Murderbot

I know one book, I just started reading it.

I know you read, it's not called Murderbot, the first Murderbot book.

All systems

read, right?

I think a lot more people try it and then don't read it at all.

If you're into Red Rising or Murderbot, you're more of a book reader than someone who tries Harry Potter in 2010.

That's just true.

Red Rising is just a surprise to me.

This is super interesting.

She does a couple of different analyses and it's just really fun to see them.

How many of these, especially Emma Lyon and Dungeon Crawler Carl and Murderbot, people talk about also Thursday Murder Club as like their comfort food.

Yes.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so I had definitely got some Murderbot vibes.

Yeah, and maybe a little of A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers, which was one of the darker of the Wayfarers series and focused on artificial intelligence.

Yeah, I think that's fair.

We've already talked about there being kind of like multiple threads in the air that were sort of like, you know, this and the ancillary books, you know, like there's things that just seem to be like cropping up in people's work.

You know, the gloves, the tea, the fact that Murderbot and this come out like around the same time or we have like robots with very strong opinions about the soap opera that they watch and would rather be watching than doing the killing that the humans want them to be.

It's just like that's like right there to like.

Yeah, I remember something must have been just after maybe Murderbot came out and it was someone suggesting we need to put, I think it was The Servitors Here, Breck from Ancillary, Murderbot, and maybe it was like Bubbles from the Questionable Content comic.

And somebody else, and I can't remember who it was, I was like we just need to let them be in like a space together.

Just watch some good

That's always the difficulty of talking about these things, but...

Well, um, the one that comes to mind first is from Murder Bot where in Artificial Condition, Art was originally not in the story, which as important as a character that Art became, that always seems weird, but yeah, originally Art wasn't there and Art only came in when I realized I'd kinda started the story in the wrong place and needed to backtrack and I needed to show the part where Murder Bot changes its body so it can look more human in order to not be caught.

So I, when I started working on that part, Art's character kinda just came in and when they started talking to each other, uh, I started developing that character and it was just so much fun and it really... 'Cause when, for me, developing a character in isolation never works and I need to develop them by seeing how they interact with other characters.

So does that surprise actually happen while you're typing away?

And-

Yeah

... and I had actually intended to see if I could get through this conversation and not mention Murder Bot at all.

Oh, really? [laughs]

Like, I n- I need a light tone.

I mean, I think that's o- one reason why I loved, like, All Systems Red, which is, like, book one in The Murderbot Diaries.

Like, I think-

Yeah

I mean, I would rather watch my serials than talk to other humans, and, like, I wanna hide in my armor and, you know-

[laughs]

Murderbot's got-

Yeah.

I love that b- But the, the follow-ups, there's no follow-ups.

I'm just like, "No, I wanna know more about what they wanna do, and whether..." No, they're all standalone sequels, and I'm like, "No." [laughs] I read that a while ago with the Murderbot series, and so I'm also re-listening to Murderbot, but how it confused my brain, my brain smashed them together, and so I thought Murderbot was, like, standalone se- sequels, but it wasn't, it was this one.

And so I was just, like, a little bit confused, but-

[laughs]

I'm glad that the Murderbot had more of a series, and we got to see his transition and his growth, but I was very sad to hear that there might not be another one.

[laughs] So I was like, "No." Uh, it is that the bookworm push and pull of, oh, we want more, but we also want to read the whole series, right? You want more books in the series, but you also want to know that you're, you get to read it all.

So I don't know.

It was fine.

It was like, it reminded me of Murderbot, which if, if you like Murderbot, you might like this, if I, I would say.

But I, Murderbot's not, like, our, we're not, like, huge Murderbot fans here, so.

No.

I don't know.

He understands that Gibson's prose is music first and briefing second.

And then two newer classics, Kevin R. Free's perfectly precise deadpan performance of Murderbot in All Systems Red, and Mel Hudson's reading of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, which is the best argument for evolutionary hard SF as a listening experience.

The key distinction with Murderbot and Children of Time is that they are future classics.

They simply haven't accumulated the decades of cultural consensus required for an all-time list yet.

It's a statement about time, not a knock on their quality.