Long answer: Not really, in my opinion, and I want to try and explain why.
Definitions
The term unreliable narrator has become somewhat watered down here on tumblr and in pop cultural discussions in general but I am working with what I learned at uni here. (Disclaimer: In academia too there are different definitions and approaches to unreliability but I'm going with the basics here)
For Wayne Booth, who first coined the term, "an unreliable narrator is one who tells lies, omits or misrepresents important information, or presents inaccurate interpretations of events as objective truth." Peter J. Rabinowitz says "An unreliable narrator however, is not simply a narrator who 'does not tell the truth' – what fictional narrator ever tells the literal truth? Rather an unreliable narrator is one who tells lies, conceals information, misjudges with respect to the narrative audience." (emphasis mine)
In other words, an unreliable narrator deceives the narrative audience (that is the implied in-universe audience), knowingly or unknowingly, in a way that significantly changes their interpretation of the narrative.
According to Greta Olson, there is "a differentiation between fallible and untrustworthy narrators" and "all fictional texts that employ the device of unreliability can best be considered along a spectrum of fallibility that begins with trustworthiness and ends with unreliability."
That means: It is not a binary of reliable vs. unreliable narrator. It is a sliding scale, a spectrum, and I would argue that on that spectrum, Murderbot falls closer to the trustworthy side than the unreliable.
General Thoughts
By and large, Murderbot presents the facts of the story to us truthfully. It does not withhold information from us that impacts our understanding of the events (see below for exceptions).
Are there moments where Murderbot's narration is fallible? Sure. It makes mistakes, particularly with judging people's intentions and their opinion of it. It consistently assumes people (especially "its" humans) think worse of it and trust it less than they actually do. It considers itself not important, and therefore assumes it is also not important to others. It also often rates it competence as much lower than it actually is.
But, and this is crucial: It does also tell us when it makes mistakes and often tells us the objective events in addition to its subjective assumptions or interpretations. By that I mean: It tells us its assumptions about the humans not thinking much of it and considering it expendable. But it also tells us the humans' words and actions that prove the opposite is true. It tells us about how incompetent and useless it is (especially in System Collapse) and then also tells us the sequence of events showing it actually is still capable of doing its job. It learns alongside us that its negative thoughts about itself aren't always true.
That's not unreliable narration.
Now, Murderbot's refusal to admit/discuss its emotions is the most common argument I've seen for MB being unreliable, and that is the one that probably bothers me the most.
Because
a) A narrator isn't obligated to discuss everything equally with the audience. MB refusing to discuss its feelings is a characterisation choice, but it's not keeping any vital information from us that we need to understand the story. There's gonna be narrators that focus more on outside descriptions and some that focus more on internal thoughts and perceptions and neither is inherently more unreliable than the other.
b) that being said imo MB's narration actually focuses A Lot on internal perceptions and feeling, in spite of it being so reluctant to talk about them. I think MB gives us a lot more emotion than we give it credit for. I would argue it doesn't actually hide all that much. It may often not be able to state its feelings outright, but that doesn't mean it doesn't tell us about them
As an example, let's look at the moment when Gurathin reveals its name to the PresAux group because that's always one that sticks in my mind with regard to MB and how it communicates its feelings
I opened my eyes and looked at him; I couldn’t stop myself. From their expressions I knew everything I felt was showing on my face, and I hate that. I grated out, “That was private.”
Murderbot doesn't actually tell us anything about what it's feeling here. It only tells us it's feeling something intense, and that it shows in its face, that the others can perceive it and react to it, and that it hates it. We can extrapolate what it's feeling of course: it's feeling betrayed and exposed and embarrassed and vulnerable (and angry but that's a given for MB). But I would argue it's not hiding that from us. It's given us the context we need to extrapolate what it's feeling because a) it doesn't want to talk about it directly so it does it indirectly and/or b) it wouldn't even know how to name the emotions it's feeling in that moment.
So I would say that MB does the best it can given its limitations (in experience and willingness to talk about feelings) to give us the most accurate view of its emotional state without having to talk about it. After all, we almost always know how it feels, or can at the very least guess at it. If it really was trying to hide its feelings from us (not from the other characters, it probably is actually pretty opaque to them most of the time) the narration would be reading very differently.
Looking at it from a Doylist perspective for a second: This is also stylistic choice on the part of Martha Wells, it's basic "show, don't tell": She doesn't simply tell us what Murderbot is feeling, she is showing us through its thoughts, actions and reactions and the reactions of other characters. That doesn't make Murderbot untrustworthy.
Now, I want to look at a few other passages and examples that are often brought up in this debate.
"the company"
Murderbot censoring the company name is not unreliable. Once we know that it does this, through Dr. Bharadwaj's mention of it, it is quite a telling characterisation choice imo, it tells us so much about MB's feelings towards the company and itself in relation to it. But, crucially: knowing the company's name would not at all change our understanding of this story. The company's name is completely irrelevant, UNLESS it suddenly turned out that the company was GrayCris or Barish-Estranza or some other corp we already know all along. We can say with some certainty that's not gonna happen, so: substituting the company for its actual name would change absolutely nothing about the story except to give us one less piece of characterisation for Murderbot. Therefore: not unreliable.
[redacted] in System Collapse
Here is another example of Murderbot deliberately concealing information from the audience, but I would still argue it doesn't make it unreliable because a) it doesn't hide from us the fact that it's concealing something. We know something has been redacted. It's the equivalent of a narrator saying "I can't talk about that right now." b) While the information is redacted, we are given enough context clues to have an idea of what [redacted] is. We know it's an incident that occurred recently that is likely trauma-related and that has caused Murderbot to lose confidence in itself and trust in its system/mind. c) Murderbot reveals the information to us voluntarily fairly early on in the book (exactly 40% in, thanks ebooks), when it becomes relevant for us to understand what's happening going forward. It does not in any significant way change our understanding of the events of the book up to that point, since we could already see the effects the incident had on MB all along. Therefore: not unreliable.
Murderbot refusing to admit it and ART are friends
What are you even talking about?
In Exit strategy it tells us "my friend ART had changed my configuration". In Network Effect is says to Amena "my friend is dead" and it thinks to itself "It’s my friend. It helped me because it wanted to, because it could."
So it later objects to the term friend when ART uses it after reinitialising and when Ratthi tries to talk to MB about their "friendship", and gave us "mutual administrative assistance" why? Because it's angry at ART. It feels betrayed and used and it's rightfully pissed off, so it can't think of ART as a friend in that moment. That's genuinely how it feels right then, and even if not: it's not uttering that refusal to us as the audience but to the characters in the story (ART and Ratthi). A character lying to other characters is not the same as the narrator lying to the audience. Therefore: not unreliable
MB not talking about/refusing to notice the relationships of the humans around it
I don't even know where to start with this one. Murderbot also routinely skips over descriptions of survery work and other things it finds boring because it simply does not care about them. As I said above, a narrator isn't obligated to discuss everything equally with the audience. In fact, a narration by necessity needs to limit a narrator's perception to what is relevant and important, because it is simply not possible to describe absolutely everything in equal measure. If Murderbot paid a lot of attention to human relationships, this would be a different kind of story. Therefore: not unreliable.
Murderbot has no emotional intelligence
Again, this isn't really a question of being unreliable at all, but I've seen it brought up in this context and it pissed me off so I wanna discuss it.
Literally one of the first things that happens in the series is MB talking to a terrified and in shock Volescu with gentleness and empathy and understanding, knowing exactly what it needs to say in order to keep him calm and get him out of danger, to the point that everyone in the survey is amazed at how well it handled this very emotionally fraught situation... only for some people to turn around and say Murderbot has no emotional intelligence?? the gall tbh
Having a negative self image (and a shitton of trauma) does not equal having no emotional intelligence. And let's not forget that Murderbot's bad opinion of itself and SecUnits it completely justified by its experiences and informed by a lifetime of being enslaved, objectified, abused and de"human"ised/having its personhood denied. Pretty much everyone it's ever met up until ASR has been either afraid of it or treated it as an appliance/toy, or both. It has limited education, very restricted life experiences and almost no actual interaction with other people, outside of receiving orders. Given all of that, I actually think it's shockingly sensitive and emotionally intelligent and regulated.
Murderbot didn't tell us about Ganaka Pit
Now this is the one instance where I can see the argument about Murderbot being unreliable applying.
With the very first sentence of ASR ("I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module ...") it at least implies that it hadn't done any mass murdering. It never tries to hide the fact that it and SecUnits in general are dangerous and murderous (see: murderbots), but iirc it doesn't give us any hint of Ganaka Pit until Gurathin brings it up about halfway through the first book (unlike the TV show where I think there are indistinct flashbacks from the start).
It does admit to the narrative audience at that point that it hasn't been entirely truthful and gives more context/information. It also admits that its memory of the incidence is unreliable and its conclusions about what happened are largely conjecture ("I think that’s what happened. ... And it makes a better story that way.")
I wouldn't say that this information significantly changes the story as we experienced it thus far, but it does change the way we perceive Murderbot. Personally I would call it more of a backstory reveal than an instance of unreliable narration, but an argument can definitely be made. You could say that Murderbot represented itself as safer than it was for the first half of the book (although I don't think it represents itself as very safe at all; it does keep emphasising how dangerous and horrifying it is.)
Therefore: Possibly unreliable.
Conclusion:
Murderbot is a fallible but mostly trustworthy narrator. It may underreport and misevaluate some things, but mostly those that are subject to subjective interpretation anyway (emotions, internal and external perceptions). When its assumptions or interpretations are incorrect, the audience is often made aware of that. As far as we can tell (i.e. unless there is a major plot twist coming up in the next book) there is no narrative or authorial intent of deceit or obfuscation.
Interpretation of narrative texts is not an exact science, and there are scholars who would say that narrative and authorial intent matters less than generic readers' assumptions, but this is what I, as a reader, believe given the information we receive from the text.
If you believe that Murderbot is an unreliable narrator, I likely won't change your mind. But I think what I and others are wary of in this debate is people using the "unreliable narrator" label as an excuse to pick and choose which parts of canon to believe and which to dismiss in order to reinforce their own ideas/preferences, rather than engaging with what the text actually gives us.
Take this as food for thought, if you want, and maybe sit with it for a while.
Or not, I can't make you.
Sources:
Here and here for a general refresher on Unreliability
For the direct quotes
And credit where credit is due: All of this is built around my contributions to a discussion on the topic on the MB 2.0 discord. I only used my own words for this essay but of course my analysis was partially informed by thoughts and arguments brought up by others involved in that conversation.
"im not saying feminism is for everyone but-" the fuck? well im saying that. feminism is for everyone. yes even cishet men will benefit from feminism and cishet men should be feminists because cishet men are indeed harmed by the patriarchy; nowhere near to the extent that women are, but having a culture that is fully equal and anti-misogynist benefits everyone. have we forgotten that lifting up the disenfranchised people in society helps all of us as a collective? "im not saying that universal and unalienable human rights are for everyone but-" YES THE FUCK THEY ARE LOL
I need to admit something to the US Tumblrinas. Philadelphia isn't a place to me. It's a cream cheese. You say "philadelphia" or "philly" and I immediately, and exclusively, think of the cream cheese. "Twelve people die in Philadelphia disaster" wow that must've been a Molasses Flood style event
#PHILADELPHIA DIDN'T EVEN INVENT CREAM CHEESE#IT WAS INVENGED IN CHESTER NEW YORK 4 HOURS SOUTH#*starts being dragged away by Philadelphians* YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME
Not gonna lie I always just assumed cream cheese was hundreds if not thousands of years older than the USA. That's way too late to be creating new textures of dairy.
it's important to be able to recognize when a character is speaking for the author and when the author wants you to realize a character is full of shit.
when Batou says the ends justify the means, we're supposed to take this as fact, something he learned due to years of law enforcement experience, something that's sad but undeniably true. the guy in the car with him who believes rules need to be followed only believes this because he's young and inexperienced and naive. the narrative (read: the author) will prove that this is correct, again and again.
when Morgan says nothing she does could ever materially matter, however, we're supposed to realize that this is bullshit: she's literally standing in a crowd of protesters who would not BE there if not for her actions. by this point she's ended countless lives and despite her intentions, her actions are causing real change, affecting real people. the narrative (read: the author) will prove that she is wrong, again and again.
i feel like people still think accessibility and accommodation are favours bestowed upon others and not like a collective responsibility of everyone in society
hey, keeping a shared space free from an allergen for someone who's also there isn't an imposition on your personal freedom. it's literally your duty to do that
THIS I’m tired of living in a city where people care more about animals than people. There are cafes with signs against loitering, but they allow people to bring in their dogs regardless of training.
Not everyone is in love with every dog on this planet, and I do NOT like how stigmatized it is to feel this way. If you stand up for yourself and have the gall to not allow animals ((that actively shed, and cause some folks (like my cousin), to puff up and get hives)), you’re looked upon like you announced that you eat a puppy based diet.
If non service animals are not allowed in an establishment, all the better! I’m protecting my staff, any persons who have dander and/or saliva based pet allergies, and YOU.
Keep your pets at home, and at parks/places of recreation that are fun and interesting for them!
and if you have a computer with a disc drive, you can move the content of those CDs onto it and then burn it onto future CDs. it doesn't even have to be the same album. you can make a playlist with physical media. you just have access to all of it, at your whim, with no unskippable ads being shoved in your ears. it's really nice!
But you’re also not limited to that lifespan! You can rip your CDs, and then….not burn them to new ones! Just keep the music on your hard drive, copying it forward to new ones each time you upgrade. I have songs in my music library that I’ve been doing that with for nearly 30 years (basically since the dawn of the MP3).
Okay, I'll go and visit your doll collecting friend IF you can promise me that the dolls aren't secretly people. Don't laugh, I'm not being ridiculous. This is the fourth friend with dolls we've visited and they always turn out to be people. I'm not exaggerating! There was the little kid who shrunk people down and put them in her dollhouse, there was the old woman with the porcelain doll collection that were all haunted with the spirits of dead people, there was your cousin whose action figures came to life -- yes that last one counts! I don't care if the action figures weren't previously human, coming to life as thinking feeling beings makes them people!
Honestly this is getting to be a bit much. If the dolls are gonna be people again, tell me. I'm starting to think I'm not ready for this level of friend visitation commitment. I'm beginning to regret starting to date you so soon after my previous boyfriend mysteriously disappeared on the very day that you started your funko pop collection.
For the last time I'm not being a hypocrite. My labubus aren't people. I put the souls of my previous pets in there so that they can live forever. Kitty cats are not people.
And I didn't bring up your friend whose pokemon cards manifest actual pokemon when played because frankly I'm not familiar enough with the franchise to make that judgement. Especially after he got rid of the smiling little man.
I dont mean to be so critical. I think Wizards internal data collection is solid. And I'm sure it's very frustrating to hear players say things like "I wish we could play Un-cards in other formats" and then whirl around and complain when you make it so they can. But that's because the way you interpret feedback and how it informs your decisions is also important! People wishing uncards could be played elsewhere shouldn't have been taken as legitimate demand, but rather a marker of success of previous unsets. Similarly, if you're going to make mechanically unique cards that cater to enfranchised players, then you need to make them accessible. Otherwise they'll just print proxies, or worse, be alienated from your game altogether. And I know it's easy for me to play armchair critic with my 20-20 hindsight. But these seem like really obvious pitfalls that someone should have seen coming.
It speaks to a lack of vision. Not in game design or art or story or anything like that. But of business. This reeks of a company snapping at trends for quick cash while their product rots from the inside. Of course your confused when a product is recieved negatively when you're only looking at certain data points, when all you do is respond to the last thing that was told to a marketing department.
But I feel like an asteroid. I feel like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. I was very, very guilty for years. I had to go to extensive therapy because I was like, “oh my god, I, Lochlan O'Neil, single-handedly destroyed fandom culture?”
She didn't she didn't she didn't. That wasn't it. She wasn't an asteroid.
She was the first skater that fell through the ice of Web 2.0.
I was also a teenager who found an amazing world, and My People, and friends I'd still talk to every day, on the internet. I spent years getting my mother to let me go to conventions and meet friends in distant cities. I started ambitious internet communities I didn't have the experience or skills to bring to fruition. I don't think there was a lot of difference between us, in a lot of ways. It's not that I was somehow smart or skilled or suave and she wasn't. She didn't have some awful planet-killing stink or velocity that she brought to the show.
The difference was this:
In 1994, when the Endless September began and the Internet felt perpetually full of stupid newbies, there were 20 million people online.
In 2001, when I got my first LiveJournal account, there were 500 million.
In 2012, when she joined Tumblr, there were 2.43 billion.
When I started out, and you joined a new messageboard or chatroom or mailing list, you had to introduce yourself to the community. Except in the biggest of websites, people expected to log onto the internet, read through all the new things that had been posted to their local bit of it, and then log off again. Older members took it upon themselves to greet the newbies and answer any questions they might have, directing them to the relevant community FAQs. People would say things like, "Oh yes, I remember you. This is only your second Thursday with us, right? I hope you have fun!"
I joined an Internet full of adults who got online through their jobs or their universities, one of the first wave of kids allowed to roam free. And the proportion of adults to kids kept steadily changing, but until DashCon, I don't think people understood how much. I remember a discussion that happened in early 2000s slash fandom, where the very true observation was made that in particular artistic ways, we had all agreed to suspend shame, which created a unique kind of space. As a community we could all admit that we were there to be embarrassingly enthusiastic in unusual ways about absolute nerd shit, and we understood that it wasn't life or death, it wasn't rocket surgery, but it also wasn't going to get broadcast onto the clouds and our bosses didn't know who we were. Everyone was (willing to act like) an adult, and we could hold the circle and create safety there.
That felt like a lot of geek spaces, then. Anime conventions, science fiction conventions, furry conventions, videogame stores, D&D meetups. Images were bulky and pixelated, video incredibly hard to move. When you got to a con, it was like a brief oasis of Weird that sheltered you and screened you from view, and you ended up volunteering because the weary, cynical, intelligent, kind people in the con ops office looked like you were throwing yourself in front of a bullet just for offering to run a clipboard down to the other end of the hotel for them.
The ice was thick enough to skate on. The circle was strong enough to let you be brave and funny and silly and free, and you could buckle down with some friends and clean all the trash out of the ballroom by 11am on Sunday, and you'd see everyone next year.
The bubble was going to burst, but nobody seemed to worry about it.
Things were changing fast for fans, all kinds of fans, in the early 2010s. Conventions that used to get news coverage like "Local Freaks Weird Out Hotel Employees: This Weekend Only" to "#Cosplay: The Hottest New Trend" and from Geocities sites that shut down if you exceeded your page visits for the month to AO3 getting 10 million pageviews a week.
It was great. We could conquer the world together. We could stay safe and together and the circle would hold.
And then the ice broke open and Lochlan fell through. Right through the bottom of that goddamn ballpit into freezing arctic sea. Right into years of people sorting through the churned ice of the wreck, taking years to come to the realization that there really had not been ANY goddamn adults in the room making sure things were okay. The community had not actually failed so much as never been formed in the first place.
Because as it turns out, group-bonding techniques that work for 100 or 1000 people do not work for 10,000. Or 100,000. Or one million. Or one billion.
That line about agreement to suspend shame sticks with me all these years after because the defining feature of post-Dashcon Tumblr has been shame. And scorn, contempt, derision, and hatred. Cringe, in short, and kys. Exactly the kind of bullshit I saw every day in junior high school, and ran to the Internet and fan conventions to get away from.
I got the kind of community and mentorship and support that have made fandom a refuge and a resource my whole life. Lochlan O'Neill didn't. Not because there was anything worse or dumber or less experienced about her.
Because a system built in the 1990s was incapable of bearing the stress of a load fifty times bigger than what was already "way too full."
Just because I'm from one generation, and she's from another.
"Underlying conditions." That's what killed them. Not the virus, not the measles, not the tainted lettuce. Underlying conditions.
don't be afraid. don't be afraid. go to work. go out to eat. don't be afraid.
They weren't killed by the slashing of the CDC. They weren't killed by the administration's demonization of masks, that brought on by the vanity of one man who didn't want his bronzer to come off. They weren't killed by an industrial food system which will only do things Right if it's forced to, if it's inspected and made to, and over which there are far fewer watchdogs than there used to be. No! Don't worry. They were killed by underlying conditions.
don't be afraid. don't be afraid. the engines must keep running. don't be afraid.
Don't think about the fact that 12% of the population, or just about the same percentage of the population that marked themselves as Black on the 2020 Census, has diabetes. Don't think about the fact that 10% of the US population, or approximately the same percentage which has blue eyes, has at least one autoimmune disease. Don't think about the fact that 6% of the adult US population, or approximately the same percentage as 'people under the age of five', has a chronic heart condition. Don't think about the fact that the CDC says that 40% of the US population is obese, and that is an "underlying condition," too. That percentage? It's about the same as every US resident between the ages of 25 and 54.
don't be afraid. don't be afraid.
"Underlying conditions" is a way to wave away responsibility, yes, but it's more than that. It's a way to put separation between the average citizen and the two people -- so far -- who have died from food infested with parasites, the two people who literally shit themselves to death because the Trump administration has fully abandoned all of its proper functions in order to strip down everything it can get its hands on and cart it away for itself. It is not enough to grift billions through American Liberty World Financial Bitcoin, Gold Shoe, And Bible-Printing Emporium. It is not enough to set up a literal "please bribe the President" ATM for foreign governments to shovel cash in via cryptocurrency. They have to grab everything they can that isn't nailed down, and to do that, they have to rip everything they can out of the walls, fire everybody they can get away with, and shuffle the money into ICE, and from their into the pockets of friends no-bid contracts.
It is not enough, and so they whisper "underlying conditions," because that tells so many Americans, "Hey. Don't be afraid. It's okay. You don't have 'underlying conditions,' right? You are good and virtuous. You have done Everything Right, and are thus blessed with Good Health. You have Worked Hard and Been Proper and thus you will not be touched by the seemingly-random hand of fucking death hiding in a bag of Kroger lettuce." It's the same voice that says, "You don't want those layabouts getting disability and cheating you out of your money, so we should make it harder," except now it's saying, "Actually, just like COVID, the only people who died were the people who were sick already, and obviously you only have underlying conditions if you weren't taking care of yourself, which you are, so don't worry! We don't actually have to do anything. This will sort itself out."
don't be afraid. don't be afraid. after all, it's not you. it's them.
Warner Bros. Discovery has officially launched a dedicated YouTube channel for the classic 1990s science fiction series Babylon 5, marking a
In a welcoming video posted to the platform, series creator J. Michael Straczynski appeared to introduce the official home, emphasizing that it would feature original commentaries, interviews, chats, and additional material in the coming months. This development builds on earlier efforts by Warner Bros. Discovery to make full episodes available for free on YouTube, following the series’ departure from other ad-supported platforms earlier in 2026.
you have to dress in this style for the rest of your life!
(you do not have to follow the beliefs associated with the style if that style has associated beliefs. The wheel curse does not affect anything like that.)
