Meet the Murderbot
Most first-person narrators in a sci-fi setting are not just here to tell you the story, but to serve as your guide in the rich, wonderful and complex world in which that story is set. Murderbot does not want to be your guide.
A typical Murderbot adventure, at least early on in the series, will go like this. Murderbot is travelling and trying to avoid being detected. Along the way, it will run into some humans who are in some form of danger, possibly because it is their own fault. So Murderbot will have to save them, while also trying to conceal the fact that it is a rogue SecUnit. Usually, it will find itself unwittingly befriending a human or AI in the process of saving them, before disappearing into the horizon again.
Murderbot has not been freed from its governor module’s control to lead a rebellion for AI-kind, or to go and explore the big wide universe. It has no interest in all the usual carrots-on-sticks dangled in front of protagonists. All it wants is to be left alone and allowed to watch its shows, and the stories of The Murderbot Diaries are invariably what gets in the way of that.
Put simply, even by science fiction robot standards, Murderbot is hugely autistic coded. Wells herself has gone on record as saying this is not deliberate. She has described herself as Neurodivergent, and in this interview with the Science Fiction Book Club said, “I didn’t intend for Murderbot to have autism spectrum traits, but again, I’m drawing from my own experience.”
But whatever her intentions, all the cues are there. Murderbot does not like being touched. It does not like eye contact – usually when it is dealing with humans it will watch them through the feeds of its own security drones so that it does not have to look at them directly. Its enjoyment of “mediatypes” includes finding new ones to watch and rewatching old favourites repeatedly, and as much as it is for entertainment, Murderbot uses them as models for human interaction, which it finds difficult. The humans around Murderbot rarely realise just how much information it is processing at any given moment, navigating data feeds while watching multiple cameras and audio feeds simultaneously.
Importantly, a “robot” character and an autistic-coded character and a “robotic” autistic-coded character, Murderbot is never devoid of emotions. It feels grumpy, and sad, and scared, and lonely in ways which it finds hard to process because it also hates being around people.
