I have a bunch of things in my drafts that I ought to push out, but what’s on my mind right now is Murderbot.
Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries are a melange of novellas, short stories, and a couple of novels, soon to be an Apple TV series, about an entity we can perfectly well call a cyborg; it is a SecUnit, short for Security Unit, and goes by SecUnit, except when it’s mad at itself and calls itself Murderbot. Its pronouns are it/it/its. SecUnit is unusual among SecUnits in that it has “hacked its governor module,” meaning that it is autonomous rather than bound to the commands of its corporate enslavers — as other SecUnits, cyborgs, and robots are. The Murderbot Diaries are, very roughly, the stories of SecUnit’s liberation and its subsequent work to liberate other nonhuman intelligences (and arguably some human ones) from corporate domination. This work involves a lot of ass-kicking, because SecUnit is a very effective ass-kicker and corporations don’t like letting go of their stuff.
This is all a reasonable summary of what the books are and a very thin picture of what they are like. What they are is — or feels to me, anyway, like — an almost deliberately generic corporate future; the bad trends of 21st-century American capitalism have more or less continued and stretched into space, all the horrible things are done by companies with forgettable hyphenated names like “Barish-Estranza,” and SecUnit’s faced with the problems you’d expect in this future: How can I stay safe and keep a low profile, how can I help other intelligences in positions like mine? The people SecUnit relates to are a melange of multicultural names who aren’t really individuated by personality until pretty late in the series. There honestly isn’t a lot to grab onto in terms of the worldbuilding.
What makes Murderbot remarkable is SecUnit’s voice: Straightforward, literal, and unpoetic, but also withering, yearning, avoidant, and even passionate. Some aspects of its thoughts are recognizably human, some recognizably not; and it’s its internal monologue that stirs up the ideas about gender, neurodivergence, and free will that make the books really interesting.
And, like: Voiceover exists, but TV at the end of the day is a visual medium. Murderbot has lots of great action in it, but I don’t think it holds up as an action story. It lives or dies on SecUnit’s voice.
Or, you know, not! I will be pleased and fascinated if I’m wrong about this. But the concern about the books’ reliance on access to SecUnit’s thoughts is so obvious that you’d hope any successful pitch for the series would have to have hit on a good solution.
Currently reading: LYORN, by Steven Brust.
If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.