🤗Ī post shared by The Reading Spree on at 7:53am PDTĪll Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, and Exit Strategy track Murderbot’s progress from newly independent robot figuring out what and where it’s supposed to be into a robot recognizing and acknowledging its past and present selves along with all of the complex emotions it loathes. Tell me what you’re reading and how you’re holding up. This avid indoorswoman started feeling cabin fever only a few days ago, but I’m not venturing out even as lockdown eases and cases keep going up. I’ll take a fictional killer bot over a killer virus and actual human killers any day. At least Murderbot got me back into reading (and laughing while reading) almost five months later. (Burnout, my old friend…) It’s like my attention span, memory and imagination, drive, and vocabulary went into hiding when we all did. No books read until the last page since January, and writing for both work and myself has dried up as well. Its next move would be to turn into a ruthless humanity-killing machine, right? Imagine an armed and armored robot that suddenly becomes a free agent in deep space. This hack happens after it went wild and straight-up murdered – hence, its self-given name – the human clients it was supposed to protect, and its owners (which it calls the Company yes, seriously) wiped its memory. In Martha Wells‘ hit The Murderbot Diaries novellas, Murderbot is a security robot (or ‘SecUnit’ in the Murderverse preferred pronoun ‘It’) that hacked its governor module: the component that controls its thoughts and behavior, and punishes disobedience. But after 101 days in the world’s longest (ongoing) quarantine, including a two-month Time Out from work and life, I’ve finally made some progress with my long reading backlog! I’m ready to talk about a science-fiction series about a rogue and sentient robot that calls itself… Murderbot. Today I’m still anxious, angry, scared, and occasionally drunk.

I was too anxious, too angry, too scared (and sometimes, too drunk) to get through anything worthwhile. But not reading – it was my refuge, until one day it just wasn’t.

I know that sounds bad, but it’s a goddamn pandemic. I was ready for most of my life to be put on indefinite hold. If it’s longer than a social media update and if that said update is not from my personal network, I’ll mentally check out ASAP. Of all the curveballs, serious scares, and personal/professional losses that 2020 and COVID-19 have dealt me so far, I expected ‘inability to read anything about life and humanity’ the least.

Murderbot artificial condition