Murderbot Diaries 2-5 by Martha Wells
Jun. 28th, 2020 10:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsArtificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, Network Effect
4/5. Finally sat down and read these straight through. Confession time: I hadn't read beyond the first novella mostly because I find some of the ways people talk about Murderbot (so relatable! So cute!) deeply weird and off-putting. And maybe now I know why.
Shotgunning these let me pinpoint what I like about them, which is Murderbot's increasingly complex relationships with other artificial beings – a robot, a ship AI, another security unit. And here's the thing. These are books in a long tradition of science fiction about personhood and how to attain it. That's the arc of these stories, Murderbot the construct is constructing a new concept of self. And it's specifically a concept that rejects being a mirror of, or sometimes even a response to, human personhood. Murderbot doesn't want to look too much like a human, to have sex organs like humans, or often to process emotion like humans. And I don't think it's an accident that Murderbot's personhood seems to come into focus most for it in relation to other artificial beings, particularly ART. That's what I like. Speaking as someone who is periodically depersonalized by operation of ableism – yeah, when you are an adolescent constructing a self that the world does not want to admit exists, it's pretty harmful to do it under the guidance of some of the same kinds of people who depersonalize you. It just doesn't work.
(Relatedly, Murderbot is all, "Ah, ART loves teenagers, I don't get it," and also, "I guess ART kinda digs me too," and just . . . does not . . . connect those dots . . . at all.)
Anyway, all that is great. But to get there I have to put up with the ways I find these books . . . insipid maybe. Troubling? IDK. Specifically when they set up Murderbot to essentially be a woobie – generally when it depersonalizes itself the most by treating itself as an object meant for killing -- you can just feel the multiple layers of human characters, author, and readers collectively going aw, I just want to give you a hug, and it's . . . not actually cool? Like stop that? It's kind of *gestures* a weird imposition of a kind of personhood that Murderbot doesn't understand, and to the extent it does, it actively rejects? And the books are really inconsistent about getting that versus exploiting the woobie for feelz.
4/5. Finally sat down and read these straight through. Confession time: I hadn't read beyond the first novella mostly because I find some of the ways people talk about Murderbot (so relatable! So cute!) deeply weird and off-putting. And maybe now I know why.
Shotgunning these let me pinpoint what I like about them, which is Murderbot's increasingly complex relationships with other artificial beings – a robot, a ship AI, another security unit. And here's the thing. These are books in a long tradition of science fiction about personhood and how to attain it. That's the arc of these stories, Murderbot the construct is constructing a new concept of self. And it's specifically a concept that rejects being a mirror of, or sometimes even a response to, human personhood. Murderbot doesn't want to look too much like a human, to have sex organs like humans, or often to process emotion like humans. And I don't think it's an accident that Murderbot's personhood seems to come into focus most for it in relation to other artificial beings, particularly ART. That's what I like. Speaking as someone who is periodically depersonalized by operation of ableism – yeah, when you are an adolescent constructing a self that the world does not want to admit exists, it's pretty harmful to do it under the guidance of some of the same kinds of people who depersonalize you. It just doesn't work.
(Relatedly, Murderbot is all, "Ah, ART loves teenagers, I don't get it," and also, "I guess ART kinda digs me too," and just . . . does not . . . connect those dots . . . at all.)
Anyway, all that is great. But to get there I have to put up with the ways I find these books . . . insipid maybe. Troubling? IDK. Specifically when they set up Murderbot to essentially be a woobie – generally when it depersonalizes itself the most by treating itself as an object meant for killing -- you can just feel the multiple layers of human characters, author, and readers collectively going aw, I just want to give you a hug, and it's . . . not actually cool? Like stop that? It's kind of *gestures* a weird imposition of a kind of personhood that Murderbot doesn't understand, and to the extent it does, it actively rejects? And the books are really inconsistent about getting that versus exploiting the woobie for feelz.
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Date: 2020-06-28 09:18 pm (UTC)I agree that there's a definite desire to anthropomorphize Murderbot, which is just as bad as any other version of it is. But I'm not sure if it's the author or the reader who performs that? I mean, there's definitely an opening the text leaves for allowing the reader to feel the hugs, but I'm conflicted if it's a function of the text or a function of "our" collective desire to see the Virgin Mary in a potato...
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Date: 2020-06-28 09:29 pm (UTC)Eh, I think Martha Wells is definitely setting this up on purpose. It's a very fannish sensibility she brings, which makes sense, considering she's spent a lot of time in fannish spaces AFAIK. It's that oh, honey sensibility. And sometimes she subverts it -- Dr. Mensa [sp] specifically stating that it was wrong for her to try to bring Murderbot home with her right off and that she underestimated Murderbot's selfhood and capacity to get by in the world. And sometimes she leans waaaay into it and it gets weird for me.
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Date: 2020-06-28 10:13 pm (UTC)I think you're right that human characters, readers, and the author keep feeling, "aw, I just want to give you a hug," and then having to think, "It doesn't want your hug, it wants you to leave it alone." I didn't find it inconsistent, though; I thought it was contrasting the way I feel about Murderbot with the way I think about Murderbot in order to make the point that Murderbot is a person but not the same kind of person I am, so there is translation that has to happen for my feeling of goodwill to come across as an expression of goodwill.
I'll be thinking about your comment during the rest of my reading.
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Date: 2020-07-07 07:26 am (UTC)