The Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells
The Murderbot Diaries! I'm currently on book 6 (Fugitive Telemetry). I started listening to the audio books a couple weeks ago, then promptly started picking up the physical books from the library when I ran out of borrows. I am having a fantastic time with this antisocial, media-loving, killing machine. It's been such a long time since I've been so completely sucked into a story so quickly. I've just purchased the box set of the original four books and once I finish Fugitive Telemetry and System Collapse I plan on rereading and using this space to collect my thoughts about each book in this series!
On ART and MB
I recently finished Network Effect and I've found myself thinking about ART and Murderbot's relationship. Even excluding everything in Artificial Condition, their relationship in Network Effect is absolutely crazy.
If you start chronologically, ART's crew answers a distress call and then suddenly everyone it loves is in danger. There are alien remnants infecting it. The strange people that have boarded it have taken it's crew hostage. What can it do to save it's people? What can it do to save itself? Who does it know that could possibly help? It could only be the SecUnit it spent so much time getting to know. It offer's MB as a weapon for the hostiles. It saves a copy of itself and creates a message that only the SecUnit could understand. It's the only one that could possibly save it. When they get to MB the hostiles shoot at MB's humans and in its efforts to adjust it's guns aims, get's itself deleted...
MB and it's humans are being attacked by an unknown hostile ship. It has to protect Dr. Mensa's family. It has to protect it's family. But this ship... it's... ART?? It couldn't be it's friend, right?? Right?? Murderbot and it's humans get kidnapped. ART. The ship has to be ART. The halls of the ship are haunted by MBs memories of everything the two of them did. Everything they went through together. Rough first meetings. Media. Feed leaning and handholding. Arguements. Configuration changes. There's not sign of ART. MB is standing in ART's corpse...
Except... The lights keep flickering. And it's ART. There's no way it's dead right?? It can't be dead, right? MB needs to take care of Amena. It needs to do its job and figure out what's going on here. It needs to KILL every one of the hostiles on this ship. And make it HURT. That's what it's going to do. Why does it feel like collapsing against a wall?? SecUnits don't do that.
Then, there's the message... Worldhoppers. ART's favorite show. "I'm trapped in my own body" ART's alive. ART has to be alive in there somewhere. MB is bleeding and the hostiles are closing in but it has to look for ART it has to.
There's a file. A suspicious file. It's locked under a password. What password would ART put on a backup of it's kernel?? A backup of itself?? MB tries something. It works. The password was it's, Murderbots, hard feed address... ART made the password to the core of itself what it calls Murderbot. The thing only it could call it.
As more of MBs humans file into ART, it slams its presence into the feed "DROP YOUR WEAPONS." They do. "Don't hurt my humans, ART" "I'm not going to hurt your humans, you little idiot."
Last Updated: 5/30/2025