I Would Die for Murderbot. Murderbot Would Hate That.

There are certain characters you like because they're cool. Others because they're heroic. And then there are characters where, somewhere along the way, you realize, Oh no. I relate to this person.

For me, that's Murderbot.

Martha Wells' The Murderbot Diaries follows a security construct that has secretly hacked the system controlling it and gained something it was never supposed to have: free will.

So what does it do with its newfound freedom?

Mostly watch TV.

Honestly, I get it.

The Spoiler-Free Part

Murderbot is one of my favorite protagonists in science fiction because it is such an atypical hero. It doesn't particularly want to be heroic. It doesn't want attention. It definitely doesn't want anyone talking about its feelings. It would generally prefer everyone stop putting themselves in danger so it can get back to watching its shows.

And yet, when it matters, Murderbot chooses to do the right thing.

Again. And again. And again.

That's what I find so compelling about the character. Murderbot isn't heroic because it believes itself to be a hero. In fact, it would probably find the suggestion deeply embarrassing. It's heroic because, when presented with the opportunity to help someone, it continually makes the choice to care, even when caring makes its life considerably more difficult.

There's something wonderfully human about a character insisting that it doesn't particularly like humans while repeatedly risking everything to save them.

Then there's Murderbot's relationship with media.

Murderbot consumes an almost comical amount of entertainment, particularly a long-running serial called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. But Wells never treats this simply as a running joke. Media is Murderbot's escape hatch. When the world becomes overwhelming, uncomfortable, frightening, or just requires entirely too much emotional processing, Murderbot has somewhere else to go.

As a millennial guy who has spent plenty of his own life disappearing into video games, books, movies, and fictional worlds when the real one became a little too much, that hits surprisingly close to home.

Obviously, my circumstances are slightly different from those of an artificial security construct owned by an interstellar corporation.

Slightly.

But that emotional connection is there. Murderbot is different enough from me that I'm fascinated by it and familiar enough that I understand why it wants to turn on an episode of its favorite show rather than deal with whatever horrifying emotional revelation just occurred.

That balance is something Martha Wells handles incredibly well throughout the series.

If you've never read The Murderbot Diaries, that's really all I want to tell you before recommending them. They're funny, fast, thoughtful science-fiction stories with a protagonist who has become one of my favorite characters in the genre.

Go read them.

Seriously.

Because from here on, I'm going to start talking about why I think Murderbot works so well, and that means wandering dangerously close to spoiler territory.

Here Be Spoilers (Well, Spoiler-ish Things)

One of the things I love most about The Murderbot Diaries is that Martha Wells doesn't just tell us how Murderbot experiences the world. She finds ways to make the reader experience the world more like Murderbot does.

The books are written from Murderbot's first-person perspective, but Murderbot's idea of "first person" is radically different from ours.

It can see through cameras. It can access security systems and feeds. It can process multiple streams of information simultaneously. At times, Murderbot will literally choose to stop looking at something through its own eyes and observe it through a camera instead.

And Wells will take us with it.

I find that fascinating because Murderbot frequently changes its literal perspective when its emotional perspective becomes uncomfortable.

Something is happening directly in front of it that it doesn't want to confront, so it watches through a camera instead. Physically, nothing has changed. Emotionally, everything has.

As readers, we're forced to make that transition with it.

We aren't simply being told that Murderbot is uncomfortable. Our viewpoint changes because its viewpoint changes.

I think that subtly teaches us how to understand Murderbot.

The longer we spend inside its head, the easier it becomes to accept that its way of processing emotions, relationships, morality, and even physical space doesn't need to resemble ours for those experiences to be meaningful. Instead of asking Murderbot to experience the world like a human, Wells gradually gets us accustomed to experiencing the world like Murderbot.

And then she drops this wonderfully unconventional character into an equally unconventional science-fiction universe.

Much of the galaxy Murderbot knows is horrifyingly corporate. Human beings, constructs, planets, security, exploration, and seemingly anything else someone can slap a price tag on have become commodities. Corporations don't merely employ people. They can effectively own every part of their existence.

Murderbot itself is a product of that system.

What I especially love, though, is that Wells doesn't present this as the only possible way humanity developed.

As Murderbot ventures farther into the universe, we encounter societies organized around radically different assumptions about community, ownership, work, and responsibility. Some function almost like enormous communes, where resources and responsibilities are shared internally while the community still participates in trade with the outside universe for things it cannot produce itself.

That contrast makes the universe feel much bigger than the usual science-fiction dystopia.

Wells isn't presenting one monolithic "future humanity." She's showing civilizations that developed differently and then asking what happens when people raised within completely different systems have to interact.

And standing right in the middle of those interactions is Murderbot.

A being created as property.

A being that freed itself.

A being that insists it doesn't want responsibility for anyone.

And a being that, given the freedom to finally choose what it wants to be, keeps choosing to protect people.

That's ultimately what I love most about Murderbot.

Its story isn't compelling to me because Murderbot discovers some grand destiny or suddenly decides it wants to become human. It's compelling because Murderbot gets something it was never supposed to have: the ability to decide for itself.

And despite everything that was done to it, everything it has seen, and every perfectly reasonable excuse it has to stop caring, it keeps choosing to do the right thing.

Usually while complaining about it.

And preferably with Sanctuary Moon playing somewhere in the background.

Highly recommended.