that Murderbot is a stand in for people on the autism spectrum. This is an unusual viewpoint in literature and probably resonated with a lot of people in a similar situation. I personally liked the stories and will read the next installment when it comes out, but found myself gravitating more towards ART than Murderbot. If I had any quibbles it would be how the living people are u…
It seems to have a lot of resonance with trans people too. I'm autistic but there's enough overlap between the two groups that I've noticed how people in both communities react to the series.
I'm a man, so I went in with my prejudices and automatically assumed Murderbot is a "he". When reading a review that considered it a "she", I re-read most of it and there's no single indication of its gender, if Murderbot even assumes one.
I found that interesting, kind of like that trick Ursula K. Le Guin pulled when she didn't tell her readers Ged from Earthsea was dark skinned.
By the way, long scifi fan here, so I'm aware of the conventions of the genre.
- Murderbot is neither a "he" nor a "she". This isn't immediately obvious on a first read, and I initially assumed it was a "he", but there's absolutely zero indication of its gender. What I mean to say is that Murderbot is subtler than it seems at first... um, read.
- Women are in power as good characters and it's not something you're hit over the head. Pacifism/cooperativism is an actual option. The most intelligent character in the series is a woman, but again, this is not preachy nor does it seem like "it has an agenda". It's actually something you realize once you've read the first few novellas. It just happens.
- The action-oriented tech is pretty good actually, way above the low techno-babble bar set by Star Trek and similar. Martha Wells used to work in IT and it shows. While the tech is hand-wavy and not so detailed that it becomes boring (this is not a "nerd's paradise", which I actually approve of, because such things don't result in good literature), but communications, "the net", what's wired vs what's not wired, bandwidth, hacking, etc, all make sense in Murderbot. There's not a cringeworthy moment in sight.
- The action is good. It's not military porn [1] (I wouldn't classify this as military scifi) yet it's quite thrilling.
- The humor is excellent too. I loved the whole "I'd rather be streaming soap operas".
Is it the deepest scifi there is, exploring the most thought-provoking ideas? Well, no. But is it fun? Hell, YES. And that has to count for something -- smart, thrilling fiction that is not necessarily groundbreaking.
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[1] I hate this term and I hesitated about writing it down, but in the end decided most people will understand what I mean.
I haven't read the stories for many years now but for some reason both I and my wife assumed the bot would look female, and both of us were independently surprised to learn that the protagonist was cast as male in the upcoming series.
I wonder what Martha Wells thinks about this casting choice...
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They reminded me a lot of a sci-fi version of the classic action hero airport novel stuff like Jack Reacher or the Bourne books. Just a super competent hero who generally succeeds despite things being messy and chaotic.
Yeah, I think it's actually hard to write something that quick moving and action packed. It's perhaps a different skill then character development or world building or prose polishing, but it's how you get these books people blaze through. ( Now sometimes I blaze thru something and hate it at the end, but thats a different problem ... )
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I think Murderbot doesn't have a gender, so it'll probably be a pretty androgynous look anyway. I listened to Kevin R Free's fantastic narration, so maybe I would have expected a male actor, except that I do the aphantasia thing and never visualize anything from books to begin with!
Murderbot frequently blends into the crowd as a dude though, that's a recurring theme in the series.
Murderbot blends as a human. Can you remember a specific passage where it's a dude? It could be your brain playing tricks on you.
I'm a man and I'm guilty of assuming a male gender for characters where the text says "a guard", "a doctor", "a soldier", etc. When I was told some readers thought Murderbot was female, I re-read several passages and nowhere does Martha Wells state its gender either way (even by stating Murderbot passes for a man or woman).
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I'll say I've only read the first ... uh... three? four? novellas, and it's been many moons. I don't recall any point where having a female form would've been noteworthy. Not like a /Stomship Troopers/ shared shower moment or anything. Mainly I think we came up with that mindset immediately upon reading the first novella and never updated it.
It's entirely possible that there's never any point where "observed gender" is even implied and my mind just filled in some blanks when it talks about passing for human. To be honest I never gave it an ounce of thought before this whole conversation.
I'm pretty sure it's never stated it looks like either a man or a woman. I mean, if it can pass for human it must like either or at least androgynous, but Martha Wells never tells us which.
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I read the first three books of the Imperial Radh (Ancillary Justice) series and for all of the love they get online I found them rather dull. There's this fairly dramatic collapse of a galaxy spanning empire happening in the background while the protagonist frets over the level of offense she might cause at the tea party if she chooses to wear the more scandalous gloves. The last book gets a bit more into the fractu…
Definitely don't read the most recent one, Translation Space. It's some very bad "I like you but I don't know how to say it!" YA-vein tropes and the climactic scene is, essentially, people walking around a circular hallway a couple times. It was so bad it caused me to re-read the original three, and I realized that only the first was one was any good.
I feel like once you decide you don't like something, it's very easy to get reductionist about it in a way that makes it sound stupid or trite even if the reductionist statement is true. This summary to me is a quintessential example.
I liked the book alright, but certainly not enough to get into a debate about it. If you liked Leckie's other work, you'll probably find something to like here too, no matter your feelings on hallways. But maybe not!