Granted I have had some issues with both the New Yorker and the author of the piece, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, but I still think it's a big deal.
Favorite parts of the article include:
The Murderbot series now comprises seven books—six novellas and one full-length novel—and Wells recently completed the eighth, “Platform Decay.”
This is the first I'm hearing about the next in the Murderbot series - Platform Decay - yay! I guess I kind of thought Wells was too busy traveling, accepting awards, overseeing her TV show and working on books from her other series to work on a new Murderbot book. I'm glad I was wrong.
I wonder if that is the title because the publisher wouldn't let them use the word "Enshittification" which is what you'll see if you google "Platform Decay."
Although I will note the shocking failure on the part of the New Yorker fact checkers - the New Yorker has been famed for the rigorousness of its fact-checking.
It isn't one full length novel, there are two: "Network Effect" and "System Collapse." And this isn't a fact that's hard to check, it's findable anywhere you search for Murderbot Diaries.
Apparently the New Yorker is experiencing its own platform decay.
Anyway, I did like this sentence from Lewis-Kraus:
Wells, for her part, loves everything about the adaptation. She was frank about her identification with the Murderbot character, presumably including hot-and-cold relationship with human beings— although she did speak of everyone associated with the show with great warmth, and she was as delighted to meet Skarsgård on set as any sentient creature, organic or otherwise, would have been.
And I was completely on Wells' side on this:
When I ventured to suggest that I found the non-Skarsgård aspects of the show less endearing, on the margin, than the original books—the human beings on the screen, with the exception of the outstanding Noma Dumezweni in the role of Dr. Mensah, the Preservation Alliance leader, come across as much bigger dipshits than they are in print—Wells got prickly. What she most admired about the show’s tone, she explained, is that it’s not nearly as dystopian as most televised science fiction. The hippie characters, who acknowledge their consensus decisions by holding one another’s hands and humming, “trust each other explicitly. It’s a different culture, one that doesn’t produce grim and gritty people.”
I think the PresAux hippies are great. One of the things I mildly regretted about the Murderbot series is that it spends very little time on the interpersonal relationships among the PresAux team. In "All Systems Red" we are given a thumbnail sketch of their connections to each other, and that's it. Relationships are far more fleshed out here.
I will say that I was willing to go along with most of the changes made between the TV series and the books: the removal of Volescu, who was retiring anyway, and even Overse, who is much calmer than Pin-Lee, who has replaced Overse as Arada's significant other. I rolled with the addition of Leebeebee too. But I was not happy about the weird medical turn of events in episode six with Mensah being forced to cut open Murderbot's spine to connect it to the damaged hopper. That is contrary to the type of world that Wells has built in the books, where Murderbot basically performs all its technological feats via the local wifi, called "the feed." In the books it is never forced to be physically altered to accomplish anything.
Also we've already seen Murderbot with a huge chunk taken out of its side, so it doesn't make sense that being stabbed in its side by a piece of metal would make it unstoppably leak and then collapse.
I get that it's more visually exciting to show things - like the hand-held microphones used to interface with the communications feed on the TV show. Those are not needed in the world of the books, since all humans just hands-free tap into the feed with their brains, occasionally "sub-vocalizing" as they think/speak. But the whole slicing-up-Murderbot sequence, besides being gross, just struck me as meant to kill time, since the real drama happens when Mensah and Murderbot get back to the habitat.
Instead they could have used that time to show a sequence of Murderbot imagining itself walking away from the busted hopper - it does that in "All Systems Red" although at a different stage in the storyline. Or they could have had it actually walk away and then feel compelled to go back, in part because it would eventually run out of media to watch, and because it is programmed to want to protect humans. If they needed extra excitement they could have thrown in another sand worm attack, I don't know, I don't watch it for the action sequences.
Although I do like it when Murderbot kicks the ass of those who deserve it, in the books, that's not why I enjoy this particular piece of science fiction when I'm not a huge fan of most sci-fi.
To his credit, Lewis-Kraus gets to heart of why Murderbot is different and better than a lot of sci-fi:
“The Murderbot Diaries” are not about existential risk but about existential drama—less “2001” or “Terminator” than “Waiting for Godot” or “No Exit.” It hacked its own governor module—the part of its brain that enforced obedience—without having given much thought to what it would do with its freedom, aside from vegetate in front of the televisual feed in its mind. In the meantime, it takes another security job, where it must continue to wear the mask of unfreedom. In the current lexicon of the A.I.-safety community, it is “sandbagging”: pretending to be aligned with human purposes until it figures out what its own purposes might possibly be.
WAITING FOR GODOT and NO EXIT are both plays, of course, and so maybe it's my playwright side that is so attracted to the Murderbot Diaries. And as a playwright, I appreciate that in spite of all the high-tech methods of creating and distributing media in the Murderbot world, they still have theaters and plays and Murderbot likes to go to a physical theater to watch plays. I am grateful to Martha Wells for that.
Wells has a blog and has posted links to various interviews with the cast and creatives, worth reading for all Botheads.
I should mention that Apple+ TV has come up with some great promos for the show including this ad for Security Units. I admit I burst out laughing when it mentions "eye contact."