Hank Green and Martha Wells discuss All Systems Red. This episode was originally released to subscribers in April 2020.
As the first guest curator for Life’s Library, Hank Green selected All Systems Red, a science fiction novella about a self-aware cyborg named Murderbot. In this episode, Hank and Martha Wells, the author, discuss writing characters that are smarter than themselves, which real-life show Murderbot’s favorite soap is based on, and the dystopia of our corporate world.
This episode was originally released to subscribers in April 2020. The Life’s Library Discord and subscriptions are now closed after a wonderful three years of reading together. Check out past books at www.lifeslibrarybookclub.com, Twitter, and Instagram.
Life’s Library logo by Bethany Mannion.
Hank Green: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the first ever guest-curated episode of the Life's Library podcast. I'm your first guest curator. I'm Hank Green and instead of John and Rosianna talking together about a book, instead, you get me talking to the author of the book, which is really wonderful that I get to do that. Martha Wells is the author of many books, and most recently of the Murderbot Chronicles—a four-novella series with an upcoming novel in May of 2020. And—which is very exciting. And we, as part of Life's Library, read the first novella in that series, All Systems Red. So this podcast will have spoilers about All Systems Red, and I'm very excited to have Martha Wells here with us today. Hello!
Martha Wells: Hi, thank you for having me.
Hank: My first book was coming out. I went to see—to the Barnes and Noble corporate office and the sci-fi fantasy buyer there—the guy was in charge of sci-fi and fantasy.
Martha: Mhm.
Hank: I went into his office and he was like, very sweet and I got to meet and chat with him and he did not let me leave without a copy of Artificial Condition, which I then read without having read All Systems Red.
Martha: Oh!
Hank: And he was like, I can't—I don't have the first one, but read this one. And he just shoved it into my hands and made me go away. So that was wonderful. I think you have a lot of champions for this book because it's really different and I think special.
Martha: Oh, thank you. And yeah, it's been really amazing, the response to it. It's—I haven't had anything like that before. And so it's just kind of floored me.
Hank: I'm not sure. Is this the first, like, straight science fiction you've written?
Martha: Yes, basically. I've done mostly fantasy novels and a few media tie-ins. I did a Star Wars novel—
Hank: Mhm. Right.
Martha: —and two Stargate Atlantis novels. I was always a science fiction fan. I read it a lot growing up and I read it a lot now, so it wasn't too different for me, but it was just—this was a story that I couldn't really—I didn't feel like I could tell or wanted to tell in a fantasy setting. It was really a science fiction story.
Hank: Did that feel like a departure for you? Did that feel like doing something new or did it just feel like—
Martha: Um, it didn't feel that new because again, I'm so familiar.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: I've read so much science fiction over the years. It didn't feel that unfamiliar.
Hank: You seem to have—I think, like anyone, not anticipated that the world would be this ready for an action sci-fi story about a, you know, murderbot. That was not a strength fantasy, not like a masculine power fantasy, but about flaws and frustration in human nature. But you still wanted—like, why did you want to do that?
Martha: I don't really know. I just—that was where the character went for me.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: It was a very—I knew when I first started—I don't usually write in first person, either. I usually write in third person. And so it just—the first person perspective and the character talking a lot about its feelings, it just—that's just where it seemed to go for me and that's where the story was.
Hank: Right. I guess—
Martha: This person was trapped in the situation, and I wanted to really get into their feelings about it.
Hank: I guess it's not surprising for me that you wanted to get into their feelings about it, because that is—you know, that's your vein. You're not going to write a Jack Ryan novel.
Martha: Right.
Hank: But the question is why write about a murderbot? Like why pick that to be a character that you felt like was really interesting?
Martha: Again, I'm not really sure. The way it came to me as I was working on The Harbors of The Sun, which was the last book and in the fantasy series I've been doing. And that was a really intense book to write and while I was almost done with it, I suddenly got the idea for the murderbots for All Systems Red, which was originally going to be a short story with kind of a depressing ending.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: And the scene that came to me first was Murderbot in the cubicle with Dr. Mensah kind of doing that transgressive action of knocking on the cubicle to talk to it—
Hank: Right.
Martha: —and ask if it was okay.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: And so I got that scene down and made some notes and then made myself finish the novel—the novel draft, and then went back to it and started working on it.
Hank: Did that feel like it was part of the—did it come to you as part of the story you were working on, of that larger book—
Martha: No.
Hank: —or was it just a completely separate thought?
Martha: It was completely separate. It's like—I'd been working so hard. I think I was getting a lot of ideas at that time.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: And a lot of them—sort of didn't come to fruition, but this one did. And this was the one that I was really most interested in.
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: And also I had been writing a book with several different characters over quite a long period of time and giving this big epic fantasy feel to it.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: And so going into something that was completely different—in first person, focusing on really one character—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —and the relationships with the other people and just kind of really focusing in on how that person felt was pretty much a big change.
Hank: Was there any, uh, personal exploration in that for you, in the creation of Murderbot?
Martha: Yeah, there's a lot of personal exploration, really. It's—I put a lot of my own feelings in it. So I was writing it in 2016. And so a lot of my anger about what was going on in the world—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —like everything I was mad about, everything I was irritated about, I just kind of put it into—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —the Murderbot stories.
Hank: Yeah. I mean, that is a bigger question, too. I mean, your—I mean this world—like Murderbot's world anyway, not necessarily the whole universe—it seems like PreservationAux is sort of a nice place. But Murderbot's world is very dystopian. But if I was in its situation, it would be a nightmare.
Martha: Yeah.
Hank: But even like—even not like being Murderbot, but being this team of people, having to interface with this corporate reality where, you know, basically this—there's sort of a monopoly that controls everything and it's mining every single opportunity for revenue. And that's basically a tax on every moment of everyone's life.
Martha: Mhm.
Hank: Feels a little bit like—you know, to me, it feels very—because I live a lot of my life in sort of social media world. It feels a lot like my concerns about what—like how we are being treated in our—when we live in our internet spaces.
Martha: Mhm.
Hank: We are just being treated as like, everything we do is an opportunity for monetization and every way they can do that. It's sort of like, we're just like, okay, I guess, you know, every conversation is being recorded and mined for data, and everyone knows the corporation is doing that, even though the corporation says they aren't.
Martha: And you feel like you don't have any choice.
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: And in a lot of cases, you don't have any choice if you want to communicate with other people, so.
Hank: That's very true and worrying.
Martha: Yeah.
Hank: And didn't occur to me until the second viewing, how—part of what makes the worldbuilding—part of how to do worldbuilding quickly is to make things sort of reflective of our reality, but different. And I think this is one way we're all sort of like, oh yeah, it makes sense that there would be a world where there's no privacy anymore on the corporate—like, we sort of live inside of a corporate state that controls every interaction.
Martha: Mhm.
Hank: And you can't do anything without buying its insurance and leasing its property and it just feels a little bit like that worldbuilding doesn't have that much weight to pull because we're kind of in a way there. Now of course, our world is not as dystopian as your world. But a really interesting thing, I think, about the dystopia of the corporate world is that it's not discussed as a dystopia. It's just the world.
Martha: Mhm. It's amazing how quickly we accept it.
Hank: Right, but like a lot—
Martha: Amazing and scary.
Hank: —dystopian literature isn't written that way. It's written like, here, it's so bad. Look at how bad everything is. Whereas this is like, here's the world. Everyone just lives with it. That scares me.
Martha: It scares me, too. And I think that's what I was working out a lot when I was writing these—when I was writing the stories. And also, I think it's a bit worse than people realize—I know some people seem to shy away from the central point. They talk about Murderbot coming to consciousness and then, you know, getting into watching the media and things like that. And I think it becomes more clear in the later stories and the novel that all the SecUnits and Comfort Units are conscious.
Hank: Mhm. Right, of course.
Martha: But they just—they're completely controlled.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: So it's just interesting to me, the way that some people have kind of shied away—have liked the story, or commented on the story or the novella, but have kind of shied away from that point. And also the people who are very resistant to seeing the SecUnit situation as being slavery.
Hank: Oh, that's interesting. I mean, that's very—
Martha: And that was interesting too.
Hank: That's even very on the page. Like they say it out loud.
Martha: Yeah. I mean, yeah. Several of the characters, you know, say it pretty much straight up. Murderbot says it at a few points. So yeah, it's just—that's just kind of an interesting—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —it's been interesting to me to see the way different people react to it and I kind of wasn't expecting that particular reaction, but—
Hank: Well, it is sort of like, Murderbot itself doesn't talk about that in a way that reflects the injustice of it. Murderbot is sort of like—it's pretty sarcastic and angsty and tongue-in-cheek. And like, doesn't like its situation. But like, especially in the first book. I don't—I can see it—you know, it's not on the page—it's in the page in terms of people talking about it, but not in terms of the magnitude of the injustice.
Martha: Yeah. And in the later novellas and the book, also, it gets a bit into Murderbot more confronting its feelings about it.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: And that comes through, I think, or I've tried to make it come through in how it talks about itself—
Hank: Right.
Martha: —and how it talks about the company, and I think I reveal more of that. But it's just Murderbot's world, and it's never experienced anything else.
Hank: Right.
Martha: And it knows it's wrong. And you as the reader know it's wrong.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: But this is the reality.
Hank: Right. It's almost like Murderbot doesn't necessarily know it's wrong. It just knows that it doesn't like it. It's like, this is unpleasant. But is there even a morality at play here? It's like weather. It's like, oh, this is a hailstorm.
Martha: Yeah.
Hank: Like this isn't immoral, it's just bad.
Martha: I think it knows it's wrong, but the idea of morality in its situation, that the company would have any kind of morality about that—
Hank: Right.
Martha: —it doesn't have any—
Hank: Right.
Martha: —it knows that that would never happen.
Hank: So I'm very interested in motivation, both in terms of literature and in terms of living my life and figure—and trying to both understand and maybe even a little bit control my own motivation. So there's this larger motivation of the murderbot that sort of, like—uncontrolled—like they have no control over this motivation. There's a governor module that tells it what it has to do. But then, there's this deeper motivation. Once Murderbot hacks its governor module, it still kind of wants to do its job. It has humans. It wants to protect them. It doesn't turn into this—the sort of societally-constructed myth of a Murderbot without a governor module is just a death machine.
Martha: Mhm.
Hank: So it has this deeper motivation. And that's really interesting to me. I think that—of course, the novel wouldn't work without it, but it left me wondering: since all murderbots seem to have, or since all SecUnits seem to have—they look the same, they move the same. It left me wondering, if the governor module is a thing that controls them directly, but they are also constructed organisms, can we call that Murderbot's motivation? Or was that something that was actually programmed into it upon creation?
Martha: That's a question I think Murderbot wrestles with a little bit in the novellas.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: Not necessarily—trying to think how to put this. I think it sort of comes out later on how—what does it want to do? It has a lot of problems talking about its feelings, at least to the humans.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: It's pretty clear about them in some ways to itself, but you know, what does it want to do? Well, he wants to not do anything. The thing it thinks it begins to realize it's good at is protecting people, saving people, figuring things out. It deals a little bit with that of—and I don't think I ever get into—at least straight out in the text—the question of is this programming or is this—
Hank: A person.
Martha: —just a person.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: Because in a lot of ways, our brains are programmed, too. There's programming in our brains. It's just our organic, you know, programming as a life form.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: To want things like food, to sleep.
Hank: Right, and—
Martha: So is that much different from, you know, an actual—
Hank: Right.
Martha: a machine program.
Hank: And I think that this—it also gets to the dehumanization of even people in our own society.
Martha: Uh-huh.
Hank: Right now, who are trained for combat. We imagine them as both a little bit more than and a little bit less than people.
Martha: Mhm.
Hank: They are doing this great service and they're doing this big thing and they're also—but also we have to be okay with the fact that they—we as a society are putting them in a higher chance of death than the rest of us. And there's a dehumanization that comes along with combat, at all, ever. And—
Martha: Yes. And I don't think it's even just combat. I think it's in our society, it's almost—it's the people who work in the fields—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —and pick—do—with the agricultural industry and people who work in fast food and anybody in the service industry.
Hank: Right.
Martha: It's like, there's a lot—the division between—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: The divisions there—it's almost like people are—it's dehumanization, it's objectification. The people who need those services, but don't want to give anybody who does them an internal life.
Hank: Mhm. And creating this very—by making this a novel that takes place entirely from Murderbot's point of view, and having you be inside of its head and also seeing that what's in there isn't anything like what we'd imagine. It's similar to when they first see its face and know that like, oh—or especially when it comes out in the—it's called the skin suit is what I think is what you call it? It's like dressed normally.
Martha: Yeah.
Hank: And they're like, who's that? Who's this? There's somebody on—how did you get on the ship?
Martha: Yeah. Suddenly there's another person there.
Hank: That's very good and like, very real. But that reaction that they have is sort of similar to when you look at the cover of the book and then you read the first page of the book. It's like, there's sort of an incongruent-ness to that. And I read it first as an audiobook, so—I actually know Kevin R. Free—to like a person I know's voice juxtaposed with this picture of Master Chief from Halo a little bit, which is a very specific power fantasy.
Martha: Mhm.
Hank: To instead be like, there's an angsty teen under here. And that's another thing that I sort of picked up on my second read is that Murderbot feels kind of adolescent.
Martha: Yeah, I think it's because it's—it isn't really its age—it's actual age doesn't matter because it's actually—it's going through a lot of these things that human adolescents do. Hank: Mhm.
Martha: Because this has really been—it hasn't had very long time to think its own thoughts and not worry about, you know, triggering its governor module to kill it.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: So it's—this is all—it's going through a lot of the things that we go through as we grow up.
Hank: Right.
Martha: But it's having to do it really fast with a lot of of this other input coming in.
Hank: We talked a little bit about the governor module and motivation and also like, are they sort of all built the same, to have the same, like both external control, but also internal control. There are also what we would consider now, like Murderbot seems to have an anxiety disorder or just extreme disinterest in social situations, at least. Is that something that you feel like might be something that was intentionally given to them as—like it makes them better at their job?
Martha: That's—I don't think so. I don't think I had that in mind.
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: I think it was just the pressure of having the governor module and then their situation causes these problems. Murderbot plays it for laughs, almost. Like it does a lot of really serious things, but where—it talks about—Dr. Mensah comments on giving them more intelligence, you know, to make them work better, basically, as a horrible—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: I can't remember the exact line, a horrible compromise and Murderbot at times acknowledges it's got anxiety and depression. It gives you anxiety and depression because you know what's—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —you know what your situation is. You're smart enough to know what's going on. Yeah, I don't think that was given to them intentionally. Again, it's just sort of the company being really callous of what it's doing and and not really taking into consideration anything that the profit motive—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —oh, we'll make more money if they're more autonomous. So we make them more intelligent and not thinking about what—
Hank: Right.
Martha: —that's going to do to the individuals.
Hank: And it does feel reflective of reality, though, that some people are like, oh, you're awkward in social situations so you must not be not capable of a variety of other things. Whereas Murderbot—it's sort of nice to see a character who's like, I would rather, if at all possible, to be watching television right now, but who can also take down a giant fang worm without a problem. Or, you know, with some problems. There are things that you can take on that are not—that are very different from—it's a very different challenge. So I think that that is empowering, I think, and that might be one reason—does that feel like one reason why it might resonate?
Martha: I think it does. And the fact that—it's actually good. It doesn't, it's really—it disparages itself a lot, but it is really actually good at things. It's good at writing code. It's good at—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —breaking into systems and making them do what it needs to them to do. It's good at helping people. It's very—it's incredibly observant.
Hank: Yeah, and it's extremely smart.
Martha: Yes.
Hank: That's always something that I struggle with is writing smart characters because I feel like—can you—how do you write someone who is smarter than you?
Martha: Yeah.
Hank: It feels very phony. Is that just a—there is an advantage that you know more about the world, maybe, than they do, so you can let them know things that they—
Martha: Yeah.
Hank—or figure things out faster than you would.
Martha: I think it's easier to write characters who are smarter than you when you're controlling all the circumstances. I think you just kind of have to do your best there and hope for the best, basically.
Hank: And then people meet the author and they're like, you don't seem nearly as smart as your characters.
Martha: Yeah, yeah.
Hank: And it's like, well, I don't know everything about the world.
Martha: Yeah.
Hank: I know everything about my world, but not everything about this world. This world is very confusing.
Martha: It's like, I'm great when I'm making stuff up, yeah. The rest of the time, I don't know.
Hank: So Murderbot loves soaps, it seems, or at least some kind of televised drama things. Do you—
Martha: Yeah. They're not exactly soap operas. They're all based on a real show.
Hank: Oh!
Martha: And actually, The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon is based on—is kind of the space version of How to Get Away With Murder.
Hank: Oh, okay, cool.
Martha: So it's more of a—not necessarily just a soap, but a soap with a lot of drama and action.
Hank: Sure. Mhm. That's cool. I didn't know that. That's great! I was going to ask you, what is your Sanctuary Moon?
Martha: A lot. I love TV. I'm like Murderbot. That's the thing I share with it. I like to binge-watch and I have almost every TV service that's available. There's a couple I need to get, but it's like—I watch all the different things, so a lot of things, I like a lot of—I like mysteries and suspense—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —and drama, historical mysteries or contemporary mysteries, and then a lot of science fiction and fantasy.
Hank: Do you got any suggestions for me right now?
Martha: Oh, suggestions. I love that—the Watchmen—
Hank: Mm, that was really good.
Martha: —that just finished. There's a new one on HBO, a new mystery—a serial killer, looks like. A thriller I'm going to watch later. And I love stuff that's not quite so intense. I love The Brokenwood Mysteries, which is a New Zealand—
Hank: Hm.
Martha: —mystery program. It's more cozy mysteries
Hank: Ah, I love cozy mysteries.
Martha: Yeah, and—
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: All different things, though. The Witcher—I liked the Witcher. I was not a big Game of Thrones fan. My husband really liked it—
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: —but I never got into it. But—oh, and just things like Stargate and Stargate Atlantis—
Hank: Mm.
Martha: —and Farscape—
Hank: That's nice.
Martha: —and all those kinds of shows.
Hank: Yeah. I just started watching a Spanish drama that takes place on—I think it's the fifties and it takes place on a transatlantic crossing and a cruise ship.
Martha: Oh, High Seas?
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: Yeah, I see that one. I've got that on my list to watch—
Hank: It's really good.
Martha: —because it looks really good.
Hank: It's so ridiculous but I love it. It is very soapy. It's like Downton Abbey but Spanish and—
Martha: About a boat—
Hank: —on a boat.
Martha: —in Spanish. Yeah.
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: It sounds perfect.
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: I love—that's why I really like getting these new services, because you can get these shows from other countries.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: And get the subtitles and then some of them are actually dubbed, I think. But actually I get to the point where I like to hear the actors' voices.
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: So I just usually do the subtitles.
Hank: I do subtitles. Yeah.
Martha: And actually, I think it's more relaxing that way, because it's sort of like combining reading a book with watching TV.
Hank: Right. It prevents me from picking up my phone.
Martha: Yes—
Hank: I just can't—
Martha: —you can't be distracted. You look away—especially in some of the really fast-moving mysteries—you look away for like two seconds—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —and you've missed half the plot there, so.
Hank: Yeah, I really liked that.
Martha: I really like that now.
Hank: Watchmen was like that, where it demanded you pay attention every moment.
Martha: Yes.
Hank: I like that, personally. I think my wife would prefer to be able to look down at Candy Crush every once in a while. But we're going through Alta Mar right now and it's really fun—or High Seas. So you did not have a lot—just a couple more questions here—you did not have a lot of space for worldbuilding in this book because it's quite short. I love science fiction short stories and I am always amazed at how quickly a universe can be constructed. But this one feels really real and I wonder, is that a process of writing out a lot more than we know? Like you do you know much more than we know? And is that written down or is that just in your head?
Martha: Right now it's just in my head. Well, I've already done the novel and some other things—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —set in this world, so—
Hank: What are some other things?
Martha: Some of it's written down.
Hank: What do you mean by other things?
Martha: Well, I can't tell you.
Hank: Ah, okay. Exciting.
Martha: —because some—yeah, I can tell you about the novel that—when I did the first one, I actually wrote it pretty quickly, which is different for me.
Hank: Mm.
Martha: Usually it takes me a long time and it has taken me a long time with the other novels and the novella—and the other novellas and the novel, just trying to get Murderbot's perspective right and bring in all these other perspectives it has through its different accesses to different systems and cameras and everything. That just takes a long time.
Hank: Right.
Martha: But the worldbuilding—I try to keep in mind, it's all from Murderbot's perspective and the things it pays attention to and the things it—
Hank: Right.
Martha: —the information it has—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —is not the same as what the humans have. And so it defines things in ways that humans don't.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: For one thing, it talks—it always separates out humans and augmented humans. That's not something that humans would do.
Hank: Okay. Interesting.
Martha: Because to them, they're all—they don't really think that being a difference, but to Murderbot, an augmented human would have a better chance of realizing what it's doing.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: That it—especially when it was still on these company contracts, because an augmented human would have had a better chance of realizing that it had hacked its governor module.
Hank: Right, right.
Martha: And in fact, it is Garafin whose has brain augments—
Hank: Right!
Martha: That he's the one who realizes it.
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: So that's why it separates them out like that.
Hank: I had actually thought that was a world decision where everybody in your world—in that sort of further separates SecUnits and other constructed beings. Like there's another step between them and humans. So it's like humans and then augmented humans and then SecUnits. And so you're even further away from being human because of that. But that is—
Martha: Well, to Murderbot it is another step—
Hank: Right.
Martha: —but to the humans it's not.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: And also it tends to—it only refers to people by one name and it's actually referring to them by their ID that they use in the feed.
Hank: Oh, cool. Yeah.
Martha: So there's a lot of little things like that that I just haven't—I've come up with, but I've never really found a spot where I could actually—
Hank: Yup.
Martha: —talk about it because it's so sort of intrinsic to how Murderbot sees the world and it would—there's another thing with the novel. I don't want to spoil it, but where Murderbot doesn't—never gives a name to "the company."
Hank: Right.
Martha: And it's actually not called "the company." It has a name, like the other corporations in the world do, but Murderbot never uses it. And so I was actually was able to find a place where I could talk about that just a little bit.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: And things like that, it's just—trying to keep in mind Murderbot's perspective and how different it is from a human living in the world.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: It's still giving you a lot of information to let you get the feel of what this place is like.
Hank: Yeah. I love that understanding of the universe, like a single perspective understanding, gives you a particular lens through which to see the world. And it feels comprehensive to the reader because you only have the one perspective to view it through, but you don't have to do as much huge info dumps and like, "Okay, what you really have to understand is that there's these three different corporations and they all—"
Martha: Yeah.
Hank: "—but there are also non-corporate worlds and here's how they work." It's just sort of like Murderbot existing inside of it.
Martha: Yeah.
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: Like you never hear anything about what life is like on planets, hardly, except—because the only thing it really knows about are mining camps—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —and space station, you know, even the rest of the station, it just knows about these terminals where you go back and forth to get on the ships.
Hank: Yeah. Right.
Martha: That's really—that's where most of his experience is.
Hank: Yeah. That leads me to a—probably a really big and common question, which is at the end of the novella, Murderbot has an opportunity to be in a safe place. So even if it's not like, "Ugh, I don't really want to live in a world where I'm like, what am I going to do there on my SecUnit?" But like, it's extremely dangerous to be a SecUnit with a hacked governor module in the world where to Murderbot chooses to continue living. And it feels right—I'm not saying it doesn't feel right—but I am curious about its motivations.
Martha: Well, I went back and forth in that and originally again, when it was a short story Murderbot actually died in the end.
Hank: Right.
Martha: And as I was writing it, I knew it needed to be longer. And also I was like, that's too depressing. I don't want to do that.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: And I like this character too much. But its motivation there—in some ways, at this point, it would have been like trading up to better captors—
Hank: Right
Martha: —basically. It would not—they would never have seen it—well, they probably—you know, it would have been a much more different dynamic. They would not have seen it as a free person.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: And by the end of the fourth novella, it's established to its friends and to itself that it can navigate this world.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: And it can take care of itself.
Hank: Right. I mean, it's like, of course, Dr. Mensah's amazing and sees clearly and from the beginning that this is a person, even if not a human. But is there some element of, this is patronizing. Like you are imagining that I cannot live in the world, but I can?
Martha: Yeah, and it's not—let's see if I can explain this. It's—there is a bit of patronizing. It's like, well, we want to take care of you and—which is nice, but they'll be able to—they need to stand on equal footing.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: I don't think Murderbot probably articulated any of this stuff to itself when it was making this decision—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —but it didn't want to have decisions made for it anymore. It didn't want to be taken care of by humans.
Hank: Right.
Martha: Again, it's like, it's looking for an equal footing and just at this time, the best way to do that was to leave and to see if it could live on its own. And again, it wasn't really thinking about—it wasn't really expressing a lot of that. It was just—it had been—even after it hacked the governor module, it was staying on these company contracts because of fear, really, of what to do. It's like, it's been stuck here. It's afraid of the unknown, basically—of going out, what would it do? How could it live? And that's, I think, a very human emotion, being afraid of the unknown. And actually when I was growing up, I used to have—had problems with agoraphobia. So I was kind of hearkening back to that a little bit, but now that it's seen the outside of the station. It's seen the outside of the deployment center and seeing what the station is like and seeing maps and, you know, transport schedules and kind of realized, you know, I could do this.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: And it's never thought of itself being able to navigate the outside world without its armor and now the armor is taken away and it realizes people aren't looking at me. People don't know what I am here.
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: I can do this. And so it's just kind of a leap of faith, really. Kind of going out—of knowing it had to go out and find out what it wanted.
Hank: Mhm. Do you get people often, like, am I wrong? That that's something that people are like—
Martha: Yeah.
Hank: "But you should just go with Dr. Mensah."
Martha: Yeah, there's people that do that and don't understand. And "why don't you just do this?"
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: And it's sort of like, eh.
Hank: Do you feel like you have—how much control do you feel like you have over, let's just say Murderbot in particular. Can you as an author—are there times when you feel like you can modify its behavior in order to get something done in the plot? Or is it just like this character is too solidified?
Martha: I kind of have to figure out what it would do. That's kind of the problem. And it's an eternal problem with point of view as an author—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —when you're writing someone who is not like you.
Hank: Right.
Martha: With Murderbot, I do share a lot of the same problems and issues.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: We have a lot of the same issues. So I can generally work with that pretty easily, but having to think about its abilities and that's what happens with any characters, because—I noticed this when I'm teaching young or beginning authors. That's a big problem is people will come up with this character that has all these abilities and yet they're writing the character as if it's them.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: And when you're working with POV, especially when you're first kind of really getting into it is, you need to step outside yourself and think—from this other put your—run your software on somebody else's hardware, basically, and thinking, what would I do if I could do these things? If I was this person, if I had their—not only their abilities, but their problems and their—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —their—
Hank: Well.
Martha: —their interaction with the world. And that's kind of the thing, is I have to sit there and look at, okay, in this situation, I wouldn't do anything because I'd be scared, but Murderbot might be scared, but it would also have all these other options—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —can it break into the system? Can it see what's going on over here and can it do this and can, you know, so you have to kind of try to take into that—take that into account. And also I'm kind of trying to get across the fact that it exists on a faster plane than everybody else—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —because its processing ability, it's able to—
Hank: That comes across really well.
Martha: Oh, good.
Hank: It really functions. It's—it's not like a thing that is taught in craft school, you know, like there's no, here's how you have a character who thinks faster than other people. Like it just—but it—yeah, it really works.
Martha: Yeah, I'm glad because I work really hard on it! In the novel, there's sections in particular were three or four different things are going on in different places at the same time while Murderbot's in a fight scene.
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: So it's skipping through these different—that it actually thinks that it can see through either various systems or cameras and so it's skipping through all this.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: At the same time, it's having to fight someone off. So those—and it's just technically, it's—there's the emotional stuff, of trying to get the emotional stuff right. And plus the technical stuff.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: So, yeah, it's hard.
Hank: Yeah!
Martha: It took me eighteen months to write the novel, which is unusual for me. Usually it's only—it's about a year for a novel.
Hank: Yeah, are you a write-every-day-er?
Martha: I try to. I don't—I try—also, I don't beat myself up if I don't write every day—
Hank: Sure. Sure.
Martha: —because I know sometimes if I'll get a whole lot done one day and then the next day, not very much. So I think it kind of—trying to push myself—
Hank: Sure.
Martha: —doesn't really work.
Hank: Sure. You know, not only are you writing a character who—or that is very different from you. But you—sort of like having to write a character who is not human.
Martha: Mhm.
Hank: Like this is a person, but this is not a human. And you have to—not only do you have to understand the character of Murderbot, you have to understand the character of SecUnits. And part of that is like thinking faster than the rest of us. But part of it is, you know, just like, what are my values? What is my worldview? What is my—how do I imagine other people? How do I imagine myself? What are my identities? And it's like—anytime—writing non-humans—I have had to do a little bit of in my two-book career. It's like, how am I supposed to think? Like, it's hard enough to think like another person.
Martha: Yeah.
Hank: How do I—how do you think like another—like a—you know, and obviously this line—like Murderbot is very clear that "I am not a human." Whereas I, am a reader. I'm like, "Well, I mean, but like I don't want to say that you're not a human" but Murderbot's like, "I'm not."
Martha: Yeah.
Hank: "Don't try to get me. Don't try to pretend at my gender, because like, that is totally foreign to me. Don't try to, you know, don't try to put me in this bucket with you because I'm not you."
Martha: It takes a lot of experience. I think one of the reasons why I was able to do this at this time is I'd been working on the fantasy series, the Books of the Raksura, is all non-human characters. So I'd been working on that since—well, the first book came out in 2011, I think.
Hank: Okay.
Martha: And it's been, one two three—five, yeah, five novels and two novella collections in the series. So it's something I've been working on—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —for quite a while. And I'd done non-human characters a little bit before that, but that was my first really big experience with it. So it just—it's kind of a habit of thought and just always kind of being aware of your point of view and really thinking about the character's physical abilities—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —how that would affect their thinking—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —and the way they would approach problems and really kind of keeping that in mind and keeping their world in mind.
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: It's kind of just a—when you're developing a fantasy or science fiction character that is not from Earth or anything, you have to—when you come up with their environment and how is that environment going to affect them. When you develop even a human character and you kind of have to just keep pushing that and saying, okay, well, this person is not human.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: How is their thinking different and how is their situation and the way their family situation, their—how did they get food? How did they do this? How did they do that? How did they move in this world? What are they afraid of?
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: You know, what do they want? What do they need? And you really have to kind of like try to balance all that and keep that in mind. So it's just a lot of hard work, basically. Writing is hard work, anyway—
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: —but I think writing non-human characters are—is harder.
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: But it's something you can do, which is just trying and—
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: —keeping up with it.
Hank: Right and like, who knows how good we are at it? No one will know, because—
Martha: No one will know. No one will be able to say, hey, I am expert—
Hank: There will never be a SecUnit to tell you you're wrong.
Martha: Yes. Yes, basically.
Hank: That's nice. But it feels very real. It feels very good. And to cap us off, I wanted to ask a question that's really—sort of logistical, which is the form of the novella. I don't—I read short stories. I read novels. And I don't—like novellas, just don't tend to come across my plate that often. And I really like it.
Martha: Mhm.
Hank: It's something that can jump my to-be-read pile because it's like, well, it's going to take me a couple—like a day at most, maybe, well, not a day. I'm a slow reader. It's going to take me a week at most. And it's like a sample plate, where I can be like—
Martha: Yeah.
Hank: —it's like a little bit—like literary tapas. But I don't see it—and it's really encouraging that Murderbot, I feel like caught on pretty big. And—but maybe that—because what I know about publishing is that publishers aren't going to make a bunch of things in a new format if there's no clear signs of that format succeeding. So that's encouraging, but is it something that you enjoy? Is it a form you enjoy?
Martha: Actually, yes, it is now. It's not something because I—before, I wasn't even much of a short story writer. I've done a few short stories—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —but mostly I wrote novels. And novellas started basically coming back. I think there were more short novels and novellas in pulp magazines.
Hank: Sure. Yup.
Martha: But as you know, things got more expensive. Novellas kind of died out a little bit because magazines didn't—a lot of magazines didn't want to carry them, or if they did want to print a novella, they only wanted to do one—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —per issue or split one between two issues or something like that. When eBooks really started to get—
Hank: Right.
Martha: —gather steam—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —is when novellas came back because a lot of people—a lot of authors started doing them themselves.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: Self-publishing them. And then the online magazines that don't—they're not constrained by paper costs—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —started—were also carrying novellas and I think it started to get more popular. And tor.com is—started out as mostly a novella publisher. They also did—a novella line—they also do novels, but they were doing a lot of novellas and it's a great way to sample debut authors, I think.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: And sort of got—you know, you find this one and it's like, wow, I really liked this person's writing style and I'm going to go look for all their—you know, their next work, their—you know, when they have a novel come out and they're doing these whole novella series—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —that people look forward to. So, yeah, and that's how I started reading novellas. I was reading more novellas because again, they were getting more popular and then tor.com did—oh, Sorcerer—The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson. And that was such a great—I think that was the first one they did. I think that was their—the debut novella for their line.
Hank: Cool.
Martha: That was such a great book, such a great little book and wonderful fantasy and very original. And so I'd been kind of following the other books that they were doing and reading them and everything. And so when I got the idea for the short story and then realized it's not going to be a short story, it needs to be longer. That's what I thought of doing. It's like, well, I could try to do—I could write this as a novella and see if, you know, it can be sold that way. And actually there was only going to be the one. I hadn't really thought about doing a series.
Hank: Hm.
Martha: And I think that was—I don't think tor.com had done a lot—I think that was still within their first or second year when they were publishing so they hadn't done, you know—
Hank: Mhm. Mhm.
Martha: —they had done many series. They didn't have time to do anything like that. But when they bought All Systems Red, they asked for a second novella. I mean, it's like, oh yeah, I can do a sequel to this. And then I wrote Artificial Condition. And then by the time I finished Artificial Condition, I had more of where the story was going. And I wanted to go ahead and see if I could do two more and then it just kind of took off from there.
Hank: That's great. That's great. I mean, like, was your editor there—like, this is—people were—like, before it was published, did they know that this was going to be—were they excited about it before that?
Martha: I think they really liked it, but I don't think they had—in the cover—the way they did the cover was brilliant. With the—the perception of the SecUnit on the cover.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: And then again, like you said, you opened the first page and it's completely different. It's clearly not what you were expecting.
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: It actually got labeled as robot horror early on by some places—
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: —which it's really not.
Hank: I mean—
Martha: It's kind of the opposite of that. It's human horror.
Hank: It is if you think about it, deep enough.
Martha: Robots being horrified by humans.
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: So I don't think they had any idea it was going to take off like that. It was just—I didn't either. It has just been—I just—sometimes I've just been numb with shock.
Hank: I mean, I mean that's really exciting.
Martha: What's going on?
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: It's like, yeah, it's this—it's so exciting I can't understand—like, I'm like Murderbot. I can't figure how to feel about it.
Hank: When I was prepping for this, I went to your Goodreads page and I noticed the top review is from Patrick Rothfuss and then I was scrolling down and there was one from Lois McMaster Bujold. Is there anybody—any feedback you've gotten that has been particularly soul-lifting?
Martha: When Ann Leckie—
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: —liked it.
Hank: Yeah.
Martha: That was—because I've admired her work so much. And when N. K. Jemisin—
Hank: Mhm.
Martha: —liked it, too.
Hank: Wow. Yeah.
Martha: She's someone else whose work I admire so much.
Hank: That's a lot of what it comes down to in this world is like—like having people—being appreciated by people you appreciate, but also just being appreciated generally.
Martha: Yeah. Yeah, it really is.
Hank: I'm so glad that I got a chance to pick a book. And I'm glad that I had been—had this thrust upon me so that we could pick you and also that you were able to take the time to chat with us.
Martha: Oh, thank you. I've really enjoyed it.
Hank: That's great. Thanks. Everybody, that was Martha Wells, author of All Systems Red and the rest of the Murderbot Chronicles, and also many other books and novellas and short stories. She's wonderful. You can find her stuff on the internet. I am now putting the Books of the Raksura on my list after that conversation. That was—made that fantasy series stand out as a potential cool next read. And it was a wonderful chat. I'm so happy to have been able to do it. And I'm really happy to have been a guest curator here on Life's Library. Thank you for your subscriptions. Thank you for being a part of this community. And I guess as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.