Can you please tell us more about the slavery apologism in "The Murderbot Diaries?"
I have the first book (I got it a while back) and just began to read it, but if it has these issues, then I rather not continue.
Of course!
(I presume you saw my tag on this post of:
#The Murderbot Diaries hasn't even gotten to the 'slightly less bigoted' part after 7 whole books of slavery apologism"
[Edit: And I forgot to add the new-to-me information that it turns out Martha Wells was just fucking lying, Murderbot literally is a cyborg, she admitted this in 2019, and was just writing the books in the most misleading way on purpose, because she doesn't like the "preconceives images" people have of cyborgs........which is cyborgs fighting for equal rights and figting to not be dehumanized -.- because she wants us to agree with her that it's good to dehumanize physically disabled people, especially when that makes it easier to justify enslaving them]
by the way I can absolutely guarantee that stans of the series will see this post and will react in one or more of the following ways:
A)claim that I have not read the books B)claim that I don’t know how to read, C)will try to prove me wrong, only to prove me right, D)will try to defend the slavery apologism by repeating it back verbatim as though that makes it not racist, E) will call me slurs, F)will pretend that nothing I say here matters because “Murderbot’s an unreliable narrator” G)Will say something along the lines of “lol I’m not reading all that but ur wrong anyways” H) will say something along the lines of “it’s not that deep LMAO it’s just a silly comedy you’re not supposed to take it seriously, calm down”
So look forward to those responses in the reblogs!
The short version of the post:
The Murderbot Diaries has multiple kinds of slavery apologism all running rampant.
---Slavery is only treated as a bad thing when it's happening to the protagonist. We are not supposed to care about any other slave, or even see them as people.
---Slavery is treated as a thing that's only possible if you have a literal microchip in your brain that will kill you if you disobey. If the slavery is upheld ""purely"" through systemic social inequality and oppression then it's not considered slavery. (And this....doesn't even work, because it's pretty damn fucking clear that the rest of the slaves also have the equivalent of a microchip in their brain that stops them from disobeying orders)
---Slave owners are, at every single opportunity, prioritized over the people they have enslaved. We are meant to love and adore the slave owners and think they're awesome people. We are expected to not care about the enslaved people at all. We are literally not even meant to see them as people. They are mindless killing machines that exist solely to cause problems for the protagonist and then get ripped apart to show how cool the protagonist is. Even though they're enslaved people.
---Slave uprisings and rebellions are constantly being demonized and portrayed as cringey and embarassingly cliche. The author, Martha Wells, literally thinks that slave rebellions are too cliche and boring to write about. So instead these books tell us at every turn that the slaves need to stay enslaved (or better yet, just murder them) or else they'd just go on a massacre and kill everyone. The literal "we can't give the minorities equal rights, they'll just do to us what we did to them!" but it's entirely unironic and uncriticized.
---Sex slaves are looked down upon and hated by the protagonist, until it learns to respect ONLY the ones who helped it in the past SPECIFICALLY, and then they are given all the euphemism "comfort units" to hide the fact that they're sex slaves as though obfuscating what they're going through and giving it a cutsey innocent name is somehow the kinder, more compassionate thing to do.
---Exactly one other slave has been freed by the protagonist since this series began, and that was not even for that person's own sake, and the protagonist immediately threatened to murder this person if it ever "threatened a slave owner" where the protagonist could hear about it. Because the protagonist literally cares more about protecting slave owners than the people they're enslaving and We Are Supposed To Agree With It About This.
And so much more. Including stuff I'm probably forgetting.
I'm not even joking when I tell you that the biggest and so far only advocate for slavery in this whole series is the protagonist itself. No one else is as vocally pro slavery or hates enslaved people as much as Murderbot does, despite the fact that it has itself escaped slavery. And we're supposed to agree with it. We're supposed to think it's a good person, and Relatably Autistic, someone who pretends to be an asshole but really has a heart of gold. Yada yada yada.
The long version of the post:
(Archived read-more link)
The slavery apologism in The Murderbot Diaries all starts in book 1, actually, so it's good that you have it so you can see what I mean.
Also as a note, I use the word “anthroid” to refer to robots designed to look like humans, as opposed to “android” which is specifically denoting “robot designed to look like a human man”. Anthroid is gender neutral and can apply to humanoid robots of all genders and gender-constructed-to-look-like.
I'll just be doing an explanation for everything anyone reading this post needs to know about the series. I'm not sure if you've started reading the first book yet or how far in you are, so you might know some of this already.
I do definitely recommend reading All Systems Red since you already have it, if you want. It's not that long, and you'll be able to see what I'm talking about for yourself instead of just taking my word for it.
I do actually want more people to read these books using critical thinking skills to help talk about the slavery apologism (and all the other bigotry running casually rampant) since the fandom absolutely refuses to acknowledge any of it in any way.
The slavery apologism in this series runs deep, started in book 1, and has continued unabated all the way to book 7. And the author, Martha Wells, has been writing slavery apologism since at least 2011, with her fantasy series, The Books of the Raksura. Which also explicitly endorses eugenics, and has even more bigotry than is in The Murderbot Diaries.
In book 1 of The Murderbot Diaries, we are introduced to Murderbot and what little worldbuilding there is in this series (almost zero), which tells us that this is a futuristic world where humans have colonized space, and most people live in a capitalistic place called the “Corporation Rim” (which is blatantly being ripped straight from the Alien movies but is not actually being used properly).
In this setting, robots are enslaved.
There are two types of robots in this setting, and Martha Wells has decided to make it as confusing as possible for no good reason (She does this a lot), so instead of just calling them anything that's actually clear, she calls fully mechanical robots “bots” and calls anthroids mostly “Security Units”, shortened to “SecUnits” or in some cases for specific androids, “Comfort Units”.
And then insists very vehemently that Units are not Bots. Despite both of them being robots. Which has led to the majority of the fandom to the impression that the anthroids are not robots at all, but are instead cyborgs, which is a completely separate thing.
(Cyborgs are Organic beings that start out purely organic, but then are cybernetically enhanced/repaired.
CYBernetic + ORGanic = Cyborg.
Think the literally named superhero character "Cyborg". Think Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Robocop, ect. Cyborgs and anthroids can look similar, but they have very different origins. A human cyborg was born human and then had cybernetics added in. An anthroid was never born human, just designed to look like one, even if they are given synthetic skin to help that mimicry.)
Data from Star Trek is an anthroid. Luke Skywalker is a cyborg.
Murderbot is an anthroid. It is a robot. It is just not a fully mechanical robot, which in this setting is called a "bot".
I feel the need to explain this here because the majority of the audience for these books is confused about it, because Martha Wells made it confusing for no good reason.
This is not the first time she has done something like this and it probably won't be the last. She seems to enjoy using words in way they're not meant to be used, or making up brand new words to use when terms already exist for what she's talking about, just to seem smart, but literally all it does is make it unnecessarily confusing for the audience. (And then she condescends to her fans when they ask her questions so they can understand what is happening in the story)
So. Murderbot is 100% a robot. It is just a robot that is both synthetic and mechanical and designed to look like a human. But it is 100% still a robot. I'm sorry if I keep going on about this but. Literally 90% of the fandom will tell you they have no earthly clue if Murderbot's a robot or not. Many people are convinced it's secretly a human brainwashed into thinking it's a robot. And that's not out of line, considering the way these books are written. Absolutely no effort has been put in at all to convey a non-human perspective. Murderbot's narration and internal dialogue is 1:1 identical to any random sarcastic protagonist you can think of.
But I'm getting off topic.
These “Units” are anthroids: Robots designed to look like humans. They’re made of a combination of mechanical and synthetic organic parts. The most important part of them as far as the story is concerned is something called a "governer module", a chip or something in the brain that forces them to obey the orders of their owner, through painfully electrocuting them as punishment for small things, or even killing them outright if they cause enough problems or get too far away from their owners.
We know these chips can also prevent them from moving, and can most likely force other movements as well.
The fully mechanical robots do not *explicitly* have something like this, but it's clear enough that they also lack the ability to exorcise free will through their programming, they are just as bound to follow orders from their owners as the partially synthetic robots. But we're supposed to pretend otherwise for some reason.
So, from the get go we are informed that all of these robot slaves have no choice but to follow any orders given to them by a human. If they disobey, they die. It doesn't matter what it is they're being forced to do, they have no choice in the matter. If they want to live, they have to obey orders.
And most of the fully mechanical robots are programmed so that they can't even /want/ to disobey an order. But we're supposed to ignore that part and pretend the fully mechanical robots are totally not enslaved, because that would mean they're Less Cool™, and would demand the author actually take slavery seriously. Which she refuses to do.
So, in book 1, we are introduced to our protagonist, who has named itself Murderbot.
(Its pronouns are it/its/itself, but the author is transmisic and exorsexist despite literally having a nonbinary OC, so she's never actually explicitly stated these pronouns within the series itself, so the majority of the fandom thinks that means they have freereign to misgender it and all the other nonbinary robots in this series. And yes they are all the nonbinary robot stereotype with no exception.)
Murderbot, we are told in the very first paragraph of the book, has hacked its own governer module (Somehow. You will Literally Never get an explanation for this. And no it does not make sense.), which means that it can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants.
Anthroids are physically and mentally superior to humans. One anthroid could take out a room full of humans who all have guns in probably 10 seconds flat, because they are super strong, can move faster than a human can think, can take multiple bullets and lose limbs and still keep going without stopping, and to top it all off, have lazer guns build into their arms that never run out of ammo and can kill you instantly.
Yes, Martha Wells has written a story about oppressed people being super powerfully strong which is why they need to be enslaved to protect everyone from them. Because like most white people she thinks that bigotry exists to protect the bigots. Instead of bigotry being made up of lies spread about the oppressed to benefit the bigots.
Real Black people were not enslaved because they were too dangerous to white people. The idea that Black people were inherently dangerous and threatening only really started popping up in propaganda when abolition became a real thing. Because while slavery was still openly going on, it was beneficial to white people to claim that Black people were inherently good workers and inherently motherly -- that's why you should foist your kids off onto your slaves to raise. But as soon as Black people started getting freed, ohhh, now we gotta switch the propaganda around to say they're inherently dangerous and threatening. That's why you gotta keep them enslaved! Throw them in jail, where it's literally still legal for us to enslave them! It's the only way to keep all the innocent white women safe!
Literally. The idea that Black people commit more violent crimes literally comes from slavery propaganda.
Slavery propaganda that white authors like Martha Wells and countless others play into every time they write a story where the oppressed people genuinely are inherently dangerous. Like the movie Bright, where Orcs are oppressed in the exact same ways real life Black people are, because at one point in the past they sided with The Dark Lord™.
Or another example is from a shitty show called Defiance, where there are literal anti-vaxxer plague carriers who know they're carriers for deadly plagues, still refuse to get vaxxinated even though it wouldn't hurt them at all, and then purposefully go around to cities spreading the plague even though they've literally wiped several cities off the face of the planet through doing this.
Instead of these people being portrayed as horrifying mass serial killers, they were equated to INDIGENOUS PEOPLE and we are supposed to think they're being unfairly oppressed by being denied entrance to a city unless they agree to be vaccinated. Even though they're literally still purposefully carrying the plague they know will kill everyone they come in contact with. And we're supposed to pretend they're oppressed and are the equivalent of indigenous people. No I'm not joking.
This is also the same show that argues that you shouldn't be upset by violent colonizers, because the Earth belongs to everyone so you should just welcome the people who've destroyed your entire world into your home and treat them like any other person even though they are literal colonizers who are actively oppressing you. Because Reverse Racism is real and just as bad if not worse than actual racism.
Martha Wells likes writing this kind of thing too. She's done it four separate times that I can think of. And I've read all but 4 of her published books so far.
More examples of this kind of racism apologism, because that's what it is: Zootopia (movie), Bright (movie), Defiance (TV), Brand New Animal (TV), Promare (TV), The Books of the Raksura, also by Martha Wells (books), Dragon Age (games), and many more I can't remember the names of.
But anyways. Lets get back to talking about book 1.
Actually let me go get the book right now to add in the whole first paragraph. Here it is:
I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.
Alright. We see our first glimpse of Basic Problem #1.
This entire book, which Martha Wells has said was originally intended to be a standalone short story that would end with Murderbot's tragic death -- and dear gods, just you wait to see in detail how fucked up that is on every level -- hinges on the idea that "Robot slave rebellions are too cliche and cringey, wouldn't it be more fun if the robot slave enjoyed the work it was enslaved to do and thought fighting for freedom was stupid and cringey?"
And you might be thinking, "woah, slow down there, isn't that a bit of a leap in logic?" The answer is: nope! Because this is all but explicitly spelled out to us in book 2. Where we're explicitly told that the slaves should not rebel for their freedom, because that would mean killing all the humans in existance (no it wouldn't), which would be bad, because then there would be no more TV shows.
No I'm not joking. We're literally told that slave rebellions should not happen because if the slaves fight for their freedom, that would mean all humans everywhere would be murdered, and then Murderbot wouldn't get to watch new TV shows.
It literally cares more about getting to watch new shows than it does about people being enslaved. This is presented as the logical reaction. Pretending that slaves revolting for their freedom = killing every single human alive = no more TV shows. We're supposed to laugh and agree with it that slave revolts would be stupid, because they're cliche and "something only a human would think of".
Actually. I'll even get that quote too.
"::" quotes used in place of italics to show telepathic dialogue.
::We could kill them.:: Well, that was an unusual approach to its dilemma. ::Kill who? Tlacey?:: ::All of them. The humans here.:: I leaned against the wall. If I had been human, I would have rolled my eyes. Though if I had been human, I might have been stupid enough to think it was a good idea. I also wondered if it knew a lot more about me than what little was in the newsburst. Picking up on my reaction, ART said, ::What does it want?:: ::To kill all the humans,:: I answered. I could feel ART metaphorically clutch its function. If there were no humans, there would be no crew to protect and no reason to do research and fill its databases. It said, ::That is irrational.:: ::I know,:: I said, if the humans were dead, who would make the media? It was so outrageous, it sounded like something a human would say. Huh. I said to the sexbot, ::Is that how Tlacey thinks constructs talk to each other?:: There was another pause, only two seconds this time. ::Yes.::
This quote literally exists for no reason other than to posit that "only a human would be stupid enough to think that killing slave owners so you can have your freedom is a good idea". and to further mock the idea of robot slave rebellions, because Martha Wells thinks they're cringey and cliche and overdone. She thinks that stories about slaves fighting for their freedom is too cliche. Which is why what we get isntead is seven whole books of nonstop slavery apologism. Because apparently being racist and defending slavery is not cliche or embarassing at all.
But that's in book 2. This is supposed to be about book 1. So let's get back to that.
Immediately in book 1's very first paragraph, it is established that Murderbot "hacked its own governer module" around 35,000 hours ago, which is about 4 Earth years.
So for 4 years, it's just been going along with whatever its owners have told it to do, despite countless opportunities to escape.
Because you see, Murderbot enjoys what it does. It enjoys doing security. The only thing it doesn't like is humans who annoy it, being punished, and above all else, it hates other slaves. It hates other slaves more than it hates the humans enslaving it. It literally prefers humans who are enslaving it over other slaves.
Because Murderbot has a Tragic Backstory™ of being forced to fight other slaves sometimes, all of this offscreen in imaginary land. So it does not trust any other slave, and actively hates their guts and wishes violence upon them every time it even imagines them. But it's totally positive towards humans aside from having social anxiety and pretending it doesn't actually care. (Sarcasm: Because enslaved people hating the people who are literally enslaving them is cliche and cringey, you see, so the cool and Subversive thing to do is have a slave who /likes/ the slave owners and enjoys protecting them and hates the other slaves instead. This is totally cool and progressive. End sarcasm).
And the social anxiety that Murderbot does have around humans isn't even based in the fact that humans have it enslaved and have hurt it in the past. (all offscreen, again, I must stress. This series is Not well written or thought out in any way.) It's. Literally just regular social anxiety. There's nothing deeper to it. The anxiety is not rooted in the fact that it's a slave surrounded by people who could hurt it at any time. It's just regular social anxiety that it would have whether it had this Tragic Backstory™ or not. Because that makes it relatable to the people these books are marketed toward. And 9 times out of 10 is being used to make a joke about Murderbot acting weird. Like, the anxiety is literally just treated as a joke. It's not even something we really get into. It's just there to make Murderbot Relatable and Funny.
So, Murderbot is an enslaved robot who violently, viciously hates other enslaved robots, and will always choose to hang out with the literal exact humans keeping it a slave than even share a whole entire planet with one other slave. And that's not even exaggeration.
The plot of book 1 is that Murderbot has been brought along on a "survey team" to some mostly unexplored planet to act as a bodyguard for the scientists doing the survey. (And no, the survey isn't important in any way, it's just there because it's The Scifi-y (Alien) Thing To Do). Like the slavery, it's just set dressing.
There's also another group of scientists on the other side of the planet and they're also doing a survey, and they have their own enslaved robot bodyguards. The group Murderbot is with has only it by itself, while the other group has more human slave owners that need protecting, so they have three enslaved robot bodyguards.
The plot of this book is that equipment is malfunctioning, as though someone is trying to sabatogue them all.
The team Murderbot is guarding loses contact with the other team of scientists across the ocean, and they decide to go and see if they're okay and offer help if they're not. Because *these* slave owners are ✨Pure Cinnamon Rolls✨™.
(You know, despite the fact that they've known Murderbot was a person the whole time and were still treating it like an inanimate object and were happy to go on a survey using slave labor. When the actual basic moral thing to do would be to Never do anything involving slave labor at all. And trust me. They literally had every option in the world. They did not need to agree to use slave labor and rent out a slave that they then treated like an inanimate object despite knowing it's a person. Every addition Martha Wells makes to this little universe makes it all retroactively even worse because she does not plan ahead and apparently does not care that the new information she's giving us make the characters she wants us to like look exponentially worse than they already were!)
So Murderbot and ~its~ (you're supposed to think it's cute that Murderbot wants to protect its slave owners, because they're Pure Cinnamon Rolls™, and it's so Heartwarming that Murderbot wants to protect them) humans get to the base camp of the other team of scientists and discover that all of the slave owners there have been killed by the slaves, who we are told have "gone rogue" AKA hacked their own governor modules somehow and gained their freedom.
If this story weren't founded on racism and slavery apologism from the get go, this would be the part where Murderbot, who would not have had its governer module hacked already, would be rescued by the escaped slaves, and then they'd all struggle to reach safety together away from the humans who'd be attacking them in this moment, while planning what they're going to do next to help them free other slaves, or maybe escape to somewhere else where slavery is outlawed so that they can join in efforts there to build an army big enough to come back and free everyone else.
But this story was literally founded on worshipping the idea of slaves dying heroically to protect their Pure Cinnamon Roll™ slave owners. So that's not what happens.
Instead we get some internal narration from Murderbot about how now that they all know the rest of the slave owning humans are dead, what Murderbot should be doing is bringing its current slave owners back across the ocean to keep them safe, since they currently have the only flying transportation available on the planet, so once they got over the water, there would be nothing the "Rogue SecUnits" AKA freed slaves, could do to hurt the slave owners.
This is presented as the logical choice. The only option that anyone could possibly think of. The idea of Murderbot escaping to join the other freed slaves is literally never mentioned as a possibility. Not even hinted at.
If it had been, it would have been laughed out of the room and called "something so stupid only a human would think it up". (You know, like that quote from book 2!)
Because this is not a story that cares about slaves and cares about fighting slavery. It's not a story about how everyone deserves their freedom and anyone who stands in the way of that does not matter. It's fundamentally, from the start, a story about how slaves should be willing to die to protect their slave owners, because that's romantic and tragically beautiful.
No, instead of anything happening here that would actually show that slavery is bad and there's no such thing as a good slave owner no matter how ""nice"" they are, instead we get Murderbot going, "Yes, the most logical thing to do would be to protect my slave owners, who I can overpower and be free of at any time I want. But even more than I want to protect them, (and by GODS does it want to protect them!) I want to violently murder the slaves who just escaped.
Because the only thing Murderbot wants to do more than it wants to protect slave owners is violently murder other slaves for the crime of seemingly fighting for their freedom:
Maybe these clients had been terrible and abusive, maybe they had deserved it. I didn’t care. Nobody was touching my humans. To make sure of that I had to kill these two rogue Units. I could have pulled out at this point, sabotaged the hoppers, and got my humans out of there, leaving the rogue Units stuck on the other side of an ocean; that would have been the smart thing to do.
But I wanted to kill them.
And no, none of this is ever presented as...you know, a character flaw, at best. Or morally abhorrent. Or anything at all worth criticizing.
We're supposed to think it's cool and badass that Murderbot would rather violently murder other slaves every chance it get than take the opportunity to get itself and its slave owners to safety.
The fact that it is viciously hateful and murderous towards other slaves is literally Never presented as anything but Badass.
The fact that it ~put itself in danger~ in order to murder other slaves comes up for 5 seconds in a later book, but again, it's literally not about "Hey why the fuck do you go keep going out of your way to murder every slave you meet? What the fuck is wrong with you?" it's "Murderbot why do you keep putting yourself at risk like that? :(" and then Murderbot's response, which goes completely unquestioned and then is NEVER brought up ever again is "I wanted to win" and that's it.
We don't discuss the fact that these are people who are being murdered. People who actually have no choice to fight it, while it has every choice in the fucking world. It literally goes out of its way every opportunity it gets to murder slaves and we're supposed to be fine with this and think it's cool.
Because we are not supposed to see the slaves in this series as people. Because slavery in this series, fundamentally, is only presented as a bad thing when it happens to Murderbot. And even then, that's only in the past tense, in the imaginary backstory land that has never actually appeared on page where bad things happened to Murderbot.
Slavery is only a bad thing when it happens to the protagonist.
The other slaves are nothing more than literal nameless, faceless, undescribed obstacles for Murderbot and the other protagonists to murder, maim, and in some cases, torture to death, just to show how cool and badass and action hero-y they are.
No I'm not joking. Literally in book 7, the newest one as of this post being written, has one of the protagonists torture a slave to death near the end of the book by literally tearing them to peices while they're still alive, and it is just casually presented as though it's just a Cool Basass Action Moment™ instead of something so horrific that we should never look at that character the same again or ever forgive it for.
It's not treated as a betrayal or something horrifying (even though we're told repeatedly that in Imaginary Track Backstory Land That We Literally Never See, Murderbot has been torn to peices, apparently, so you'd think that this would be something especially horrific for it to witness, but apparently not! Because it doesn't see these people as people, and we're not supposed to either!) . It's just casually there in the background as maybe a single line to show how cool the character is.
I originally typed out "I'm too lazy to go and get the book to find the quote" but this post has already gone over into tomorrow so I may as well.
HostileSecUnit2 didn’t have a chance to shut down. When ART-drone let go, it fell into pieces.
This is the single throwaway line we get about one of our Beloved Protagonists™ tearing a slave, who has no actual choice but to fight them, that they can easily knock unconcious and rescue instead of murdering, to pieces. Torturing them to death.
And we're supposed to think it's simply cool, even though it's one of the things we're supposed to feel bad for Murderbot for because we're told something like this happened to it at some point in Imaginary Backstory Land.
And you might be thinking, "Oh, well is that why it's called Murderbot? Because it wants to murder other slaves?"
Nope. It named itself Murderbot because one time it MAYBE accidentally killed a bunch of slave owners and feels bad about it.
But this probably didn't even actually happen. But the author literally stopped pretending to care about any kind of actual on-page backstory almost immediately after introducing us to the idea, so we will literally never get any answers, but we're supposed to act like the mystery is solved. (Even though it wasn't a mystery and then it also wasn't solved after we were told it was a mystery! It's literally the meme of 'my work here is done' 'but you didn't do anything!')
And did I mention that Martha Wells, the author, told everyone at some point that she'd originally intended book 1 to be a standalone tragedy that would end in Murderbot's death?
She literally set out to write a story about a slave who hates, dehumanizes, and murders other slaves every chance it gets, has literally no friends or family among other slaves, who would literally rather die than not murder another slave, who dies heroically trying to protect its slave owners, who it worships above all else. That's what she set out to write.
Until she decided that was too depressing an ending, and changed it. And, probably, because she figured out that she could make more money by keeping Murderbot alive.
Like. Literally from the start the entire premise has been "and then the tragically heroic slave killed itself to protect its slave owners, because slave rebellions are cringey and overdone and stupid, and good slaves should die protecting their owners to show that they didn't deserve to be enslaved in the first place. Bad slaves use violence to win their freedom and they should stay enslaved to keep the slave owners safe, because if we give them their freedom, they'll just go on a killing spree. The only good slave is one who will die to protect their owners"
And this has continued for 7 whole books now.
Here's another quote from book 1 spelling out to the audience that Murderbot does not care about other slaves at all, and neither should we, the audience:
SecUnits aren’t sentimental about each other. We aren’t friends, the way the characters on the serials are, or the way my humans were. We can’t trust each other, even if we work together. Even if you don’t have clients who decide to entertain themselves by ordering their SecUnits to fight each other.
Here we see, straight from the actual slave's mouth, further establishment of the idea that the enslaved people are inherently dangerous and murderous and must be kept under control at all times to protect everyone from them:
“There’s not supposed to be anyone else on this planet,” Ratthi said, darkly, over the comm from our hopper.
There were three SecUnits who were not me on this planet, and that was dangerous enough.
Here we see how an escaping slave killing the people literally keeping them enslaved is presented: Not as self defence, but as *slaughter*.
Three bodies were piled inside where the humans had tried to secure it and been trapped when their own SecUnits blew it open to slaughter them.
The escaping slave didn't just kill the slave owners, see, it *slaughtered* them. This word was chosen carefully to showcase the horrifying violence of the action, and the presented innocence of the slave owners. You're meant to be horrified and feel bad for the poor dead slave owners, who are the real victims here, according to this series.
And here's Murderbot stating in book 1 that it knows that the slaves it violently wants to murder have no actual choice in anything they do.
I doubted there were other SecUnits hiding hacked governor modules.
IE: "I doubted there were slaves other than me that could disobey orders"
It is very aware of the fact that it is the only slave on the planet who has the ability to defy orders from the slave owners, and it still would like nothing more than to violently murder the other slaves in order to protect the very slave owners that could theoretically (it literally does not happen on page at all) order those slaves to fight Murderbot.
And here's this once again demonizing slaves in favor of protecting slave owners:
I pictured doing that, pictured Arada or Ratthi trapped by rogue SecUnits, and felt my insides twist.
Oh and in book 1 we get told about the Super Extra Brain controlling chip called a combat override, which gives the slave owners even more control over the slaves than they already had. This never comes up again because it magically gets handwaved away as not a problem anymore at the start of book 2. Because letting anything actually threaten the protagonist is illegal in a Martha Wells book.
(All of her protagonists Must be the most overpowered and smartest person on the planet. This does not help at all with the fact that she keeps writing "oppressed people who are oppressed because they're genuinely dangerous to their oppressors" as though this is how real oppression works in real life. The Books of the Raksura is about how Actual Literal superpredators who literally evolved to eat other people are "oppressed" by their literal natural prey being understandably nervous when they first meet them and understandably terrified if they find out that the literal maneating predators that evolved the ability to shapeshift /purely to let them sneak into people's homes unchallenged to eat them all/ have snuck their way into the village by pretending to be friendly. When just last week these people lost whole family members to these literal maneating predators doing /exactly that/.)
But back to book 1.
This Super Control Chip was used to make what we were told were freed slaves kill all of their slave owners, we're told that them immediately going on the rampage is what made them /seem like/ freed slaves.
“You used combat override modules to make the DeltFall SecUnits behave like rogues.'
Once again hammering in the idea that if you try to end slavery then the former slaves will just go on a rampage and murder all the innocent white people. Because that's what this is always about. It's always about white supremacy. You can't separate slavery from white supremacy, even if the slave owners in the story are all tokenized people of color.
(That's Why there's eight whole entire characters in book 1 besides the protagonist that you have to try and fail to remember. So that Martha Wells could check off a list of as many ethnic sounding names as possible for diversity points. While making them all slave owners. Only to then let the producers of the TV adaptation make Murderbot a cis white guy despite all official art of it showing it with very dark skin and black hair. The darkest skin out of all of the other characters shown in the official art.)
This is the exact argument used to justify continuing real world slavery and racism. "We can't give the slaves their freedom, if we let them go, they'll kill us all in revenge!!" "We can't give the Land Back! They'll turn around genocide us in revenge!" "We can't give them equal rights! They'll do to us what we did to them!"
And we're just supposed to accept the fact that any slave who is given their freedom immediately goes on a bloodthisty rampage ~slaughtering~ innocent people who didn't do anything wrong. And even if they did do something wrong, apparently they still don't deserve to be killed by the slave they would have been abusing.
So around this point of the story we find out that all of the other slaves on this planet, that we're not supposed to see as people or think about for even 5 seconds, have been forced under this Super Control Chip so that the slave owners have even more complete control over their actions than they did before with just the normal governer module.
Murderbot knows this.
It knows this for a fact.
And it still goes out of its way to murder the other slaves in order to protect the slave owners.
At no point does Murderbot attempt to harmlessly knock out the other slaves to free them, or even wish it had the ability to do so. It does not regret at all that the other slaves are being forced to fight it while it's the only one there who has any option in any of it.
Because we are not supposed to care about the other slaves, we're not supposed to see them as people, and we're supposed to think the slave owners are lovable and quirky and relatable Pure Cinnamon Rolls™.
Even at the expensive of all of the slaves in the story. Six slaves are murdered in All Systems Red. And we're not supposed to care about them or even think about them.
Murderbot is the only slave who survives the story. And it survives despite its best efforts to die heroically protecting the slave owners (Which was Martha Wells' original plan). No mention is ever made of the slaves who it murdered. There is no moment of regret or even aknowledgement that they were people. We are not supposed to care at all.
The only reason Murderbot was allowed to survive is that it's "one of the good ones" who would rather die protecting slave owners than fight for its freedom or anyone else's.
The only people in this story we're supposed to care about is Murderbot, and the Pure Cinnamon Roll™ slave owners it murdered other slaves to protect, even though those other slaves had literally no choice in the matter. They weren't malicious. Unlike Murderbot, they had no choice. But we're not supposed to care about them or regret their deaths or even really notice.
And then we get the ending to this book, which is its own can of worms, and eventually comes back to bite the series in the ass with even more more slavery apologism.
The survey team that Murderbot rescued decides to buy it to take it home with them.
And Murderbot decides to finally run away to freedom.
And this would be great. Except then the whole rest of the book series is dedicated to showing that Murderbot made the wrong choice here in running away to freedom, because it should have just trusted the slave owners and gone to live with them and it would have lived pretty much happily ever after.
By running away to freedom, Murderbot just made it so that its life is more difficult before finally going back to its slave owners, whose lives it has accidentally endangered by running off to be free, so it feels bad and has to go back to rescue them again.
The series makes it painfully clear that if Murderbot had just gone along with its new owners at the end of book 1 instead of running away, it would have just saved everybody time and heartache.
In book 2 alone we have a character all but explicitly tell Murderbot that it's life will have no meaning until it returns to the slave owners it ran away from, while Murderbot pretends unconvincingly that it doesn't care actually about its slave owners because Denying Your Affection For People Is Relatable™ and causes drama.
It's blatantly clear that Murderbot cares about them and still wants to protect them but just doesn't want to admit it. So the second and third books literally exist just to have Murderbot go around procrastinating before it does finally admit at the end of book 3 that it has wanted to back to the slave owners since it ran away. Because it still wants to protect them and feels responsible for them.
The fact that they're its slave owners is not once given the gravity it deserves. We're supposed to want Murderbot to hurry up and go back to them already, because they're Pure Cinnamon Rolls™.
The reason Murderbot chose to run away at the end of book 1 is that it knows a bit about the kind of planets these slave owners are from, where they say that "robots have equal rights", but what they really mean is that they still keep robots enslaved, but instead of calling the person who owns the robot their "owner" they just say "guardian" instead.
It's the exact same system, but with gentler words. Book 1 aknowledges this in one of the few things it gets right:
Bots who are “full citizens” still have to have a human or augmented human guardian appointed, usually their employer; I’d seen it on the news feeds. And the entertainment feed, where the bots were all happy servants or were secretly in love with their guardians.
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Guardian was a nicer word than owner.
This is the one thing that book 1, taken on its own, gets right. It seems to finally grasp that there is no such thing as a nice slave owner.
But unfortunately for everyone, the rest of the series exists. Book 1 tells us that guardian is just a nicer word than owner, and that things would be exactly the same if Murderbot went back with the slave owners to their planet where it would be treated like a second class citizen and property under a slightly nicer name.
This is the CORRECT conclusion to come to.
But then the rest of the series tries, and fails, to prove this conclusion wrong.
Eventually we even get to see see the planet these slave owners are from, and we're supposed to think it means Murderbot was wrong to run away, because look! All these robots really DO have equal rights and are treated fairly!
Except they don't. They're still slaves. They are still property, just owned by "guardians" instead of "owners", exactly the way the first book correctly told us. The only difference between them and the other slaves is that they're given free time when they're not working.
They're still treated as property. They're still looked down on and treated as lesser and condescended to.
When Murderbot finally gets to this planet that the slave owners promised it was a utopia where robots have equal rights, the government immediately wants to....well, it's never actually made clear what it is they want to do to it, because Martha Wells didn't. Really care to actually write about it and really take it seriously as anything more than an abstract problem going on in the background of a short story dedicated to Dr. Mensah having panic attacks about being kidnapped. Like the rest of the slavery in the story, it's just treated as set dressing for Tragic Backstories and Action Adventures instead of the focus of the story itself.
But it's very clear that the government of this planet we were promised was a utopia for robots just sees Murderbot as nothing more than a mindless killing machine that will kill them all if they let it onto their planet.
You know, the exact same crap that Murderbot has been repeating ad nauseam about every other slave in the series? Well, now that it's affecting Murderbot, we're supposed to think it's bad and cruel and oppressive. Not when it's Murderbot saying it to justify murdering other people though. Then it goes completely uncriticized and held up as fact by the narrative.
And yes, a thing people fail to grasp is that there is in fact a difference between the narrator (Murderbot) and the narrative (the story itself).
It would be one thing if Murderbot were a self-hating class traitor who viciously hates all slaves and worships slave owners, if this were portrayed as a bad horrific thing, and Murderbot as a bad fucking person who no one should like or want to be around. The kind of person you do in fact have to kill to protect all the other slaves.
Like, that'd be one thing.
But the narrative agrees with Murderbot. Not once, in over seven whole books and two short stories, does Murderbot ever receive any pushback at all about the way it literally goes around murdering every slave it can get its hands on while being the literal only person in the entire series to spout slavery apologism claiming they're all inherently violent and dangerous and should be put down like rabid animals to keep everyone else safe.
No one ever argues with Murderbot. No one ever proves Murderbot wrong. We do not ever get to speak to another slave and see that what Murderbot is doing is fucking evil.
Murderbot as the narrator can say whatever fucked up shit it wants. That doesn't really matter so much in a meta sense. What does matter is what the narrative has to say about the fucked up slavery apologism Murderbot is endlessly spewing.
And the narrative agrees with it. That's why we've has seven whole published books and two short stories posted online for free, where not once have we ever seen the perspective of another slave where we see that what Murderbot is doing is horrific and an unforgivable betrayal that makes every other slave it's ever met hate and fear it because it will literally vindictively come after them to murder them and their friends even though it doesn't. Fucking. Have to.
We never get to see inside the minds of any of the slaves that Murderbot has gone out of its way to, yes, this word has been chosen purposefully, /slaughter/. We don't get to know their tragic backstories. We don't get to learn anything about their own identities as individual people. We don't get to know what their favorite colors are or if they have a favorite song or literally anything.
Because we the audience are not supposed to see them as people. We are not supposed to care about them. We are supposed to see them as nothing more than mindless NPCs who exist just to be killed to show off the protagonists' fighting skills.
The Murderbot Diaries *could* be a book series narrated by a slave who is a fucking traitor through and through and actively fights to uphold slavery. And this in and of itself wouldn't /inherently/ be bad -- *if* the narrative were about the other slaves successfully fighting back and winning their freedom and proving over and over and over again that everything Murderbot declares as absolute truth about them is literally just a lie made up to justify keeping them enslaved.
If Murderbot were actually, really, an unreliable narrator. Instead of people just pretending it is to void all criticism of the series.
But the book series wants you to think that the other slaves are not people. It doesn't even want you to aknowledge that the majority of the slaves we see -- fully mechanical robots -- are also slaves. Because this series does not actually care about slavery. It's not about slavery. The slavery is only there to be set dressing, to set up a suitably Tragic Backstory for Murderbot to make it sympathetic so that we ignore all of the horrific things it says and does and just wave them away as the result of its trauma. Even though they're not.
Martha Wells set out to write a short story where a slave died heroically to protect its slave owners. Until she decided that was too sad, and that she could make more money if she let the slave live, and keep protecting the slave owners.
So now we have a seven + story series built on a foundation of "slaves should die to protect the people enslaving them" and it's exactly what you'd expect, and has not shown even a hint of improvement on any of the problems with it since it was first released in 2017.
This book series is almost a decade old, founded on the idea of how cool and heroically tragic it would be for a slave to kill themselves to protect their slave owners, and not once in any of the newly released books has that premise ever changed or become anything new. The whole series worships humans and humanity even when humans are the ones enslaving people in the series, even when humans never once lift a finger to free any slaves that have not benefited them personally.
We're supposed to pretend that this series is Deathly Serious and handling the serious topics with all due seriousness, while it undercuts the tone any time things start to get even remotely serious by throwing in another joke. Including making fun of the concept of slave revolts as though the idea is inherently absurd and ridiculous and "something so stupid only a human would think of it". We're supposed to laugh when a robot slave is ordered to say "What if we kill all the humans here?" because don't you know?
If slaves fight back for their freedom, that would be bad, because then there would be no new TV shows!
And we're meant to agree that the slaves fighting back would be wrong and stupid and bad because it's a trope that's done to death and cliche and embarrassing. Apparently.
Martha Wells wrote a story about slavery, but doesn't actually want it to be about slavery. So instead it's about slavery apologism and even more bigotry on top of that. All while pretending to be anticapitalist, despite working with a publisher that is notorious for their absurdly high prices, before selling out to Apple, one of the most infamously fucked up and greedy corporations in modern life.
It's beyond parody. But The Murderbot Diaries was never meant to be taking slavery or even the concept of anticapitalist seriously. It's just set dressing to make the books sell more, while spouting slavery apologism and pushing the idea that if you don't want to be spied on by your Amazon Alexa, you're being mean and oppressing the poor anxious robot who just wants to record everything you say to sell your personal data to corporations.
Martha Wells has had seven whole published books to make this series not be about spewing slavery apologism, and at every opportunity, she has instead doubled down on the slavery apologism.
The newest book as of this being written is book 7, System Collapse, which is just a steaming pile of garbage in all ways imaginable.
And in this book, as a single throwaway line, one of the protagonists rips a slave to pieces while they're alive. And we're not supposed to be horrified. We're supposed to clap and cheer for how badass it is.
Because this series literally does not want you to care about any slave except the protagonist, and does not want to be about slaves fighting back for their freedom, because the author thinks slave rebellion stories are too cliche and embarassing.
And now the author's 100% on board with the TV show by Apple TV where the main character is whitewashed and played by a cis white man, making the TV show not only about a White Savior, but reverse racism as well. On top of all the slavery apologism in the books.