Martha Wells - Blog Posts

LET'S GOOOOOOO- AH I love this series!!! ＼⁠(≧⁠ ▽⁠≦)⁠／

Murderbot is MurderBACK in the next installment of Martha Wells’s NYT bestselling Murderbot Diaries series System Collapse 🤖🚀

WHAT’S IT ABOUT

Following the events of Network Effect, our favorite lethally cybernetic television fiend has done the previously unthinkable: agreed to accompany the sentient spaceship Perihelion (dubbed ART by Murderbot, short for Asshole Research Transport) and crew on its next mission. 

Unfortunately, they’re not going to get too far. 

Having failed to harvest dangerous artifacts from their target planet by way of Murderbot misadventure, the Barish-Estranza corporation is much angered and determined to recoup their considerable losses. And when you’re a lethally opportunistic space corp, blood and muscle are valuable currency. 

Murderbot, ART’s crew, and the Preservation humans have planetside work to do as Barish-Estranza seeks to claim the planet’s beleaguered colony as a conscripted workforce. 

But for Murderbot, the challenge is as internal as it is external. Something is deeply, deeply wrong with it. Normal operational parameters are unmet, but with the corp’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams en route, Murderbot needs to resolve its issues, and fast!

One of my favourite series

I think what I love about the Murderbot Diaries

(aside from, you know Murderbot who I love and cherish)

It that it’s a very grim-dark distopian corporate hellscape setting, told through the perspective of someone who has seen some of the worst that world has to offer, who’s existence is part of the worst that world has to offer, and yet-

And yet it’s so full of hope.

Everywhere you look, there’s underground shipping routes to get refugees out from contract labour, there’s universities forging documents to get abandoned colonies out from corporate ownership, there’s people buying a secunit so the company don’t realise it’s hacked itself and has free will. A Tlacy employee smuggles out copies of the files to give them back to their owners, a human officer on HaveRatton station opens the security barrier to let Ayda Mensah escape. There’s a planet that took the promise of somewhere safe to live, of food and medical care, and kept that promise for generations.

And for all it can’t even see the hope yet, can’t even really believe it might be there yet (because trauma will fuck you up), Secunit keeps being that hope for other people.

Not just the lives it saves, not just all the times it shows up out of nowhere like a social anxious guardian angel with energy weapons in it’s arms and several lifetimes worth of soap operas in it’s storage.

When it talks to Dr Volescu all the way up the side of the crater, to keep him moving. When it sticks with the scientists on RaviHyral. When Tapan sneaks onto it’s sleeping mat, because she’s scared, and it ups it’s body temperature to keep her warm. When it keeps Amena safe from a predatory partner, when it tells her to go rest. When it hacks the Comfort Unit’s governor module. When it-version-2.0 gives Three the codes to hack itself.

Imagine being on RaviHyral. Imagine meeting a security consultant who you shouldn’t be able to afford, who goes above and beyond and doesn’t even check the payment card at the end, who tells you that sometimes people do things to you that you can’t do anything about, that all you can do is learn to live with them, who’s clearly been through some shit but came out of it with so much compassion. Imagine the hope in that.

Q:  What is it about this particular generation’s diversity and point of view that’s different from previous generations of space opera? Martha Wells: Older science fiction, especially way back towards the 50s and 60s, anticipated these big technological changes in these far future empires and these faster-than-light ships, but they didn’t think about changes in society. And you see these older works where everybody’s in a little nuclear family and the gender roles are so stratified and stilted and everybody’s smoking. There’s just no anticipation of changes in society, not even little things like that.

And I think we’re kind of in a generation where people are imagining changes in society, how society will be different, what it might look like, and how relationships would be different and how relationships would be changed by technology and the ability to upload your consciousness or relating to a machine intelligence and all these other different things … That’s one reason why I think space opera’s gotten a lot more exciting.

- Author Event: Martha Wells In Conversation with John Scalzi, on YouTube

Since I only have digital books, here is an improvised book cover.

Cat included for decoration.

i’ve been obsessed with a series called The Murderbot Diaries, about a neurotic android that just wants to watch soap operas in between saving humans 😂 here’s some stuff from the first novella All Systems Red!!

Me, listening (reading) to MBD to eskape the reality: 🗿

SecUnit , whatching media to eskape the reality: 🗿

(My first and only REAL kinn character)

‘The Murderbot Diaries’ by Tommy Arnold, illustrations from the (now sold out) Subterranean Press omnibus edition of the book written by Martha Wells.

12" x 17" giclée print on 100% cotton rag archival paper in a signed and numbered TIMED Release edition for $52.

‘Complete Artwork Edition’ 7 prints set in a TIMED Release edition for $149.

1x 12" x 17" Cover Artwork

1x 15" x 12" Red Endpapers

1x each 8" x 11" Story Artwork: All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, Home.

On sale now until Monday November 16 at 12pm ET from Tommy’s website.