ROBOT RED BOOK SERIES TOR PUBLISHING CODE
ROBOT RED BOOK SERIES TOR PUBLISHING PLUS
ROBOT RED BOOK SERIES TOR PUBLISHING TV

Murderbot is standing around bored on a planet whose name it doesn’t know and doesn’t care about when a monster erupts from the bottom of a crater and snatches one of the people Murderbot is responsible for. It’s a beautiful character arc for a fascinating character that just happens to be Artificial Intelligence that’s also human from its opaque helmet to its manufactured feet.

ROBOT RED BOOK SERIES TOR PUBLISHING CODE

Another thing I love about Murderbot: it takes in its experiences across the books, examines them carefully, and rejects anything it considers bad code and accepts the useful, even if its uncomfortable. It knows the story series are ridiculous, not realistic in any way, and it appreciates that because its had enough reality in its life (yeah, me, too, Murderbot, that’s why I read fiction). (Okay, it doesn’t watch TV, it downloads the series directly into its memory bank, but it’s pretty much watching Battlestar Galactica while munching metaphorical popcorn every chance it gets.) Its education is sketchy since the Company cheaps out on that, but watching thousands of story hours about heroic humans in tense situations has made it, by osmosis, a competence porn hero in its own way, fed up with the clusterfuckery around it but dedicated to preserving life (or as it says in exasperation when it realizes how bad the situation is in the first novella, “I’ve got four perfectly good humans here and I didn’t want them to get killed”).

ROBOT RED BOOK SERIES TOR PUBLISHING TV

There are many things I love about this character–its self-deprecation, its wry humor, its character arc, its essential goodness–but one of things I love most is that its character arc is fueled by the TV series it watches constantly, mostly adventure shows, in conjunction with what it learns by reluctantly interacting with humans. Have I mentioned that Wells is a terrific writer? That’s all back story, neatly taken care of in the first novella and built on later. It’s just not going to kill anybody because of human error again. Shortly after that, it gives itself a name–Murderbot–hacks its governor so it’s no longer controlled by outside forces, and quietly begins life as rogue but still obedient AI. Then one day, the humans who have taken a contract with it as part of the equipment are hacked, and the hack goes wrong, and Murderbot, helpless to refuse an order, murders fifty-seven people. (This is where I should say that calling Murderbot “it” is dehumanizing and bothers me because Murderbot is in my mind entirely and delightfully human, but it has no gender identity which it’s pretty forceful about, so “it” it is.). Designed to augment computer services to humans working on strange planets, it has decision-making capibilities but is in total thrall to the Company, which can break it down for parts if it doesn’t obey orders. Murderbot is a construct, machine parts inextricably combined with cloned human parts, a mash-up that leaves it in constant existential crisis because, as it explains, its not two halves working together, its one whole in conflict with itself. “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 on the company satellite.”Ī character that has a choice between mass murder and watching stories and picks stories: that’s my kind of robot.

Then Tor offered the first four novellas for free, and readers I trusted were so enthusiastic that I took Tor up on its offer (hey, FREE) and met Murderbot and loved it from the first line: So when I kept hearing about Murderbot, I thought, Robots that kill, uh, no, and moved on. But then I moved on to mystery and did my first master’s thesis on that (it was terrible) and then working on my PhD I finally took a good look at romance and settled in for the long haul.

Our Laura Resnick is Mike Resnick’s daughter. (I almost drove off the road one afternoon when my pal Alisa Kwitney told me her dad was Robert Sheckley I loved Robert Sheckley’s work. I devoured science fiction in junior high and high school, so my background in the genre is Asimov, Norton, and Sheckley. Wells is a terrific writer so I’m sure all of her books are terrific, but I am a Murderbot fan (to put it mildly) so this is a Murderbot post.

ROBOT RED BOOK SERIES TOR PUBLISHING PLUS

Two, I have read all of the Murderbot novels plus the last novel well over twelve times (I stopped counting then) and I’ll re-read them another twelve times at least. First, two confessions: One, I’ve only read one Martha Wells’ novel that wasn’t a Murderbot.

Robot red book series tor publishing