Book Review: The Murderbot Diaries Series
by Martha Wells
Set in the far distant future with sentient machines, device-augmented humans, and human-machine “constructs” that are essentially persons in their own right, including machines that have human-like relationships with each other, Martha Wells brings to life in the Murderbot Diaries series a dystopian yet hopeful vision of the future for humanity. The main protagonist is one of those constructs, a SecUnit (a sort of security bot) named Murderbot, and whose point of view is the window for the reader throughout the series. As a gripping arc of story plots this series provides a full course of entertainment and relational cultural awareness for almost anyone—including non-stop edge-of-your-seat action suspense, advanced technology, non-binary interpersonal relationships, and personal flaws (including Murderbot itself) along with humorous first-person narrative. If you’re just looking for some good action tales, Wells’ masterful story telling skills in this series are sure to please—and it’s much more than that.
Wells presents both in the backdrop and the main plot thread a serious systemic problem visible in our own world: that of corporate dominance of society. It includes the portrayal of millions of human beings trapped in permanent servitude mining hazardous materials basically as slaves for life including their children, even to the point that a refugee operation was a pivotal aspect of the novella Fugitive Telemetry in the series—something eerily congruent with the contemporary concept of millions of people screwing in little screws in sweat shop factories generation after generation. In System Collapse countering the lure of false promises and deceptive persuasion tactics for recruitment into this life of permanent indenture is front and center in the plot.
The author illustrates how the mentality of competition rather than collaboration encouraged by neoliberal capitalism has drained the humanity out of everyday living. In the series, the Preservation Alliance provides a contrasting way of life, in which basic essentials such as food and shelter are a baseline assumption and no one is trapped through legal chicanery into an involuntary arrangement—that is in contrast with the corporate rim, which is dominated by powerful, profit-driven corporations that are by nature hostile to civic governments or democratic polities, willing to deal in dangerous “alien remnants” and also have no compunction about killing in the course of conducting business. In the corporate rim, everything is transactional, even to the point of having to pay for life-saving assistance (if you can’t pay, well, too bad). The assumption that everything is based on a contract is second nature to those who are attuned to the ways of the corporate rim.
Wells presents AI as a productive assistant when it’s properly implemented with its learning models aimed toward helping humanity. Initially just an appliance shipped in a crate, Murderbot manages to achieve the essentials of self actualization: Autonomy (via hacking its governor module), Mastery (via skill in mitigating threats to security and safety), and Purpose (via protecting friends from harm). Those assets prove foundational throughout the series, as Murderbot and its allies face recurring situations with long odds of success or even survival. In that context, another recurring theme in the series is that of never giving up, even when the situation appears impossible—it’s a stance for us to adopt now, to ensure that the fictional corporate rim with its tech oligarch overlords and exploited masses in the Murderbot Diaries series never materializes in real life, now or in the future.