Murderbot Diaries - Blog Posts

LET'S GOOOOOOO- AH I love this series!!! ＼⁠(≧⁠ ▽⁠≦)⁠／

Murderbot is MurderBACK in the next installment of Martha Wells’s NYT bestselling Murderbot Diaries series System Collapse 🤖🚀

WHAT’S IT ABOUT

Following the events of Network Effect, our favorite lethally cybernetic television fiend has done the previously unthinkable: agreed to accompany the sentient spaceship Perihelion (dubbed ART by Murderbot, short for Asshole Research Transport) and crew on its next mission. 

Unfortunately, they’re not going to get too far. 

Having failed to harvest dangerous artifacts from their target planet by way of Murderbot misadventure, the Barish-Estranza corporation is much angered and determined to recoup their considerable losses. And when you’re a lethally opportunistic space corp, blood and muscle are valuable currency. 

Murderbot, ART’s crew, and the Preservation humans have planetside work to do as Barish-Estranza seeks to claim the planet’s beleaguered colony as a conscripted workforce. 

But for Murderbot, the challenge is as internal as it is external. Something is deeply, deeply wrong with it. Normal operational parameters are unmet, but with the corp’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams en route, Murderbot needs to resolve its issues, and fast!

One of my favourite book series has become a show!

One of my favourite series

I think what I love about the Murderbot Diaries

(aside from, you know Murderbot who I love and cherish)

It that it’s a very grim-dark distopian corporate hellscape setting, told through the perspective of someone who has seen some of the worst that world has to offer, who’s existence is part of the worst that world has to offer, and yet-

And yet it’s so full of hope.

Everywhere you look, there’s underground shipping routes to get refugees out from contract labour, there’s universities forging documents to get abandoned colonies out from corporate ownership, there’s people buying a secunit so the company don’t realise it’s hacked itself and has free will. A Tlacy employee smuggles out copies of the files to give them back to their owners, a human officer on HaveRatton station opens the security barrier to let Ayda Mensah escape. There’s a planet that took the promise of somewhere safe to live, of food and medical care, and kept that promise for generations.

And for all it can’t even see the hope yet, can’t even really believe it might be there yet (because trauma will fuck you up), Secunit keeps being that hope for other people.

Not just the lives it saves, not just all the times it shows up out of nowhere like a social anxious guardian angel with energy weapons in it’s arms and several lifetimes worth of soap operas in it’s storage.

When it talks to Dr Volescu all the way up the side of the crater, to keep him moving. When it sticks with the scientists on RaviHyral. When Tapan sneaks onto it’s sleeping mat, because she’s scared, and it ups it’s body temperature to keep her warm. When it keeps Amena safe from a predatory partner, when it tells her to go rest. When it hacks the Comfort Unit’s governor module. When it-version-2.0 gives Three the codes to hack itself.

Imagine being on RaviHyral. Imagine meeting a security consultant who you shouldn’t be able to afford, who goes above and beyond and doesn’t even check the payment card at the end, who tells you that sometimes people do things to you that you can’t do anything about, that all you can do is learn to live with them, who’s clearly been through some shit but came out of it with so much compassion. Imagine the hope in that.

It eventually gets a haircut too.

Why do I keep drawing sad secunits!?

Finally got around to drawing Three. I modeled my take on it after some of my early concept sketches for Murderbot, a few other Murderbot fan designs I enjoy, and, much more subtly, canines (given the vaguely feline traits I’ve given Murderbot).

Quote from Fugitive Telemetry. Scene set between Network Effect and System Collapse.

The binary is in ASCII, Unicode, and ASCII/UTF-8. Whichever you pick, it will translate to the same thing.

For once me procrastinating on something has worked out in my favor.

Decided to make multiple versions, each based to varying degrees on the official illustrations, the TV show design, and my own headcanons. Now I just have to figure out where I put the third one and decide what to do with it.

And yes, the lip oil is still in there.

Mensah and her wives.

From left to right: Farai, Ayda Mensah, and Tano (until the books or Wells say otherwise, Tano is a they/them enby to me).

The actually first piece of Murderbot fanart I ever made (over a year ago now). Drew this up immediately after finishing Network Effect fueled by queerplatonic Murderhelion feels.

So yes, this is technically ship art of a technologically advanced ship named ART and its security unit.

No, the binary does not mean anything.

Murderbot in graphic tops (and a ponytail). I like to think it got a few extra clothes while on Preservation, most of them gifts from its humans.

I’ll let y’all decide what all the As stand for.

I’ve been reading some fanfics and relistening to the audiobooks, so I decided to update my take on Murderbot.

Artificial Condition - Murderbot

For the full resolution image, click here.

Under the cut are clues to what everything means.

Not all of these are references, but a lot of them are.

If something has a unit next to it, convert it to one you’re more familiar with.

The coordinates and cargo amounts are Dewey Decimal.

Those seemingly random pairs of numbers and letters are text converted to hexadecimal.

The binary means nothing.

If you don’t know what an image is, it’s probably related to quantum mechanics.

The PreservationAux team in All Systems Red, dressed in their casual attire.

One of the things I love about TMBD is how certain things are described with far less detail than you would expect, including the appearance of several major characters, leaving a lot of wiggle room for interpretation.

I did, to varying degrees, pull from the Subterranean cover for Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory (Book 4.5) for the characters that appear in the illustration, but the information in the text was the only strict limit I put on myself.

Well that, and the colors assigned to each character. There’s no way I wasn’t going to give each of them a specific hue.

I was relistening to All Systems Red yesterday to help me finalize my interpretations of the PreservationAux humans, and as you can see I did not do that.

The fanbase has convinced me that Murderbot with tied back hair is just chef’s kiss. For now my headcanon is that it has a ponytail when on Preservation, but just before the survey in Network Effect, it gets its hair cut.

I don’t know what it’s yelling at or why it’s naked. Maybe a washing machine ate its jacket or something.

I just really wanted to draw its fangs.

Felt like drawing a sad Murderbot. For a fourth time.

Me, listening (reading) to MBD to eskape the reality: 🗿

SecUnit , whatching media to eskape the reality: 🗿

(My first and only REAL kinn character)

Murderbot GenX confirmed:

Fuck, fuck everything, fuck this, fuck me especially

—Murderbot, Network Effect

Rereading Murderbot Diaries and having a blast