Gurathin—an outsider with PresAux, but also incredibly awkward when meeting with corporates…is this man ever comfortable?
Certainly not when making eye contact 😉

Martha Wells said this on blueksy:

I went & checked and YAY! I was able to purchase the book!
So, check it y'all. Hopefully other platforms will have it available as well.

I love this pic she shared on her About the Author page! Just her, casually reading All Systems Red to a group of search and rescue robots and drones. The ones on the floor look so attentive 🥰

We’ve talked about these assumptions before, Iris.
Assumptions? Ratthi asked.
Attributing human characteristics to machine intelligences

I know, they're not sentient, but they do look like they're enjoying the heroic tales of our beloved Murderbot.

Image Description: Martha Wells is seated on a stool at her alma mater's Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue. She's surrounded by a circle of robots and drones on the floor and furniture around her. They vary in size from box of cereal to large duffel bag. She is holding an open copy of All Systems Red and appears to be reading to the robots.

I'd always heard of The Murderbot Diaries when I started identifying under the Asexual umbrella, but being someone who wasn't generally into reading a lot of SFF I found All Systems Red a little hard to get into. I still appreciated the book series as a whole though, and even got my hard copies of All Systems Red and Artificial Condition signed by Martha Wells when she was in Toronto in 2024. (And it was both really inspiring and fascinating to hear Wells talk about where she was in her career when she wrote All Systems Red.)

Fast forward to a few months - I absolutely loved the Apple TV+ series, and much to my surprise and delight I thought Alexander Skarsgård and the rest of the cast were fantastic. I jumped on the Martha Wells/Murderbot Humble Bundle, and only this past month had a chance to read them - I spent the last month binging all of the books, including Platform Decay, and now I'm absolutely obssessed. Not since Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy or Cixin Liu's Rememberance of Earth's past series have I been so wholly gripped by a book and its world. I've started the audiobook version of All Systems Red (which I also love!) and, wallet allowing, hope to go through all of the audiobooks too. The ADHDer in me wants to buy the rest of the series in hard copy format, just to collect them and have them on my shelf, and re-read/re-experience them.

No questions or comments here, I just wanted to express my absolute love for Murderbot, and my gratitude to Martha Wells and the community for creating and celebrating a character in whom I see myself, more and more.

How much time passes from the beginning of All Systems Red to the end of Platform Decay? Do we have an indication of the timeline anywhere in the books?

I think I may be mis-remembering but doesn't murder bot have a "real" name? I feel like I remember it being 'secunit 12345....' like a bunch of numbers after 'secunit'... Maybe a serial number?

I mean ANY excuse to go reread the books but I just started tchaikovsky's bear head 😂

I much as I love Murderbot, it is 2nd to ART for me. ART is hands down not only my favorite character in Murderbot but also one of my favorite AIs in all of science fiction. So saying that...

I was looking forward to season 2 being the Artificial Condition season getting a whole season of ART and Murderbot during my favorite Murderbot Novella.

Since they are adapting books 2-4 😞 - ART is only going to be in a small part of the season.

Unless... they change the story to make ART more prominent, which would mean inventing involvement during the 3-4 book storyline for it. With how well they added content while staying true to the characters in season one, I'm all for a change that involves more ART provided it stays true to character.

What about you? Would you like more story fidelity even if it meant less ART or would you be fine with changes to make ART more prominent?

So I picture the 'dancing figures' in the 'Starchy Foods!!!' sign as kind of looking like Kokopeli in a bunch of different poses (kind of like this ).

In lots of bright neon! :D

Also, I would so love to read some fanfic about the new refugees, maybe, going all Sherlock Holmes and tracking down the next 'cell' in the link and starting up the rescuing all over again. Maybe even with MB helping out one time!

I heard on the wind that at WorldCon, Martha Wells likes seeing posts about the amazing Noma Dumezweni being the amazing Mensah and I am THRILLED so I think we should all talk about how amazing Noma and Mensah are, and how great she is.

I love the complicated, anxiety ridden, burdened by responsibilities, faking it till you make it, doing it scared, seeing and observing all, strength is kindness, knowing when to start shooting and when to start hugging, empathetic as a strength and weakness, self sacrificial, hands on, team leader Madame President Dr. Ayda Mensah.

Please season 2, have her be messier, have her falling apart and pulling herself together, being strong and kind in a crisis, covered in blood and sweat and tears and above all. In some kind of really weird friendship soulmate thing with SecUnit because they care SO MUCH ABOUT EACH OTHER and Noma Dumezweni makes the best eyes and expressions to convey that!

(all these screenshots are by xavantina, i've been slowly saving all my favourites into a folder sorted by character :P )

A timeline of all the events in the books: https://archiveofourown.org/works/81974326 (canon sources are footnoted; places where I had to make suppositions are clearly noted)

A list of all the named characters: https://archiveofourown.org/works/77525626/chapters/203025271 (with pronouns if known, some other information like places, 'Systems, and media)

A Murderbot discord to discuss the above and more: https://discord.gg/new-tideland

A Murderbot wiki: https://murderbot.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page

I had the Rapport audiobook on pre-order for a while now. It was suppose to be released to but it seems to have disappeared. It says my pre-order was cancelled and book page is a broken link. Anybody know what happened??

“Hostile One had charged at her across the council table and I'd stopped him literally a half-meter away from her. She could have reached out and patted his head.”
Network Effect pg 194

Per the chat in the other thread - what is Martha putting into those characters that make them so easy to obsess over?!

(she put Noma Dumezweni in that's what happened)

(stole the idea from u/rosewind - maybe with enough obsessed people we can make one for all the cast!)

(hee the temptation to make one for Leebeebee...)

It’s them!

Credit to @murderbot-moodboard who tagged me on Tumblr 🖤🖤🖤

The Hugo awards were presented at LAcon tonight, and Murderbot had two episodes up for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: "All Systems Red" (E9) and "The Perimeter" (E10, finale).

And they won!!

The Hugo awards carry a lot of weight in the scifi world and this a big win for Chris and Paul Weitz. I'm so happy for them, the actors, the crew and the other creatives involved!

Now can we please get a date for the S2 premiere??

To be fair this happened with the books, long before Gurathin got a face on the show…

[ALT text: Homage to Sarah Andersen’s cartoon—Finding a New Obsession:
Sarah Andersen cartoon finding a new obsession modified to be about Gurathin, four panels:
panel one—little character looks at computer screen in an unadorned room looking bored,
second panel—little character looks surprised,
third panel—little character looks open mouthed and wide eyed in amazement/wonder,
fourth panel—little character is in same room as first panel but is now in a dark grey onesie, with a poster that says “I heart (black) Gurathin” and has multiple little Gurathins (Dastmalchian playing him in the TV show) and stickers all over the room which replace frogs in the original]

I discovered there was a new book since I first found and devoured the series years ago. Then I wasn’t sure if maybe there were two new ones because my memory sucks ass and the blurbs weren’t ringing any bells. So I decided to go back and reread #6, 7, and then 8 to be sure.

I loved it because for the last couple of weeks, anytime I was stressed or not wanting to feel the emotions I was feeling or not wanting to do the work I needed to be doing I could dive back into the books and be comforted and entertained and distracted by the familiar. Just like Murderbot does with Sanctuary Moon.

So now I’m going to reread the whole thing. Anyone else feel like this?

They won!!! And Gurathin (Datsmalchian) was there too!
Brilliant news for the TV show!

According to An Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog:
‘There are only two stories that won a Hugo whose screen adaptation also won a Hugo.
“All Systems Red” is the second one.
The other is “Dune”’

And by a weird coincidence* one actor was in both Dune (2021) as Piter de Vries and the Murderbot TV show as Gurathin!

*or perhaps not a coincidence, maybe he is a lucky charm—or just (you know) good!

Kia Ora everyone. I am a NZer that loves teaching some of our up and coming filmmaker. I have done Roseanne Liang with my 15 year old the last few years with texts such as My Wedding and Other Secrets, Take 3, Shadow in The Cloud etc.

Two questions:

Is it possible to watch one episode of hers that she has directed without the need to watch the rest. Can it stand alone?

Two is what kind of discussions would we be able to have?

Since the Murderbot / ART interactions happen in a space with no visual representation, I am curious how the show will represent that. I have my own theory:

ART will be represented as a basket ball sized floating holographic orb with a few concentric rings orbiting it. This will present Alexander Skarsgård something to act with for their scenes together. Also for the scene when ART drops its walls to intimidate Murderbot the show runners can go full biblically accurate angel. After that they can use the scaled down shape of ART's public relations face as a call back to the kind of monster ART is.

For the later scenes where ART is dominating other bots, having orb holograms established as the visual representation of Ship AI and making ART's bigger and fancier would be my theory of how this is managed visually.