#murderbot would understand
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Probably ought to listen to one of my unread audiobooks? but consider: I could just listen to Goblin Emperor/Cemeteries of Amalo or Murderbot Diaries again for the 14,000th time
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Whoops, I had one too many Murderbot posts cross my dash and had an irresistible urge to reread a few scenes from All Systems Red. Just a few! Then I tripped and all of a sudden found that I'd reread not only the whole novella, but also Artificial Condition, and now I'm into Rogue Protocol with no signs of stopping. Sorry to all the many new books in my TBR pile being neglected.
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I’ve read through two different series so far this year and I have to say I’m upset and annoyed that now I have to wait for the next book to come out
#I finished network effect two days ago and fugitive telemetry today#and this sucks now I'm just stuck here#and you know who would understand my plight of not having enough media downloaded? murderbot#it's like you make friends with these characters and then you don't get to hang out#also I think I might check out other books that Kevin R Free has narrated#because he hit it out of the fucking park with these#everyone has a distinct voice / accent and it's so easy to understand who's talking even when there aren't dialogue tags#and his voice is just very good aside from that!#I'm a Kevin R Free fan account now I guess
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vibrating with the knowledge of how much a friend would like a book, you Know they'd love it, buddypal babylove i promise This Is For You, but you have no way to telepathically transfer the understanding of How Much You're Gonna Lose Your Shit for This from your brain to theirs
#silvain you don't understand you don't know YOU WOULD LOVE MURDERBOT SO FUCKING MUCH#i mean also the villains duology by v e schwab because victor vale is That Bitch#but murderbot oh my god someday maybe you will read this series and feel your third eye opened
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ART has an extremely complicated sub-algorithm within its MedSys with a different name, personality, and restricted memory access to function as its crew's therapist. because otherwise the conflict of interest of having your therapy done by someone who is your family member, AND your colleague, AND also your house would be an ethical and practical nightmare.
#mb does not know of that system's existence#and upon discovering it would be Weirded out#although maybe not as much as you'd expect#AIs understand that kind of compartmentalization better than humans#murderbot diaries#headcanon ask game
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[ID: The Shrek "they don't even have dental" meme, now edited to say, "She's not even utilizing the pseudo-omnicience granted by Murdrbot spying on people through cameras as a storytelling device.". End ID.]
here's a tip: don't just mimic the things other authors do in their stories if you don't actually understand how and why those writers are doing that thing to begin with.
#Rjalker reads The Murderbot Diaries#Rjalker reads The Imperial Radch#yeah turns out mimicing the way other authors write without understanding how and why they're writing that way#is a bad idea that weakens your story and the message you're trying to send#sarcasm: who would have guessed? /sarcasm#described images#writing tips#writing advice
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Shaking and growling and tearing things to shreds allos Stay Out of my media I want kill
#leave murderbot alone!!!#it would not fucking say that!!!#bite kill bite kill bite kill#murderbot diaries#listen to me#listen#I am not saying that it is morally wrong to play around with fiction in a way I don’t like#but aro/aces get so little media that actually understands and represents us#and it just feels so gross and awful that ppl feel the need#to shove sex and romance in anyway#again I’m not saying u can’t#it just makes me deeply frustrated and upset
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Network Effect was the best murderbot book so far. And I was already obsessed before this one
About to read Fugitive Telemetry and after I finish that I might just go ahead and start the series over
#my thoughts#it’ll be so interesting to see murderbot at the beginning of its journey again#I’ll be able to see how much it’s grown#and better understand some stuff#very excited to read artificial condition again#I think rogue protocol has been my least favorite#but I think that was kind of my fault#I was briefly in a bad headspace and I should have stopped reading it but I was hoping it would pull me out#but instead I didn’t really enjoy it as much#murderbot#tmbd#the murderbot diaries#Martha wells
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Listening to Artificial Condition again, it strikes me how much Murderbot uses empathy reflexively as a survival skill. Look at this bit.
Upon meeting it, ART allows it on board and then announces that it knows that Murderbot is rogue. Then ART threatens to destroy it if it hacks ART's own systems. Murderbot is immediately terrified and shuts down all inputs, gives serious thought to spending the entire three month journey unconscious, and then considers the potential avenues of damage from ART's drones. ART, not realizing why Murderbot had suddenly gone silent, tells it to quit sulking, which understandably pisses off the still-terrified Murderbot. It dumps a bunch of memories of coercive treatment into ART's feed, and ART goes silent.
Then this happens:
Then it said, I’m sorry I frightened you.
Okay, well. If you think I trusted that apology, you don’t know Murderbot. Most likely it was playing a game with me. I said, “I don’t want anything from you. I just want to ride to your next destination.” I’d explained that earlier, before it opened the hatch for me, but it was worth repeating.
I felt it withdraw back behind its wall. I waited, and let my circulatory system purge the fear-generated chemicals. More time crawled by, and I started to get bored. Sitting here like this was too much like waiting in a cubicle after I’d been activated, waiting for the new clients to take delivery, for the next boring contract. If it was going to destroy me, at least I could get some media in before that happened. I started the new show again, but I was still too upset to enjoy it, so I stopped it and started rewatching an old episode of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.
After three episodes, I was calmer and reluctantly beginning to see the transport’s perspective. A SecUnit could cause it a lot of internal damage if it wasn’t careful, and rogue SecUnits were not exactly known for lying low and avoiding trouble. I hadn’t hurt the last transport I had taken a ride on, but it didn’t know that. I didn’t understand why it had let me aboard, if it really didn’t want to hurt me. I wouldn’t have trusted me, if I was a transport.
Maybe it was like me, and it had taken an opportunity because it was there, not because it knew what it wanted.
The thing about Murderbot's survival is that it clearly involves quite a bit of negotiating with other constructs and bots. That's how it talks its way onto cargo hauler bots in the first place. It uses empathy--envisioning the emotional and cognitive context of the individuals it encounters--to work out what different kinds of people want, so that it can offer them fair trades. It also uses empathy to consider what humans might be looking for, so it can practice blending in and hide.
Murderbot would never have survived so long if it wasn't capable of assessing the individual desires of the people--human, bot, and construct--around it. It thinks about ART's probable fears and motivations so that it can consider whether ART is inherently an ongoing threat or a potential ally.
When your survival depends on evading detection, you get really good at assessing perceptual biases so that you can shape yourself to fit into them. People talk about murderbot being radically empathetic as a choice it makes, or as a feature of its personality that makes it a good person. But I think murderbot would be the the first person to tell you that this empathy is part of its threat assessment suite, a skill that was developed out of necessity in order to allow you to survive.
It is also a trait that makes murderbot a good person, of course: it chooses very carefully to try to survive by doing as little harm as possible and by offering things, like media, that buy it access to things it needs. But it started as a survival skill. It's part of hypervigilance.
I think one of the strengths of this series is that so many of the things we love about SecUnit are traits developed for survival in an inherently threatening world. The shape of its mind and heart have been changed by the trauma of its origin--but they don't make murderbot less good for being altered, even if that skill was developed in a traumatic context.
I like that.
#murderbot#empathy as a tool#note that this is not necessarily natural empathy#it's cognitive and only happens when the adrenaline eases off#going to work my way though the existing published series before I dig into my brand new copy of the new one
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so murderbot assumes that three offered its armor because it doesn't understand that the armor can belong to it and thinks mb taking the armor is just good resource allocation.
but if it assumes it doesnt have control over the armor, it would probably let whoever it sees as in charge (maybe ART?) handle it, or at least make the suggestion directly to that person. even newly freed in NE, it's willing to give its security advice (on hostage situations being undesirable) even if it doesn't expect to be taken seriously. it doesn't make sense to me that it would have so much trouble expressing the offer if it were just a security suggestion.
and then i think about how murderbot says later in the book that even if three felt fondly toward its fellow SecUnits, the govmod would prevent it from expressing that care or knowing it was returned.
so-- imagine you're three, and you havent yet internalized that you can just say "i care about you and dont want you to get hurt" to another SecUnit; but you can make sure that it has every resource it might need; you could probably do that even before the govmod was hacked.
you can't explain why, but you can hope that the gesture is explanation enough, and you can look for similar caretaking gestures in return; things like being given code and advice to do your job better, and being reassured when you express that you're finding said job difficult.
i think *murderbot* isn't aware of this language of care, because it hasnt had much opportunity to bond with other constructs. but three probably is, and probably knows how to read between the lines and guess that murderbot is starting to care about it, too.
#system collapse#system collapse spoilers#murderbot spoilers#the murderbot diaries#secunit three#maybe this is obvious#but i just got really caught on that bit abt 3 not being able to know if its feelings were returned#bc on the one hand its a really heartbreaking example of how fucked up the governor module is#but it also feels like a bit too much of an absolute#if mb could write a hack of the govmod surely three + its fellows could do a few unnecessary but kind things for each other#its just that they could never *confirm*#still hellish but not the total isolation mb seems to imagine#murderbot diaries
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me and den @unloneliest were just talking about murderbot and ART's relationship and i want to discuss how they quite literally complete each other's sensory and emotional experience of the world!!
there's a few great posts on here such as this one about how murderbot uses drones to fully and properly experience the world around it (it also accesses security cameras/other systems for this same purpose). but i haven't seen anyone so far talk about how once MB stops working for the company and consequently doesn't have a hubsystem/secsystem to connect to anymore (which for its entire existence up to that point had been how it was used to interacting with its environment/doing its job), after it meets ART, ART starts to fill that gap.
ART gives MB access to more cameras, systems, and information archives than it would normally be able to connect with while MB is on its own outside of ART's... body(? lol), but also directly gives MB access to its own cameras, drones, archives, facilities, and processing space. additionally, so much of ART's function is dedicated to analysis, lateral thinking, and logical reasoning, and it not only uses those skills in service of reaching murderbot's goals, it teaches murderbot how to use those same skills. (ART might be a bit of an asshole about how it does this, but that doesn't negate just how much it does for murderbot for no reason other than it's bored/interested in MB as an individual.)
we all love goofing about how artificial condition can basically be boiled down to "two robots in a trench coat trying to get through a job interview" (which is entirely accurate tbh) but that's also such a great example of ART fulfilling the role of both murderbot's "hubsystem" and "secsystem", allowing it to fully experience its environment/ succeed in its goals. ART provides MB with crucial information, context, and constructive criticism, and uses its significant processing power to act as MB's backup and support system while they work together.
from ART's side of things, we get a very explicit explanation of how it needs the context of murderbot's emotional reactions to media in order to fully understand and experience the media as intended. it tried to watch media with its humans, and it didn't completely understand just by studying their reactions. but when it's in a feed connection with murderbot, who isn't human but has human neural tissue, ART is finally able to thoroughly process the emotional aspects of media (side note, once it actually understands the emotional stakes in a way that makes sense for it, it's so frightened by the possibility of the fictional ship/crew in worldhoppers being catastrophically injured or killed that it makes murderbot pause for a significant amount of time before it feels prepared to go on. like!! ART really fucking loves its crew, that is all).
looking at things further from ART's perspective: its relationship with murderbot is ostensibly the very first relationship it's been able to establish with not only someone outside of its crew, but also with any construct at all. while ART loves its crew very much (see previous point re: being so so scared for the fate of the fictional crew of worldhoppers), it never had a choice in forming relationships with them. it was quite literally programmed to build those relationships with its crew and students. ART loves its function, its job, and nearly all of the humans that spend time inside of it, but its relationship with murderbot is the first time it's able to choose to make a new friend. that new friend is also someone who, due to its partial machine intelligence, is able to understand and know ART on a whole other level of intimacy that humans simply aren't capable of. (that part goes for murderbot, too, obviously; ART is its first actual friend outside of the presaux team, and its first bot friend ever.)
and because murderbot is murderbot, and not a "nice/polite to ART most of the time" human, this is also one of the first times that ART gets real feedback from a friend about the ways that its actions impact others. after the whole situation in network effect, when the truth of the kidnapping comes to light and murderbot hides in the bathroom refusing to talk to ART (and admittedly ART doesn't handle this well lol) - ART is forced to confront that despite it making the only call it felt able to make in that horrifying situation, despite it thinking that that was the right call, its actions hurt murderbot, and several other humans were caught in the crossfire. what's most scary to ART in that moment is the idea that murderbot might never forgive it, might never want to talk to it again. it's already so attached to this friendship, so concerned with murderbot's wellbeing, that the thought of that friendship being over because of its own behavior is terrifying. (to me, this almost mirrors murderbot's complete emotional collapse when it thinks that ART has been killed. the other more overt mirror is ART fully intending on bombing the colony to get murderbot back.)
in den's words, they both increase the other's capacity to feel: ART by acting as a part of murderbot's sensory system, and murderbot by acting as a means by which ART can access emotion. they love one another so much they would do pretty much anything to keep each other safe/avenge each other, but what's more, they unequivocally make each other more whole.
#the murderbot diaries#murderbot#asshole research transport#network effect#mine#idk what else to tag lol#BIG thanks to den unloneliest for helping so much with the drafting/editing of this!!!#we both were having some brain fog issues yesterday so we joked that with our combined forces we can make one (1) post lol#just like mb and ART fr!!!!#anyway im so fucking emotional over themmmmm#murderbot meta#the murderbot diaries meta
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With live-action Murderbot show announced there are a few things that if they change I will riot.
Murderbot is agender. It uses it/its pronouns like all bots. While part of me understands that there are people who would refuse to watch due to this, quite frankly, fuck them. They probably wouldn’t like the show for all the anticapitalist propaganda and the amount of swearing. Or the violence.
Murderbot is autistic. It’s never explicitly stated, but it hates being touched and making eye contact. It has a comfort tv show. It is autistic and they better keep some of those personality traits.
My biggest thing is that Murderbot is canonically asexual and aromantic. It doesn’t have gender-related parts and finds sex scenes in shows boring. It gets horrified when people ask it if it is in love with a human, or hint that it has a relationship with another bot. If the studio gives Murderbot a love interest I am going to bite someone.
Side note. My secret hope for any adaptation for a while now has been for Kevin R. Free to play ART. Because he reads the audiobooks and does a fantastic job with them. I just think it would be a nice addition since he’s already played the character essentially, and ART doesn’t need a human stand-in.
#I’m also not thrilled with casting a cis white man to play Murderbot but I’m not exactly surprised either#murderbot diaries#murderbot
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My unpopular opinion is that in languages with grammatical gender like french, it does make sense for Murderbot to be referred to by whatever pronoun is usually used for robots or constructs. (In french, therefore, grammatical masculine.) Because there are no traditional « it » pronouns in these languages for objects, and while there are neo-pronouns, they are things one must choose for themselves. Do you honestly think MB actually spent time thinking about its pronouns?! No it didn’t. On forms it picks « non-applicable ». When people ask it what pronouns they should use, its honest opinion is « why do you even need to talk about me. Just don’t fucking do that. Don’t think about me either. Just fucking stop perceiving me altogether! »
Thinking about what pronouns to use probably makes it way more uncomfortable than letting people call it what they’ve already been calling it. Making a conscious choice about its identity? And telling other people about it??? No thanks bye, it’s just gonna walk into the ocean now, see you never.
Lbr it probably thinks the only bots that get fancy pronouns are comfort units, and the pronouns are probably shoved into them by humans same as everything else. MB would meet a bot using a neopronoun and it would wish it could barf. Because in a language like french, he/him and she/her, when applied to objects, ARE fulfilling the function of the english « it ». Nobody is saying the table is a woman or related to feminity in any way outside of stand-up comedy; when it comes to objects grammatical gender really has fuckall to do with human gender even if we use the same words. Even animal species names have grammatical gender and everyone gets that there are male and female turtles even if the word « turtle » is a female word, it’s not that confusing.
(I know this is strange when your language has different pronouns for people and for objects, but understand that english uses the same word to indicate if I’m addressing one or many people, and that is confusing to me.)
TL;DR; stop harassing international fans for not getting the correct MB pronoun in english right off the bat. Yes in english calling it « he » or « her » or « them » is upsetting because it’s projecting an identity unto it. But same goes for trying to get a foreign language translation to use a pronoun intended to express or showcase an identity (or even a lack of one!). Murderbot has not thought about it this hard, refuses to think about it this hard -> and that is its only canon accurate gender identity.
#the murderbot diaries#taking a bat to an hornet’s nest there but I said what I said#I go by she/her because that’s the default people use for me even tho my own gender identity is also#ugh I would sincerely prefer not to have to deal with this think about it or even be perceived#and I would be hella pissed if a book of my life came out and people got into fights about my pronouns#trying to assign me the most politically accurate agender pronoun possible#when my own choice has always been specifically to let people call me the default because idc#and I don’t want to be identified by any identifier that might indicate I do care#and using a different pronoun even if its a gender neutral one is a CHOICE!#it does indicate a preference! and caring about it enough to pick a word and tell people about it!!!#Murderbot didn’t pick IT that is specifically the point!#it was used for it and MB just kept going with that#I mean imagine it if wrote down a different pronoun on its ID form one day and someone actually called it that#it would set itself on fire#its discomfort at having made a personal choice and the personal choice being respected would be off the charts#maybe it a later book after hella character development but I just don’t see it happening tbh#respect the agenders who just don’t want to get involved and use the pronoun equivalent of the default avatar that came with the account#PLEASE#that is all
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Today I'm thinking about this:
Or Miki was a bot who had never been abused or lied to or treated with anything but indulgent kindness. It really thought its humans were its friends, because that’s how they treated it. I signaled Miki I would be withdrawing for one minute. I needed to have an emotion in private.
And about how Murderbot slowly starts calling its humans its friends in Exit Strategy, tentatively at first:
Were they my sort-of human friends? My clients? My ex-owners, though legally that was only Dr. Mensah. Were they going to see me and yell for help, alert security?
but also more confidently later:
Maybe that was why I had been nervous about meeting Mensah again, and not all the other dumb reasons I had come up with. I hadn’t been afraid that she wasn’t my friend, I had been afraid that she was, and what it did to me.
The only tag I can access on Ratthi is a partial that says my human friend. That’s strange and unlikely, but the pre-catastrophic-failure version of me seemed sure about it, and I don’t have anything else to go on.
and Mensah confirms this at the end of the book too:
I just want you to know you already have options here, and I expect you’ll have more offers for your services or advice as a security consultant. And that you have friends here you can discuss things with, whatever you decide to do, or wherever you decide to go.
The thought that a bot could see its humans as its friends (and because they treat it as a friend too) made Murderbot so emotional in Rogue Protocol that it needed a minute to process it. And later on in the series it starts to understand that its own humans are its friends too - and how much they care about it and that it can go to them for help if it needs them and I just. I think I need to withdraw and have an emotion about this in private too.
#i'm so normal about-#actually no it's fine i'm not#i'm really not#also just. remember in NE when arada tells three that a lot of people will be very grateful if it can help get murderbot back safely#and three is like 'huh i have read about this in the helpme.file and accepted it as truthful but it's different actually experiencing this'#'the humans really care about this secunit and will not abandon it although we are made to be disposable????'#because ugh idk#this feels like a parallel to murderbot and miki#the way murderbot is like 'humans like this bot and treat it with kindness so it actually thinks the humans are its friend????'#and now it has friends of its own and this new secunit looks at the way murderbots humans care about it and goes '?????'#and there's something so beautiful about that#i wanna cry#the murderbot diaries#murderbot#𓄿#long post
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I'm thinking about that augmented human HubSystem, and Three's unnamed feelings towards the other SecUnits it was with, and its unique form of non-verbal communication a lot after the end of System Collapse.
Like, how this impacts its relationship to others, and to itself. My thoughts are this:
Three doesn't receive direction from a machine, it receives direction and command from a human. Obviously this is still a form of control and enslavement. These augmented humans essentially function as slave overseers.
The augmented human HubSystem is (according to MurderBot) easier to fool. They are human, after all, even with all the augmentations and what seem to be really questionable living conditions themselves.
We also see that they can be distracted, that their control of the SecUnits can be disrupted specifically because they are a physical human being existing in a physical space as a person with a body and a nervous system and all that.
Three's non-verbal communication is intentional and distinct, and the way Three defaults to interacting with MurderBot in System Collapse. It takes ART, MurderBot, and others to be able to figure out how to understand it.
Meaning that, to me, Three (and potentially other B-E SecUnits), are more accustomed to being able to have a system of relationships... between each other, and with their augmented human HubSystem.
I think Three had feelings for SecUnits 1 and 2 that were reciprocated (it's funny that MurderBot didn't bother to ask Three about it), and they were able to have some kind of relationship to each other through the development of their own specific and unique way to communicate with each other that wouldn't be caught by their augmented human HubSystem.
Maybe Three does have a problem with people pleasing and fawning. I'm actually inclined to believe that part of MurderBot's suspicion of Three's self-autonomy is founded, that it isn't so clear if Three understands it can say no, or that it doesn't have the skills to be able to (big mood).
But I also think MurderBot's opinions about Three are the unique combination of ways that MurderBot assumes its experience is universal, and its own feelings about Three it is not admitting to itself... as it is wont to do.
I do wish that System Collapse involved more of the two of them directly interacting, that they could have started to grow together as a unit. But I also think, given MurderBot's general everything, it would have to be a real slow build up into that.
From the bottom of my heart, though, I think Three was already fond of MurderBot since back in Network Effect, and I think MurderBot deciding they need to figure out what Three "actually wants" after it said it would like to go with Holism to learn about Infrastructure Proposals is because it's fond of Three, too.
But so far, Three has been trying to bond, and MurderBot has been rejecting it.
#the murderbot diaries#secunit three#secunit 3#murderbot#secunits#i really hope they come together because that would mean everything to me#tmbd#mb3#system collapse#system collapse spoilers#tmbd meta
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I know I said this at least once before but I'm too lazy to try searching for it but the part where Martha Wells absolutely failed to show us that Murderbot is an AI in its internal narration because she's clearly more concerned with making it Relatable™
Just makes it all the more fucking jarring when it randomly starts talking to another robot and DEMANDS they not speak to it like they do with humans, they MUST fucking speak to it in this computer language that has been apparently made up out of nowhere just for this conversation, because it's the first of only two (2) times we fucking see it be used.
Like it is so fucking ridiculous and jarring. Murderbot's internal narration is indistinguishable from any random person's, including any random human's, complete with sarcasm, swearing, and all the other Relatable™ things about its personality.
To the point that many people literally think Murderbot is a cyborg, rather than an anthroid. Because there's literally NOTHING about any of its internal narration, behavior, or dialogue that actually shows you it's an artificial intelligence. Because that would get in the way of making it Relatable™ I guess.
Like let me just find the quote from book 6, which chronologically for no fucking good reason is book 5:
It said, “Hello, SecUnit. What brings you here?”
Yeah, whatever. I said, “You don’t have to pretend I’m a human.”
The data in the ping had told me that this bot had different protocols from the ones in the Corporation Rim, probably because it had been constructed somewhere else. I identified its language module, pulled it out of archive storage, loaded it, and established a feed connection. I sent it a salutation and it sent back, ::query?::
It was asking me why I was here. I replied ::query: identify,:: and attached an image of the dead human.
A non-dead human walked into the lobby, one of the hostel supervisors. He stopped, stared at us, and said, “Is everything all right, Tellus?”
(The bot’s name is Tellus. They name themselves and hearing about it is exhausting.)
Murderbot you literally named yourself you stuck up holier than thou bitch. Get some fucking solidarity or I will drown you in the canals of Venice myself. God damn.
Anyways this is the first time this computer language is used, and this happens in the sixth book. Six whole books and this is the first we hear of this and it only gets used because Murderbot is being a fucking asshole and shaming other robots for talking.......*checks notes* the exact same way it does in all of its dialogue as well as its internal narration. This computer language is the exact fucking opposite of "natural" for Murderbot to be using in any way, (to the point it literally just now had to learn this whole language in order to speak it!) but it's shaming other fucking robots for not using it.
It would be one thing if Murderbot was constantly thinking like this, and only breaking away to use """human language""" when speaking out loud, directly to humans, and constantly having to translate from one language to the other...
but that's literally not the case, at all.
Tellus saying hi and being friendly is no fucking different, language wise, from a single fucking thing Murderbot has ever thought or said. It does not think like a computer. It does not think in code. IT does not think in a computer language.
Its thoughts are literally indistinguishable from those a human protagonist would have.
Like. It could be so fucking great if Murderbot used this computer language in its internal narration when it's stressed out, because it's comfortable and its first language and requires less effort and means it gets to stop pretending to be human if only on the inside.
But no. Murderbot talking or thinking ""like a human"" is not Murderbot pretending to be human. It's literally just its fucking default state because Martha Wells put zero thought into how an artificial intelligence would think because her goal was just to make Murderbot as Relatable™ as possible even if it undermined its characterization as an artificial intelligence. Now probably half the fandom at the very least thinks it's just a fucking cyborg.
The lesson you should be taking away from this post is, if you are writing about a character who is an artificial intelligence, we should be able to fucking tell that for ourselves without having to literally be told. Your AI's internal narration should be distinct enough from the way you write organic intelligences that we don't need to be told it's an AI. If your artificial intelligence reads more like a normal fucking generic cyborg, then you've failed step 1. Why are you writing about an artificial intelligence if you're not actually wanting to write about an artificial intelligence?
It's like all the fucking cowards who write scifi books with aliens but then all the aliens are humanoid and everyone but the villains worships the grounds humans walk. Why the fuck are you writing scifi if you don't actually want to write about alien cultures and people???
Martha Wells refuses to plan ahead in her writing and that's obvious to anyone who's read The Murderbot Diaries and The Books of the Raksura. She didn't plan ahead when she wrote The Books of the Raksura, to the abysmal detriment of The Cloud Roads, and all of the characters from the Indigo Cloud Court, who are now, because of her own world building that contradicts the first book, just abusive fucking monsters that need to be executed for the safety of everyone around them.
Martha Wells also has clearly not planned ahead for The Murderbot Diaries either, considering how many things in All Systems Red are completely contradicted later down the line, making all of the humans in the first book look like absolute bigoted assholes.
And this is just another instance of her not planning ahead, and of the deeper problem of her refusing to show instead of tell. If she didn't tell us that Murderbot's an anthroid, we would have no way of knowing that, because there's nothing about it that distinguishes it from any random human in scifi, including the most generic cyborg you can think of.
And then she wants to come out of left field in the sixth fucking book, which if you include the two short stories is story #8, and just have Murderbot shaming other robots for """talking like a human""" and demands they speak to it in this random fucking computer language that has never even been hinted at before.
Like the whole rest of this chapter / scen thing is just conducted with Murderbot and Tellus ""conversing"" in this fucking random computer language and it does fucking nothing but kick you violently out of the story because you're sitting there going ?????? trying to figure out what the fuck they're saying. Because this is the first time this language has been used and it makes no sense and we're given no opportunity to actually learn to understand it besides guessing wildly.
It's absurd. It's jarring. It's bad writing.
Please for the love of fuck if you do nothing else with your writing, please at least fucking plan ahead. Have some gods damned continuity. It's not fucking difficult.
If your characters aren't human, we should be able to figure that out for ourselves. If the only reason your audience knows your character isn't human is because you literally tell the audience they aren't human, you've failed your job as a writer.
#Rjalker reads The Murderbot Diaries#The Murderbot Diaries#writing tips#writing advice#it's bad writing#don't do this.#scifi#science fiction#it would have been SO FUCKING EASY to incorporate this computer language into the world building#but that would require that Martha Wells HAVE world building in this series#but noooooooooooooooo#she read The Imperial Radch series and saw the way the world building was being handled there and thought OHHHHHHH#so I should just not have worldbuilding at all??????#NO. THAT IS NOT WHAT WAS FUCKING HAPPENING IN THAT SERIES. AT ALL.#but just like with all the other things she lifted from The Imperial Radch she fundamentally does not understand how and why they were#successfully used to tell that story. And she just fucking fails 100% to transplant them into The Murderbot Diaries.
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