Meet the Murderbot
Most first-person narrators in a sci-fi setting aren’t simply right here to let you know the story, however to function your information within the wealthy, great and sophisticated world through which that story is ready. Murderbot doesn’t need to be your information.
A typical Murderbot journey, no less than early on within the sequence, will go like this. Murderbot is travelling and attempting to keep away from being detected. Alongside the way in which, it should run into some people who’re in some type of hazard, probably as a result of it’s their very own fault. So Murderbot must save them, whereas additionally attempting to hide the truth that it’s a rogue SecUnit. Normally, it should discover itself unwittingly befriending a human or AI within the means of saving them, earlier than disappearing into the horizon once more.
Murderbot has not been free of its governor module’s management to steer a insurrection for AI-kind, or to go and discover the massive large universe. It has little interest in all the same old carrots-on-sticks dangled in entrance of protagonists. All it needs is to be left alone and allowed to observe its reveals, and the tales of The Murderbot Diaries are invariably what will get in the way in which of that.
Put merely, even by science fiction robotic requirements, Murderbot is vastly autistic coded. Wells herself has gone on file as saying this isn’t deliberate. She has described herself as Neurodivergent, and on this interview with the Science Fiction Guide Membership mentioned, “I didn’t intend for Murderbot to have autism spectrum traits, however once more, I’m drawing from my very own expertise.”
However no matter her intentions, all of the cues are there. Murderbot doesn’t like being touched. It doesn’t like eye contact – normally when it’s coping with people it should watch them by way of the feeds of its personal safety drones in order that it doesn’t have to take a look at them immediately. Its enjoyment of “mediatypes” consists of discovering new ones to observe and rewatching outdated favourites repeatedly, and as a lot as it’s for leisure, Murderbot makes use of them as fashions for human interplay, which it finds troublesome. The people round Murderbot not often realise simply how a lot data it’s processing at any given second, navigating knowledge feeds whereas watching a number of cameras and audio feeds concurrently.
Importantly, a “robotic” character and an autistic-coded character and a “robotic” autistic-coded character, Murderbot is rarely devoid of feelings. It feels grumpy, and unhappy, and scared, and lonely in methods which it finds laborious to course of as a result of it additionally hates being round folks.
