MURDERBOT SAVES ANOTHER HUMAN -ME
It Took a Murderbot to Kill My Writer’s Block
An anxious, depressed, hypervigilant SecUnit saves stupid humans with exasperated devotion.
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“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. … As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.” — All Systems Red, Book One in The Murderbot Diaries series.
This series is a rollicking criticism of corporate capitalism and a tribute to the kindness of the best humans, and funny as hell. The high-quality choices of cover artist Jamie Jones and narrator Kevin Freed reflect the high standards and high quality of Marsha Wells’ writing. It will grab you and take you into Murderbot’s half-organic, half-constructed head from the beginnning. The books are binge-y, my favorite type of find, even if you are not traditionally into science fiction.
The first book in this series came out in 2017. Apple TV is working on a TV series production, due this year. I found the audiobook series about three weeks ago. Just in time for Murderbot to save me.
Some people really know how to write a title, and stories that entertain, empower and provide insight. Martha Wells does it all in this series, which you can read, old-school style, with those blocky bricks of stacked paper and ink. It might be worth it just for the cover art. But I chose the audiobook series, for head reasons I will explain in a minute.
In the audiobook series, Wells knocks it into outer space with a very human story of Murderbot, a Security Unit (SecUnit) that is rented to whoever has enough in hard currency cards to pay The Company. Its only purpose is to protect humans who have rented it, or die trying.
One day, because “The Company” is cheap and uses crappy, cheap materials, Murderbot (its private name) hacks the module The Company uses to control SecUnit. It uses that newfound freedom to construct a new life for itself. But it can’t seem to get out of the habit of protecting stupid humans, who are always trying to get themselves killed, or kill each other.
For three entire weeks I could not write. My normal process was not working. Like most anxiety-driven writers, the fact that I had writer’s block made me more anxious. I was in an anxiety spiral that I couldn’t shake. The anxiety dumped me over a cliff of paralyzing depression.
It had been coming on for months. I tried forcing myself to get at least one piece up on Medium each week. I failed. That I couldn’t put together a solid piece, one up to my own standards, made me even more anxious, with added doses of guilt and self-recrimination.
Ugh.
Writing for me is like, I have to do it, or I lose my balance. My problem is not what to write about, but which topic to focus on. If you follow me, you know that I have been focused on our fight for democracy and the shitshow that is The Former Guy. I feel that is the least I can do for the country I love so much and am so proud of.
But in researching and writing these pieces, I accidentally overdosed.
The torrent of news around the felonious shoe hustler and would-be authoritarian and the alt-right MAGA media and crooks supporting this lifetime criminal; the paid and unpaid cult crowds he drags around with him; the cheap “mirror propaganda” — okay, Hector Projector — the stirring up of hate and violence; the revelations of Justice Thomas’s shameless bribe-taking and Alito and his crazy-ass wife and the billionaires who are buying rulings to strip us of our rights…
But, and especially the media frenzy that has been a repeat of the toxic media saturation from 2016 and 2020 that forces us to hear that hectoring, bullying, aggrieved, gravelly voice all day, every day. And forces us to see that Neanderthal walk and that schlumpy, manspreading sit with his sweaty, limp hands hanging between them, breathing through his mouth; the caked-on makeup and all the hatred and whining and rambly babbly, and people treating him as a serious candidate…Whew!
I collapsed. I had overdosed. I became paralyzingly depressed and stomach-twistingly anxious.
Then a Murderbot came along to save me.
For three weeks I took notes, researched and tried to write just one stinking article, only to give up literally mid-sentence and slam down my laptop lid, giving it filthy looks, then crawling back into bed. Fuck you, laptop! My “performance level” was somewhere under 10%.
Not good.
That I didn’t get through this with aid of a bottle of room-temperature whiskey on my bedside table is a testament to a good -no, great-therapist who will move up my appointments to twice the normal schedule when I am in crisis. She is retired now, and disconnected from “companies.” She curated me into her “feed.” God bless her. She knows that putting out my writing is a direct barometer of the state of my anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress episodes. Nobody really talks about “current traumatic stress” but with a daughter who has a terminal disease, it is the baseline emotion for everything else that bursts out of my newsfeed that can ratchet up all of my negative emotions.
The series is funny, fast-paced — a perfect balance of storyline pace and razor-sharp dialogue, especially if you like snark and sarcasm (and if you do, hit that “follow” button.)
Wells brings you into the worlds of abandoned terraforming planets, the people abandoned on them, research crews, and illegal alien artifact mining funneled to the blackest of black markets — and through hazardous space journeys on the way. But action happens right away, and with sudden, frequent threats that Murderbot must solve on the fly.
She does it without dragging you down into paragraphs of dull world-building, which, to be honest, most fantasy and sci-fi writers do an absolute crap job of, bombing readers with long-winded, boring descriptions, and names of things and people that have no connection to actual human words. Wells’ writing is crisp and clean; snarky, witty and warm. She lets her readers visualize for themselves.
Another thing Wells does, that almost nobody in science fiction does, is make her characters not-binary — that is, most of the “bad guys” are both evil and somewhat sympathetic, themselves controlled by companies and bandits, and Murderbot does its best not to protect its humans by simply killing the bad guys -or bots.
Wells, in one interview, reveals that she made up her stories as she went along. The standard practice that every writer is taught — to build an outline, present a conflict, then sub-conflicts, then solve them before they write the story is not for Wells -or Murderbot. It does its job “half-assed,” it laments, and must make up for it with instant response. But again, Murderbot hates to be bored. Wells just freewheels — she brings in a crisis, and leaves SecUnit to solve it. What will SecUnit create on the fly to counter this new, sudden threat?
Spoiler Alert: Murderbot — SecUnit — gets nearly deleted in Exit Strategy. It has spread itself too thin. When it begins to recover its memory, its humans, the ones it nearly killed itself saving, are all around him. It begins to recognize them.
It brought me back to when my daughter woke up after nearly three months in a coma.
In the first-person, or in this case first-person/bot construct, Wells’ SecUnit’s sarcastic inner monologue as it “comes back online,” meshing with its remarks to its humans is a key feature that makes Wells’ series so funny — and so human.
…That was Gurathin. I don’t like him.
“I don’t like you.”
“I know.”
He sounded like he thought it was funny. “That is not funny.”
“I’m going to mark your cognition level at fifty-five percent.”
“Fuck you.”
“Let’s make that sixty percent.” — From Exit Strategy
I am not a writer who likes to wallow in cynicism and bad news. I want to be happy, dammit, and with you-know-who lurking behind every fucking bit of my newsfeed was…well, just stupid. Who curated my newsfeed, if not me? No, it was me. I can’t blame the algorithm. I subscribed to all of it. I did it on purpose. Of my favorite feeds, only four are non-political. Dumb. Galactically stupid.
I knew I had to disconnect from the news, but really, who could do that until at least the verdict for the Fraudfather was in? 34 guilty counts. Yay! Finally, I thought. This will turn the tide and I can ease up a little.
BUT, when I was finally ready to take a break, my phone would pop up with new headlines from newspapers I subscribe to; a new episode of a news show I follow; a podcast I follow, with “jaw-dropping” headlines, or a newsletter in my email box. I have over 3,000 emails in my inbox that I need to get to, lurking there like a smoke alarm with a dying battery, beeping, as SecUnit puts it, “sadly.” Really, CJ?
Maybe I would just peek a little to see what was new. I would just peek. Just a little…Another phone call to my therapist.
Another in the audiobook series. I listened, then re-listened. There are only five in the series, but I was recovering, slowly. I was getting real sleep, not exhausted periods of mental collapse. Wake up, rewind.
SecUnit has the supercomputer power to monitor dozens of “feeds” at once — browsing through archives to get more data; threat assessment reports; security drone feeds; the bot-pilot feeds of the ships it befriends; maintenance feeds; landing station feeds; “news bursts”; entertainment feeds; the feeds of the private and group feeds of the humans he is protecting -or fighting; hacking into “system hubs.” Yet, even in the middle of combat, SecUnit might pull in an “entertainment feed” to bolster its strength. Which is an absolutely brilliant author’s device, just saying.
SecUnit is built to monitor multiple threats and security issues at all times, with multiple, endless feeds of data. It is a perfect illustration of post-trauma hypervigilance and too much busyness in this new AI-driven world. Murderbot is built to do this.
I am not. I built my own toxic “feed” and just about deleted myself. I needed to find balance.
Kevin Freed’s narration is unhurried, perfectly timed and paced, using pauses in the same way painters use space to enhance an art piece. He shows his SAG/AFTRA acting chops, using hesitation and snark in just the way Wells intended.
I needed mind candy.
And I needed to close my eyes so I would not see the nagging pop-ups. I needed a not-genre-mill, mass-produced audiobook. I needed an immersive, binge-inducing, take-me-away-from-the-swamp-in-my-head kind of audiobook. Without distracting and badly sound-balanced music and sound effects. The kind you hit the “Do Not Disturb” button to listen to, with someone who is good at reading stories, reading the story.
Murderbot Diaries. Who could resist that title? I listened. Wow, cool, good, I’m in. When I grokked it was a series, I backtracked back to Book One, All Systems Red, then listened to each book in the series.
Within minutes, I found a kindred spirit in SecUnit, self-named “Murderbot” — a hypervigilant, human-phobic, paranoid, half-organic, half-computer, armed and very human “construct” who is bitingly sarcastic, rolling his metaphorical eyes at the stupid humans who are always trying to get themselves killed, while being unable to shake the habit of protecting them.
SecUnit, I can relate. I was finally able to reboot.
