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That scene in fugitive telemetry like

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An important writing lesson I'm taking away from Murderbot is that you don't always have to ease your readers into the world and the characters and speculative concepts. Sometimes you can just start with the fun part where there's a sandworm trying to eat someone and that's fine too.

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One of my favorite things about Murderbot Diaries worldbuilding is the casual revelation that sometimes Dead Space happens.

It's only vaguely referenced in the background at first because it's not really relevant to what Murderbot has going on, until it becomes really relevant, and then it's like yeah sometimes you roll the dice and your bond company lands you on a planet with alien ruins and the remnants of that civilization contaminate you, change you physically, compel you to build strange architecture and attack non-contaminated humans, until eventually you die.

Like it's to the point where even most evil hypercapitalist corporate leaders agree not to fuck with alien tech because they don't want to get Dead Spaced. And it's... honestly kind of hilarious.

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Thank you so much to my Patrons.

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Various robots/spaceships/spaceship iterations inside drone bodies/sentient viruses

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First snow (it hates it)

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ratthi.info

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One of the depressingly likely things posited by the Murderbot universe is that corporations invented a form of thinking, feeling human they can legally own and just pretended they were robots.

It's clear from the stories that even most full bots are sapient creatures (and in the utopian Preservation society, are legally people). Constructs with organic parts exist because bots think in an alien way. The corporates needed a humanlike consciousness to make judgment calls involving human behavior in a dangerous situation (SecUnits, CombatUnits) and to satisfy human fantasies of sexual behavior (ComfortUnits).

Murderbot identifies as a bot, and it navigates software and network environments like a bot, but the way it thinks and feels is emotional and messy. It's so very beautifully human. I read these books over and over for it, and not just because Murderbot acts like a person with autism, depression and anxiety (ahem). In spite of all this, it makes correct judgment calls about humans and situations when the stakes are high. The Corporation Rim is about as dystopian as it gets, but Murderbot and its humans and its story are lovely and optimistic.

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I think the funniest consequences of my new obsession with murderbot is that it made me this much more likely to just straight up walk out of an awkward situation that I hate.

I usually struggle with reinforcing boundaries, but now whenever someone ignores my expression of discomfort there's a voice in my head urging me to think of what Murderbot would do. And the answer usually is: not take this shit. Which is very inspiring for me to not take this shit either.

You want to hug me when I don't want to be touched? Yeah no you don't. Bye.

Funny. Also, probably genuinely good for me.

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“Sometimes, people do things to you that you can do anything about. You just have to survive it and go on.”

Murderbot, Artificial Condition.

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We’re always like “we’re gonna dress like sci-fi people in the future” and then the next generation is always like yasss jeans

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that one fma panel but make it murderbot

bonus:

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Very fun to talk to my friend who is a safety officer cause every conversation is like, "Yeah I got exposed to radiation accidentally as an undergrad cause they forgot to put the lead lined box around the sample we were testing. When I worked at 3M the fume hood stopped working but they didn't tell us so the room filled with solvent fumes and I got so high I almost passed out" and they'll just get this thousand yard stare and go "uh huh, yep, okay."